The mainstay protein in the Chinese diet is pork. The Chinese eat more than half of all the pork consumed on the planet each year. However, Chinese home cooking is balanced and healthy and includes a lot of tasty vegetable dishes. When I was a kid, vegetables were things that were boiled and put on the side of the plate next to the meat, and something you had to eat before leaving the table. That’s not the case in Chinese cuisine. There are many delicious vegetarian Chinese recipes.
Jing has included several vegetarian Chinese recipes on My Chinese Home Kitchen, and she regularly adds more. With summer upon us, this is a good time to do a fresh roundup of our vegetarian dishes, since many are served cold. I’ll present those first, followed by the hot dishes and soups.
Table of contents
Cold vegetarian dishes
Guangxi Pickled Radish
In my home province of Guangxi, pickling food is common: We eat all kinds of pickled vegetables or fruits. This pickled daikon (or Chinese radish) recipe is easy to make and delicious.
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Spicy Cold Tofu
Today is still the day of cold dishes for warm weather, so we will make a delicious cold tofu dish. This spicy cold tofu is simple and full of flavor. There is a seasoning in this dish that gives this rich flavor: chili oil. This is a seasoning used in most cold dishes, it is not very spicy, but full of aroma. The spice comes from the xiao mi la peppers.
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Shredded Potato Salad
This cold potato salad is great to serve on hot summer days and easy to prepare. First, Julienne-slice and rinse the potatoes, then boil them for one minute. Next place them in cold water to stop the cooking. Then you add the rest of the ingredients fresh, making Shredded Potato Salad a quick side dish for your lunch or dinner, or family picnic.
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Garlic Cucumber Salad
Today, let's continue to make cold dishes, with Garlic Cucumber Salad. This is such an easy cold dish that anyone with a kitchen knife can make it. Cucumbers can be eaten raw or cooked. Different cooking methods have different flavors and textures, and either way is delicious. In this Garlic Cucumber Salad recipe, I'll show you how to cut a cucumber using a common technique in Chinese restaurants, and I will show you an easier technique that you can do at home.
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Shredded Potatoes with Green Peppers
This Chinese shredded potatoes with green peppers recipe yields vegetables that are salty, fresh, crisp, mildly spicy, and elegant in color.
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Cold Edamame Pods
Chinese people always like to eat cold dishes with beer. Eating cold edamame and drinking a large glass of cold beer is a delightful way to beat the summer heat. July is the season for edamame. In the vegetable market, we find almost every vendor is selling edamame.
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Cold Noodles with Summer Vegetables in Chili Oil
Do you want to eat a bowl of warm noodles on a hot summer day? The answer is, of course, no. But what should you do when you really want to eat noodles? So, today we will make a northern Chinese cold noodle dish called Liáng miàn that can be eaten in summer.
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Chinese Lettuce Salad
Chinese lettuce (wosun, 莴笋), also called celtuce, is crisp and nutritious, and makes a delicious cold salad. It's really great to have cold dishes in the summer! The preparation of cold dishes is simpler than that of hot dishes, and we do not need much use of wok and stove. The addition of er jing tiao chili peppers and Sichuan peppercorns gives this salad a hint of mala spiciness without overpowering heat. When making cold dishes, we must pay attention to the cleanliness of all tableware in contact with the ingredients. Since most cold dishes will not pass through high temperature, we need to have strict hygiene standards for tableware.
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Hot vegetarian Chinese recipes
Chinese Green Radish (Luóbo) Balls
Do you like Chinese radish (also called luóbo, daikon, or white radish)? Oh, today we don’t use these, instead we use green radish (green daikon, or Raphanus sativus) to make green radish balls. Green Chinese radish, like the white radish, is a root vegetable in the Brassicaceae (mustard) family. The outer skin is green, and the inside is generally greenish yellow. Green radish has a crisp taste and is rich in juice. So, green radish is also called “fruit radish” in China. There are many dishes that use green or white radish, and In addition to cooking, it can be eaten raw. It’s firm flesh is also suitable for food carving.
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Hot and Sour Shredded Potatoes
This dish is simple, easy to prepare, and does not take much time to cook. When hot and sour potatoes meet rice, oh, I can eat it all! So, how can we cook potatoes any more delicious? Let’s make them together.
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Chinese Deep-fried Shiitake Mushrooms
This Chinese fried mushrooms recipe is the first recipe on My Chinese Home Kitchen to use a soft batter coating featuring whipped egg whites, and adds a sauce that is fundamentally Chinese, using sesame oil, scallions, ginger, garlic, and onion. To avoid an oily, greasy batter, we use a two-stage deep-fry technique. We heat the oil, fry the mushrooms until the coating starts to turn yellow. This matures and sets the batter. Then the mushrooms are removed, and the oil is heated again to 150° C (300° F). Then the mushrooms are returned to the oil to give the batter a crispy texture and golden brown color.
