My Story Telling

Unit : culture
Topic : General Information
Sup-topic : Food

The world's 5 most delicious foods

         Number 5: Peking Duck is a famous duck dish from Beijing that has been prepared since the imperial era, and is now considered one of China's national foods.

The dish is prized for the thin, crisp skin, with authentic versions of the dish serving mostly the skin and little meat, sliced in front of the diners by the cook. Ducks bred specially for the dish are slaughtered after 65 days and seasoned before being roasted in a closed or hung oven. The meat is eaten with pancakes, scallion, and hoisin sauce or sweet bean sauce. The two most notable restaurants in Beijing which serve this delicacy are Quanjude and Bianyifang, two centuries-old establishments which have become household names.

Number 4: Sushi  is a Japanese food consisting of cooked vinegared rice (shari) combined with other ingredients (neta), usually raw fish or other seafood. Neta and forms of sushi presentation vary, but the ingredient which all sushi have in common is shari. Raw meat sliced and served by itself is sashimi.

The common ingredient across all kinds of sushi is vinegared sushi rice. Variety arises from fillings, toppings, condiments and preparation. Traditional versus contemporary methods of assembly may create very different results from very similar ingredients. In spelling sushi, its first letter s is replaced with z when a prefix is attached, as in nigirizushi, due to consonant mutation called rendaku in Japanese.

Number 3: Chocolate  is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC. The majority of the Mesoamerican people made chocolate beverages, including the Aztecs, who made it into a beverage known as xocolātl [ʃo'kolaːt͡ɬ], a Nahuatl word meaning "bitter water". The seeds of the cacao tree have an intense bitter taste, and must be fermented to develop the flavor.

An authetic Neapolitan pizza ((Italian)) is typically made with tomatoes and mozzarella cheese. They can be made with ingredients like San Marzano tomatoes, which grow on the volcanic plains to the south of Mount Vesuvius, and mozzarella di bufala Campana, made with the milk from water buffalo raised in the marshlands of Campania and Lazio in a semi-wild state (this mozzarella is protected with its own European protected designation of origin).

Massaman curry is a Thai curry dish that is Muslim in origin. According to one theory, it originated in central Thailand at the court of Ayutthaya in the 16th century CE through a Persian envoy and trader.According to another theory, it originated in southern Thailand and its contacts with Arab traders. Due to its Muslim roots and therefore Islamic dietary laws, this curry is most commonly made with beef, but can also be made with duck, tofu, chicken, or, for non-Muslims, with pork (as pork is a forbidden food for Muslims, this variety is not eaten by observant Thai Muslims).

The flavoring for Massaman curry is called Massaman curry paste (nam phrik kaeng matsaman). The dish usually contains coconut milk, roasted peanuts or cashews, potatoes, bay leaves, cardamom pods, cinnamon, star anise, palm sugar, fish sauce, chili and tamarind sauce. Traders brought spices such as turmeric, cinnamon, star anise, cumin, cloves and nutmeg from Indonesia to the south coast of Thailand. 
The dish is served with rice and sometimes with pickled ginger or "achat" an accompaniment made with cucumber and chili peppers macerated in vinegar and sugar.