Steaming - Food By Steaming

Food By Steaming

In China,the Chinese have used steamers for at least 3000 years or more,with early steamers being made in stoneware and originating in the province of Yunnan. From the eighth century,thin cypress strips were used to make steamers and today they are constructed from bamboo with slatted bases.

In Western cooking, steaming is most often used to cook vegetables - it is rarely used to cook meats. In Chinese cuisine, vegetables are mostly stir fried or blanched and seldom steamed. Seafood and meat dishes are steamed. For example: steamed whole fish, steamed crab, steamed pork spare ribs, steamed ground pork or beef, steamed chicken, steamed goose, etc. Other than meat dishes, rice can be steamed too, although in Chinese this is rarely referred to as "steaming" but rather simply as "cooking." Wheat foods are steamed as well. Examples include buns, Chinese steamed cakes etc. Steamed meat dishes (except fish and some dim sum) are less common in Chinese restaurants than in traditional home cooking because meats usually require longer cooking times to steam than to stir fry. Commercially sold frozen foods (such as dim sum) used to have instructions to reheat by steaming, until the rise in popularity of home microwave ovens which have considerably shorter cooking times.

The classic steamer contains a chimney through the center,which distributes the steam among the tiers.