Chinese Dim Sum & Dishes-Cantonese Dishes

Enjoying Real Cantonese Dishes

If Dim Sum is a kind of appetizer for Cantonese food, now let’s try the main course, by stepping into the world of delicacies, and getting to the real dishes. In fact, the basic structure of Cantonese food is surprisingly similar to that of Western food.

Meals are often served first with a soup, while this is sometimes either accompanied or followed by the appetizer and the main dish. Depending on the cooking style and ingredients, it’s served with either barbeque, swallow's nest, abalone, seafood, poultry, meat, or in-season vegetables.

Steamed Fish

This is Cantonese-style steamed fish. Pour hot oil over a slightly cooked fish to make the outside crispy and then add a dash of special light soy sauce. You can eat the meat with the soy sauce and enjoy the flavor of clear spring onion from the soy sauce.

Stir-fried Crab

This is a spicy dish of fried-crab. It’s best when made with big Vietnamese mud crabs. Some restaurants have a tank of crabs, so you can pick the one you want to eat directly.

Deep-fried Prawns

This is known as gold shrimp. It’s a deep-fried dish of shrimp roe batter with eggs covering the shrimp. In other words, it’s fried shrimps, but the cover itself is shrimp roe. It’s a delicacy with the unique flavor and texture of shrimp roe.

Abalone

This is one of the finest Cantonese seafood dishes. Every abalone dish uses dried abalone, which, depending on its size is called in units of Tou. 1 Tou is the biggest, which barely comes out once a year; 2 Tou is half the size of 1 Tou. Restaurants generally have sizes between 12 Tou to 24 Tou. This is about the size of a child’s hand. The name of the dish varies according to the origin of the abalone, the type of sauce used, and also the preferences of the restaurant itself, meaning it might be difficult to order the exact name listed above.

Sea Cucumber

Sea cucumber is considered a high quality ingredient in Cantonese cuisine, along with abalone and swallow’s nest. It has saponin, which is also found in ginseng, and thus boasts great credentials as a healthy dish, full of nutrition with which to help you recover from fatigue.

Deep-fried Crispy Chicken

This is Cantonese-style crispy chicken. A boiled chicken is marinated in starch syrup and has boiling oil poured on it to make the skin turn nice and crispy. If you are a fan of chicken dishes, you will definitely enjoy it.

Sweet and Sour Pork

Sweet and sour pork has always been a popular dish. The sauce is very appetizing and the dish is also very appealing, with a very colorful combination of ingredients.

Roasted Goose

This is one of the best Chinese poultry dishes, together with Beijing duck. It’s boiled goose marinated in starch syrup, done in the same cooking style as with Deep-fried Crispy Chicken mentioned above. However, roasted goose is cooked first over a wooden fire, sometimes even up to three times, with sauce being applied in each time. This makes for an extraordinarily special texture for the fully marinated meat.

Fried Rice

Chinese-style fried rice is a kind of art in Chinese food. The egg coating between every rice, fine diced meat and vegetables forms a fantastic ensemble.

Barbecued Pork with Honey

It’s skewered pork barbeque. After grilling, apply malt to give it a gloss, and use a torch to heat it once again. It’s a humble meat dish with a sweet and smoky flavor.

Fried Noodles

These are noodles fast-fried over high heat with various vegetables and soy sauce thrown in, which means that, even without many ingredients, the taste is mouth-watering. Similar dishes are flatly sliced beef with rice noodles.

Barbecued Suckling Pig

This is one of the best of Cantonese meat dishes. It’s a barbequed newly born baby pig, between 2 and 6 weeks old, and is renowned for its crispy skin and lean meat. Some like to savour only the skin and don’t even touch the meat. It’s a dish which shows huge variation according to each restaurant.