Chinese Cooking Demystified: Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li visit Shaxi!
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica: On my final two days in Shaxi in Yunnan, Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li, the hosts of the marvelous YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified, joined me for some cooking and lots of chatting about food! We recorded this show together and focus our conversation on their heroic attempt at a taxonomy of different Chinese cuisines. We don't talk about all 63 that they identify, but we do get into their
04:31 - Flavors of Yunnan
08:44 - On balancing between the “exotic” and “normal” China
11:53 - The origin story behind “Chinese Cooking Demystified”
14:56 - The Breath of the Wok (Wok Hei, 鑊氣 / huo6 hei3)
21:05 - A Comprehensive Taxonomy on Chinese Cuisine
32:25 - Correlations between dialects and cuisine
37:15 - Efforts behind the work
39:09 - Promoting local specialties
44:23 - Chinese identity and food trends
52:30 - "Minority" cuisine in Yunnan
01:00:52 - Yunnan cuisine and the Chinese hipster generation
01:05:52 - Dali dish recommendations
Recommendations:
Chris & Steph: Shunde Lao Baby, Pin Nuo, Lao Dongbei
Kaiser: Taking time off to do something you love!
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a week in discussion of current affairs in China. |
| 0:13.1 | In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends |
| 0:18.5 | that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society, and food scene. Join me each week. We're |
| 0:27.2 | in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about |
| 0:32.0 | China. I am Kaiser Guo. I'm coming to you again this week from the lovely town of Sasi in southwest China's Yunnan province. |
| 0:39.8 | It's actually my last day here. I'm flying back to Beijing this afternoon after a month-long, unimaginably productive, thoroughly wonderful retreat with other members of my band, Trunzio, Spring, and Autumn, which, as I've mentioned before, reformed earlier this year, |
| 0:55.5 | reformed in the sense of putting ourselves back together, not, you know, changing our wicked ways. |
| 1:01.0 | A couple of days ago, we debuted a bunch of new material in unplugged form, |
| 1:05.3 | but for fans of the band who also like our harder side, rest assured that there is a good range |
| 1:09.8 | of harder rock and metal compositions that will be featured on the forthcoming album, still to be titled. |
| 1:16.8 | Cynica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. |
| 1:24.2 | The Cineca podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that |
| 1:29.2 | believes in what I'm doing with the podcast, please do consider lending your support. You can get me, |
| 1:34.2 | as always, at CinecaPog at gmail.com. A note of thanks to all the folks who subscribed to the |
| 1:40.0 | podcast after the last episode with Adam 2's, which made, you know, something of a splash. |
| 1:45.3 | For those who've been enjoying the show, which I've now been hosting for over 15 years, |
| 1:49.4 | please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinecabodcast.com. |
| 1:54.7 | You will enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, |
| 1:58.7 | essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your |
| 2:02.0 | favorite China-focused columnists and commentators, and, you know, of course, the knowledge that |
| 2:06.8 | you're helping me do what I honestly believe is pretty important work, so do check out the page |
| 2:10.8 | to see all that's on offer and consider helping out. By great good fortune, I am joined today here |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kaiser Kuo, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Kaiser Kuo and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.