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Vegetarian Stir-Fried Three Crisps
Vegetables are an essential food in our diet, vegetables are rich in vitamins, and eating vegetables in moderation in the diet is good for our health. The name of this dish is vegetarian stir-fried three crisps. It is mainly made from 3 kinds of vegetables with a crispy texture. We use carrots, potatoes, green peppers. The rich color combination makes this dish healthy and beautiful. We use warm oil to blanch the vegetables before stir-frying. This brings out the color and flavor. Alternatively, you can blanch them in water, but water blanching leeches nutrients from the vegetables.
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White Mushroom Soup
In China, we like to use freshness to evaluate a soup. This simple mushroom soup recipe is an easy way to experience this concept. By this, we mean the flavor of the ingredients creating the flavor of the soup. In China, we use water instead of seasoned soup stock, and we let the ingredients create the flavor in the broth. When you cook a soup, if you can let the flavor of the ingredients blend into the soup, then the soup is already 70% successful, and people can taste the ingredients of the soup when they eat it. Do you want to know what this easy mushroom soup tastes like? If you are interested, you can make it with us.
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Lettuce in Oyster Sauce
Lettuce is a common vegetable in China. We can eat lettuce raw or cook it and eat it. After washing the lettuce, adding lettuce to burgers or sandwiches is a common practice in China, or wrapping lettuce leaves around grilled meat. Today we will make a lettuce side dish with a unique taste: Oyster Sauce Lettuce. This recipe is so simple that you can make it in very little time, and serve it with your main course.
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Sweet Pumpkin Fries
Pumpkin is rich in dietary fiber, and in China, pumpkin is a common ingredient, chefs cook it into a dish, a soup, and dessert chefs make it into a dessert. Although I’m not a professional dessert chef, I’m going to use pumpkin to make a “dessert” today. Well, it’s really sweet, but I use the Chinese cooking process to make it. It’s more like a snack. Hope you will like it. We use sugar to soften the pumpkin. If you do not like it too sweet, you can rinse the pumpkin after marinating to remove the excess sugar. We will heat the oil, then remove it from the wok to a heat proof container. Before you begin, make sure you have a container handy that is sufficiently large enough to hold the hot oil. The heated oil is added back to the wok in small amounts during the cooking process.
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Stir-Fried King Oyster Mushrooms
The recipe we are going to make today is a vegetarian dish called Stir-fried King Oyster Mushrooms (pleurotus eryngii). King oyster mushrooms have a buttery, umami flavor, and a texture similar to eggplant. In China, we fry them, red-braise them with soy sauce, and use them in soup to make a variety of delicious dishes. Today I chose to cook king oyster mushrooms by stir-frying. This is a fairly simple recipe, but it is a two-stage cooking process: the mushroom slices are lightly browned in hot oil before being added to the stir-fry. Pleurotus eryngii is rich in protein and is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. King oyster mushrooms have anti-oxidant, anti-hyperlipidemic, anti-tumor, and anti-inflammatory properties, and benefit the immune system.
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Garlic and Enoki Mushrooms with Vermicelli
Today’s Garlic and Enoki Mushroom with Vermicelli recipe is popular with garlic lovers! We use garlic, enoki mushrooms, and mung bean vermicelli (also called cellophane noodles or bean threads) as ingredients. This is an easy recipe to make with simple steps. It can be served as a side dish with lunch or dinner, or as a main course. If you don’t want your lunch to be rice and some dishes, you can cook this Garlic and Enoki Mushroom with Vermicelli on its own. It’s a good option when you’re eating lunch at home alone.
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Air-Fryer Roasted Tofu
Foods made in an air fryer tend to be healthier than deep frying because it doesn’t require a lot of oil. You do not need to stand over the food while it cooks. Of course everything has its drawbacks. With an air fryer cooking will probably take longer. Also, since the food sits on the bottom of the air-fryer, you will have to flip the food halfway through cooking, otherwise you’ll end up with a half-cooked meal. Today we are making Air-fryer roasted tofu. This is a simple, delicious and crispy vegetarian snack.
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Winter Melon and Corn Soup
Winter melon soup is a homemade soup based on winter melon. Winter melon soup is popular in Jiangnan and northern China. It is very simple to prepare, and is often cooked in family kitchens. Whether it is served with rice, noodles, or alone, it is delicious. People say that wax gourd has the effect of reducing weight and fat. Today, I will use corn and winter melon to cook a soup. This is a healthy, delicious vegetarian soup.
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Snacks
Chinese Mango Pudding
My niece likes to eat pudding. She hopes that I can try to make pudding so that she can eat pudding at any time. A child who likes to eat pudding wants to eat pudding: this is normal. So after trying to make pudding, I summarized this family version of the pudding recipe. If your family also has children who like pudding, or you like pudding, you can try to make Chinese Mango Pudding yourself.
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Homemade Potato Chips
This is a recipe full of potato flavor! After successfully learning to make potato chips, you will have a lot of potato chips to eat. You can make potato chips of various flavors by yourself.
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