Chinese (regional) cooking with AI bots: techniques, ingredients and prompts

Core techniques

• Stir-frying in a very hot wok with everything prepped first; "wok hei" is the smoky aroma from high heat
• Velveting: coating meat in egg white/cornstarch and briefly blanching in oil or water
• Red-braising (hong shao) with soy, sugar and Shaoxing wine
• Steaming fish and dumplings

Key ingredients

• Light and dark soy sauce
• Shaoxing wine
• Chinkiang (black) vinegar
• Sichuan peppercorn, doubanjiang (chili bean paste)
• Ginger, garlic, scallion
• Oyster sauce
• Toasted sesame oil, cornstarch

Flavor logic

Balance of salty, sweet, sour, bitter and spicy, plus texture (crisp, tender, silky). Sichuan "ma la" pairs the tingling numbness of Sichuan pepper with chile heat.

Dishes to start with

• Mapo tofu (Sichuan)
• Char siu and wonton noodle soup (Cantonese)
• Red-braised pork belly (Hunan/Shanghai)
• Steamed whole fish with ginger-scallion
• Xiaolongbao (Jiangnan)

Bot prompts that get better answers

I want to learn Chinese (regional) home cooking properly.
1. Explain the main regional styles and what makes each distinct.
2. Teach me the 3 core techniques I should practice first, with common mistakes.
3. Give me a starter pantry list, with substitutes available in a typical US supermarket, and say how each substitute changes the result.
Say when something varies by region or family, and don't present one version as the only "authentic" one.

Walk me through making Mapo tofu (Sichuan) for [n] people.
Ingredients in grams and US measures. Explain why each key step matters.
Include the USDA safe internal temperature for any meat, poultry, seafood or eggs.
Then suggest one traditional variation and where it comes from.

I'm making a Chinese (regional) dish and it tastes [flat / too salty / too sour / too spicy].
Using the flavor logic of Chinese (regional) cooking, suggest one small fix at a time.

How we wrote this

Cuisines are living traditions with big regional and family differences; this is a respectful starting map, not the one true way. Use the bot prompts to explore, then learn from cooks, cookbooks and restaurants from that tradition. Meat and egg doneness still follows FoodSafety.gov safe minimum temperatures.

Checked Oct 29, 2026. Bots sometimes invent "authentic" facts; ask them to say how sure they are and to separate tradition from guesswork.