Cooking School

[The Main Kitchen] Pots

The Sand pot (Mandarin translation: Sha Guo)

It is a lightweight earthenware cooking pot, ash-glazed in the interiors. It works for slow cooking. (eg. Red-stewing) and acts as a substitute for flameproof casserole dishes or heavy iron cooking pots. Due to its tough surface, it can withstand flames that wood and straw cannot endure. Though it is time-consuming to use, the pores of the pot can retain old waters to flavor the food, producing fluffy and evenly cooked rice or stew. Though metal pots are more and more popular nowadays, these earthenware pots can never be replaced.

Rice Pots
Actually, there isn't any definite kind of rice pot for cooking rice; any pot with a tight fitting cover can be used as long as the size of the pot is big enough for the amount of rice you have to cook.

In the past, people often use stainless steel copper bottom pots and glassy Pyrex pots. It will be acceptable if there is a tight cover for the pot to enable the rice to be properly steamed. However, automatic rice cookers are more popular now, especially for those people who eat rice very frequently since they avoid forming crusts of hard browned rice at the bottom of the pot. On the contrary, there are also a great number of people who prefers the toasted flavour of the resulting crust.

Other Special Pots

This rare but special pot is made of hard-fired earthenware and is mainly used to cook chicken. Its bottom comes up in a cone and opens at the top; this will make the steam rise through like a volcano.

There are also deeper, covered pots, which were used like the wok when woks hadn't existed yet and they are the oldest Chinese cooking vessels of all.

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