Cook with your tongue !!

Cook with your tongue!!
Asian cooking is very different than modern western cooking. Where in western cooking (particularly baking) ingredients are measured exactly, Asian cooking is much more lenient. While this flexibility makes recipes more forgiving and personalised.

In Thai cooking there are four flavors: sour, sweet, creamy and salty. Heat sits on top of the four flavors. The secret of a good dish is the right balance of the flavors -- you will find that there are "sweet spots" where the flavor just tastes right.Nobody uses measuring cups in Thailand. You learn to cook by experimenting with your taste buds.

The basic food is meat and vegetable over rice. Just like the five food groups with carbohydrate is on the bottom of the pyramid, you consume more rice than meat. You take a little bit of meat or vegetable and more of the rice and scoop them on your spoon.

Chinese culinary arts have a long history. They are famous all over the world. Chinese dishes appeal to the senses through colour, shape, aroma and taste.

For local styles, Beijing cuisine combines the best features of different regional styles. Shangdong cuisine leads the Northern dishes. Shangdong cooks are good at cooking seafood. Sichuan cooks specialize in chilies and hot peppers and Sichuan dish is famous for aromatic and spicy sauces. Guangdong cooking makes use of many ingredients. They look for fresh, tender, crisp textures. Huai Yang cuisine stresses the natural flavours. Dishes are strong but not greasy, and light but delicate. Tan cuisine is both sweet and salty, There is a saying that "southerners have a sweet tooth, and northerners crave salt".

Most Indian cuisines are related by similiar usage of spices.In the north and the west, Kashmiri and Mughlai cuisines show strong central Asian influences. To the east, the Bengali and Assamese styles shade off into the cuisines of East Asia.

All coastal kitchens make strong use of fish and coconuts. The desert cuisines of Rajasthan and Gujarat use an immense variety of dals and achaars (preserves/pickles) to substitute for the relative lack of fresh vegetables. The use of tamarind to impart sourness distinguishes Tamil food. The Andhra kitchen is accused, sometimes unfairly, of using excessive amounts of chilies.

But then no matter which cuisine we talk about you don’t need to add exactly what the recipe calls for. Rather, the recipe is a guideline - once you develop your personal taste, do not be afraid to deviate. Because the intensity of an ingredient's flavor can vary from one time to the next and everyone prefers a different point along the flavor spectrums, only your tongue can tell you how much more of something you need to add. Also, if you don’t like something, omit it. Simple as that!