Chinese Ingredients Glossary

When cooking traditional Chinese food, you’ll come across both familiar and unfamiliar ingredients. We’ve compiled a list of some of Chinese ingredients we use most often, so if you have a question (e.g. “What the heck is a soy puff?!”), come here and look it up! If you think we’ve left anything out, feel free to comment below.

So get out of your comfort zone a little, and explore your local Asian grocery store and use our Chinese ingredients glossary as a general guide. If you don’t have one near you, we’ve provided some product links for you to easily locate many of the ingredients on Amazon. Even if you don’t buy, you can see what else is out there besides what we have in our collection here.

Full disclosure: this page does contain affiliate links, which means if you do buy something as a result of following one of our Amazon links, you will be supporting The Woks of Life! But prices are the same regardless.

Finally, this list we compiled is for all of you, our loyal readers, followers, and makers of our authentic recipes! Reading through the glossary and getting to know the essential ingredients will definitely up you Chinese Cooking game. So don’t hesitate to drop us an email or leave a comment if you have more questions or additional requests, since we plan to update these pages often.

Chinese Sauces, Vinegars, and Oils

This Chinese Sauces page covers the most basic soy sauce, oil and wine needed for most dishes but also identifies and explains other less common bean sauces used in our recipes. We’ve provided some explanations and key differences among various sauces, but we’ll do our best to add more information on what to use for certain dishes, when, and why. Although many of our recipes do explain the specific use of some ingredients, the descriptions here are more general and will help you understand how to use them in different situations, even when you improvise on your own in the kitchen. Click on the title or the image below to learn more!

Chinese Dry Spices and Condiments

Chinese cooking utilizes a variety of dry spices and condiments, though it’s not as complicated as you think! A few basic ingredients and you’ll produce many authentic dishes without compromising on flavor. This provides a good foundation for building out your pantry of Chinese dry spices, but we’ll definitely add to the collection as we expand our use of spices and, of course, when we get questions and requests from you! Click on the title or the image below to learn more.

Chinese Vegetables – Asian Leafy Greens

You’d be hard pressed to find a Chinese table that is without a big plate of perfectly stir-fried leafy greens. There are tons of varieties–we go way beyond those big mutant bok choy you find at the supermarket. Leafy greens are on ingredient lists for many of our recipes, so if you have any questions on what to use, just review our list.

Click on the title or the image below to learn more!

Chinese Onion, Aromatics and Peppers

The Chinese and Asian onions and aromatics we use in our recipes are pretty much the same as what other cuisines use, but there are a few you may not have heard of! Even we discovered some interesting things when we were living in China.

Click on the title or the image below to learn more!

Beans, Melons, Mushrooms, and Root Vegetables

This is the kitchen sink category of vegetables. Keep in mind that many varieties are not included here if they are commonly found in Western cooking and/or not used so much in our kitchen. You’ll probably recognize some of these anyways, but we’ve included the vegetables that turn up most often in our recipes!

Click on the title or the image below to learn more!

Tofu and Bean Curd

Tofu comes in many forms–fresh, dried and even frozen–and is readily available in both Western and Asian markets. On this page, we highlight the myriad different types of tofu, their various uses, and some of our favorite dishes.

Click on the title or the image below to learn more!

Noodles and Wrappers

Noodles and dumplings are everyone’s favorite foods, but there are so many types that sorting through them can be difficult at times. Every week we get a handful of comments about exactly what type of noodle is the right noodle for any given recipe. It’s great that there are so many to choose from, both dried and fresh, but it is indeed a confusing world for noodle newbies.

We highlight some of the more popular noodle and wrapper types and how they should be used in both traditional and modern dishes.

Click on the title or the image below to learn more!

Rice, Grains and Flour

Rice is a well known staple of the Chinese diet, and, although there are many types of rice including short grain; long grain; sticky/sweet rice; brown; red; black; and jasmine scented varieties, the Chinese people’s choice is still the common long grain white rice. Did you also know there are many people who prefer to have a few good mantou (steamed bread) or a hot bowl of noodles for their dinner rather than rice? In Northern regions of China (e.g. Beijing), it is not uncommon for people to have only mantou and noodles and never go near a bowl of rice. Blasphemous for we southerners!

Check out our modest collection of facts about rice, grains, and flours on this page, and see it expand as we, too, expand our horizons and recipes!

Click on the title or the image below to learn more!

Dried and Preserved Ingredients

Every culture has its own set of dried and preserved ingredients, but the Asian cultures have a particularly vast history of drying and preserving food. Even within China, dried and preserved foods vary according to region, which we discovered soon after relocating to Beijing. We were hard pressed to find any kinds of dried shrimp, squid, or fish in any of the markets and realized that we would have to travel to Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Guangdong (i.e. southern China) to get the best dried seafood ingredients.

Peruse our collection in this category of dried and preserved ingredients as you will need them to cook some of our favorite recipes!

Click on the title or the image below to learn more!