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Comment by Foobar8568 | Hacker News Reader

Well if you look at Chinese cuisine or even better, Cantonese one and dim sum, you realize that it was really to extract the most from scarce ingredients, not much meats or vegetables with a lot of carbs, and lots of seasoning to cover low quality ingredients.

(I don't say the cuisine is bad nor not tasty, I am only talking about the cooking part).

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Chinese cuisine is very regional. It is certainly not about "lots of seasoning" or "low quality ingredients". Like all cuisines it requires good ingredients to get good results.

Dim Sum do not use lots of seasoning, they try to work with the flavours and textures of the ingredients. This is a common theme in Chinese cuisine.

And I absolutely love that about Asian cooking. Some ingredients do not taste good on their own, and would be thrown away in western cultures, but they really shine with the right spices and seasoning. Organ meat in a hot pot is amazing.

This recipe is the epitome of "it would be thrown away otherwise": it's braised pomelo skin [1]

I mean, it's the thick, bitter skin from one of the progenitors of a grapefruit, braised in a sauce until it's edible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQomVDn4XA4

> Well if you look at Chinese cuisine

If you look at Chinese cuisine, you'll probably find that trying to compare it to say "Italian cuisine" doesn't really work - probably better to compare it to "European cuisine" and try and capture the breadth and depth.

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