What Sauces/Flavorings Can Be Used for Chinese Meals?

In my opinion, many Chinese dishes use oyster sauce as one of their signature sauce. They can combine other sauces to enhance the taste to make it stronger, fuller, richer and more aromatic. Like oyster sauce with hoisin sauce, chili bean sauce like (tai pan cheong), XO sauce (dried scallop infused sauce) shrimp sauce, light and dark soy sauce, garlic chili bean sauce, black/brown beans paste, fermented spicy tofu paste, garlic and ginger sauce, plum sauce, hawthorn berries (san char) sauce etc. Then with Chinese cooking wine, Chinese rice wine, sesame oil, rock sugar, brown sugar, and those spices like 5 spice powder, white pepper, onions, garlic, ginger, spring onions and several others more including MSG etc. Even I am a Chinese, I don't store all those sauces but the most common sauce I use is oyster sauce infused in garlic oil for most stir fries *

Try this. Feel free to 'fine tune' it to your tastes.

INGREDIENTS

1cm (½ inch) piece of fresh ginger

1 tablespoon of cornflour

2 teaspoons of water

¼ of a teaspoon of ground pepper

½ a teaspoon of salt

1 tablespoon of sesame oil

2 tablespoons of dark soy sauce

1 teaspoon of sugar

METHOD

Peel the ginger and chop it into tiny pieces.

Put the corn flour into a cup. Add the water a teaspoon at a time. Stir each time until it has dissolved.

Put the pepper, salt, sesame oil, soy sauce and sugar into another cup. Mix thoroughly

Add the cornflour mixture. Mix thoroughly.

Sweet and Sour Sauce is great!

Try HOI SIN sauce.