Food
In this section
Teochew cooking— built on freshness and clarity, on heat control and knife work; no rankings, no shop recommendations.
Cooking and snacks are kept apart: dishes belong to the banquet table, told through heat, knife work and serving order; snacks belong to streets and stalls, told through season, stall and craft. Both rest on the same thing: a fixation on freshness.
How to read this section
Chaoshan food has two systems, and mixing them muddles both: dishes for the table, kueh for offerings and festivals. They are judged by entirely different standards.
1. Dishes: heat and order
Teochew cooking is built on clarity and freshness; method weighs heat and knife work, and the table weighs order — cold before hot, savoury before sweet, soup in the middle or at the end, with local variation. A dish is judged by whether its own flavour comes through, not by how many seasonings went in.
2. Kueh: use and rule
Kueh is an offering first and a food second. Red peach kueh for rites and celebrations, rat-shell kueh for Qingming, winter-solstice balls for the solstice. So kueh is judged by fitness for the occasion, not by taste; number, shape and colour all follow rules.
3. One line drawn
This section carries no ranking of dishes and recommends no shops. Shops change with time and a written recommendation dates; it also edges into commerce, which conflicts with a reference work. What is written here is method, origin and county difference.
What can be documented
Only two food-related heritage items with published documents are listed, with batch, number and applicant region recorded as published.
Teochew cuisine | item Ⅷ-271 | applicant: Chaozhou, Guangdong | custodian: Chaozhou Cultural Centre | fifth national list of intangible heritage, Guofa [2021] No. 8, published by the State Council in 2021.
Chaoshan pastry craft (lau-peng and kueh) | item Ⅷ-70 | applicants: Jinping District, Shantou, listed twice in the original | fifth provincial list of Guangdong, Yuefu [2013] No. 118, published 22 November 2013.
Kueh skins are made from rice or sweet-potato flour and split by season and use: red peach kueh for rites, the rice-free kueh wrapping chives, rat-shell kueh with wild greens in the skin. Types and methods still need county-by-county checking.
First themes in this section
- The base of Teochew cooking: clear without being thin, fresh without being fishy Open, see Teochew cooking“1. The base”
- Kueh and the ritual year: which kueh for which festival (aligned with the ritual year) partly, see Chaoshan kueh
- Snacks and stalls: oyster omelette, beef balls, rice noodles and braised dishes by region Open, see Snacks and stalls
- Pickles and congee: salted greens, dried radish and olive greens at home Open, see Chaoshan pickles
- Ingredients and produce: Dancong tea, lion-head goose, thin-shell mussels, fish sauce Pending
- Table rules: seating, serving order, number of dishes Merged into Banquets and table rites
- Gongfucha: a separate page Open, see Gongfucha
By region
The list above runs by kind; by region is another way in. Each city has a travel page with an eat section; Shantou has a separate food piece built around five meals.
- Chaozhou: braised goose, kueh noodles, duck-mother dumplings, beef balls
- Shantou: beef hotpot, Dahao fish balls, raw-marinated seafood, cold dishes
- Jieyang: pounded tea, pingpong kueh, Longjiang pork trotter rice, Puning dried tofu
- What to eat in Shantou: five meals from morning to night
One line drawn
This section carries no ranking of dishes and no shop recommendations. It records method, origin and county difference; whether a shop is good is not a reference work’s business, and it goes stale.
The line is worth stating: entries carry no shops because an entry is meant to stay true for years. Travel guides differ —What to eat in Shantou such pages name districts, hours and old shops; they are a route for visitors, not a judgement of any one place.
What this section leaves out
No unsourced origin tales of the dish-began-with-an-emperor kind; no conflating Teochew cooking with street snacks; no secret recipes without a dish and a method behind them.
Entries now on the site
The five each hold one setting: dishes at the banquet, kueh at rites and festivals, snacks in the streets, pickles with everyday meals, Gongfucha at the end of the table and outside it. County tables for dishes and name lists for snacks and pickles are not done yet.
Sources
Item numbers, applicant regions and custodians come from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s published list and Guofa [2021] No. 8; the provincial item follows the original fifth provincial list in Yuefu [2013] No. 118 (22 November 2013). Kueh types and methods still need county-by-county checking. Verified 2026-10-20.
Last revised: 20 October 2026