Reading Chinese Menus: Characters: 炒 — chǎo — stirfry
As you'll know by now if you followed my link to Red Cook's stirfrying series in Monday's linkspam, the Chinese character for "stirfry" is 炒 (chǎo). Kian, the author of the Red Cook blog, divides stirfrying techniques into three main types: plain stirfry (清炒/qīng chǎo), moist stirfry (滑炒/huá chǎo), and dry wok stirfry (煸炒/biān chǎo).
清炒 generally incorporates just one vegetable per dish, often a leafy green or a gourd-style vegetable. A vegetable dish described as 清炒 alone is likely to be very plain, seasoned only with salt. Other flavourings may also be used, and different characters/words are used to denote this; for an overview, see my post on mix-and-match green vegetable dishes.
滑炒 involves several different ingredients, and results in a dish with a sauce; the fourth post in Kian's series has more on this. As he points out, this is the technique used to create dishes such as fish-fragrant aubergine (魚香茄子/yú xiāng qié zi).
煸炒 uses more seasonings and more ingredients than 清炒, but ends up less saucy than 滑炒. One subtype of 煸炒 is 乾煸 (gān biān), or extreme-heat stirfry, used in dishes such as dry-fried green beans (乾煸四季豆/gān biān sì jì dòu).
Here are some dishes with 炒 in the name:
| 茶樹菇炒臘肉 | chá shù gū chǎo là ròu | tea tree mushrooms with Chinese ham |
| 蛋炒飯 | dàn chǎo fàn | egg [蛋] fried rice |
| 韭菜炒豬紅 | jiǔ cài chǎo zhū hóng | pig's blood [豬紅/"pig's red"] stirfried with Chinese chives [韭菜] |
| 乾炒牛河粉 | gān chǎo níu hé fěn | dry-fried [乾炒] beef [牛] ho fun [河粉] |
| 肉絲炒麵 | ròu sī chǎo miàn | stirfried [炒] noodles [麵] with shredded [絲] pork [肉] (a.k.a. pork chow mein) |
| 青椒炒兔肉 | qīng jiāo chǎo tù ròu | rabbit [兔肉] stirfried with green peppers |
| 蕃茄炒蛋 | fān qié chǎo dàn | stirfried eggs with tomatoes |
Finally, don't confuse 炒 (chǎo) with 抄 (chāo), which as mentioned in my post on 手 (shǒu/hand) is used in the Sichuan name for wontons: 抄手, literally "crossed hands", referring to the way they're folded. Another similar character is 沙 (shā), which is used in combination with 金 (jīn/gold) to denote the use of a salted egg yolk coating ("golden sands"); see my post on sweetcorn with salted egg yolk for more. You can tell them apart by remembering that 炒 has the fire radical, 抄 has the hand radical, and 沙 has the water radical.
| 炒: | chǎo | radical 86 (火) | Cantodict | MandarinTools | YellowBridge | Zhongwen |
|---|