Balance Among Ingredients
Chinese cooks attach great importance to the balance among the ingredients in a dish. This important step should result in a harmonious blending of textures, colors, aromas, flavors, shapes and nutritional qualities. To do this well, you must understand the required cooking methods of the dishes and the characteristics of different ingredients and how they fit together.
Balancing amounts
The major ingredient should be the most plentiful one in a dish. If you are making stir-fried meat shreds, for example, the total quantity of other ingredients should not exceed the amount of meat. If there are two or more main ingredients, you should use about the same amount of each.
Balancing flavors
All the ingredients in a dish should enhance the flavor of the main ingredient. This is why asparagus or bamboo shoots are often cooked with chicken, duck, and fish: the blandness of these vegetables enhances the light, delicate character of the meat.
Similarly, the blandness of shark's fins and sea cucumbers (beche-de-mer, sea slug) can be offset by cooking them with Chinese ham, chicken, or pork, or in a highly-flavored stock. You can also cut the heavy, greasy character of a main ingredient by adding lighter secondary ingredients. This is why many Chinese recipes call for pork to be cooked with fresh vegetables.
You must also take seasonal factors and personal preferences into account. Summer is the season for light, juicy foods, while heavier dishes, or ones with thick gravies, are better suited to cold weather. When you plan a menu, you should balance sweet, salty, sour, and hot dishes to suit your taste and that of your family and guests.
There is also a Chinese sequence for serving dishes: salty dishes are served before sweet ones, while heavy- and light-flavored ones are served alternately.
Balancing textures
Texture refers to the crunchiness,
crispness, softness, or tenderness
of a food. In Chinese cooking, ingredients
with similar textures are usually
cooked together. However, crisp and
soft foods are sometimes combined
in a single dish. This requires careful
attention to cooking temperatures
to retain the differences in textures.
Balancing shapes Chinese cooks usually
cut all the ingredients in a dish
into similar shapes. For example,
chunks of meat and chunks of vegetables
are usually cut to about the same
size. This makes it easier to cook
all the ingredients evenly and also
gives the final dish a pleasing appearance.
Balancing colors
Chinese cooks tend either to select ingredients of the same color, or to use many contrasting ingredients to add color to a dish.