Hunan cuisine

2 min read

Hot, spicy, sweet, sour, bold, beautiful—Hunan cuisine embodies all the enticing facets of Chinese cooking. For me, it also conjures up home—I lived in Changsha, Hunan’s modern and bustling capital of 7 million-plus people and skyscrapers, for eleven exciting months. (Indeed, as of this writing, plans to construct the world’s tallest building by 2013 are awaiting final approval!) Yet not far outside the city limits, a land of gentle hills and fertile valleys morphs into view, blessed by a subtropical monsoon climate, promising an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables the whole year through.

In fact, Hunan is China’s third-largest producer of oranges, second-largest producer of tea, and numberone producer of rice—a veritable embarrassment of riches by global standards. Ask the locals what Hunan’s greatest agricultural accomplishment is, however, and most of them will proudly answer it’s the hot chili peppers, which grow prolifically throughout the province. After all, what would Hunan cuisine—or Chinese cuisine, for that matter—be without them? Known for its exquisitely hot dishes, Hunan cuisine is even spicier—or ―la‖—and hotter than Sichuan cuisine, to which it is often compared. It is also purer and more simple, relying almost exclusively on fresh, not dried, chili peppers.

While the peppers may burn your palate, they load your system with more vitamin C per gram than citrus fruit and more vitamin A than carrots—and contain compounds that can kill harmful bacteria in the digestive system to boot. Blasts of capsaicin, the active ingredient found only in the pepper family that causes the feeling of spicy heat, release endorphins, the body’s biological painkillers, for a natural high.

Common physiological effects also include a metabolic boost and heavy sweating—explaining the paradox of how hot chilies can actually cool the body and, as a result, why they are so popular in tropical climates. To the uninitiated, Hunan cuisine is an intoxicating contradiction of pleasure and pain. To the initiated, like me, food simply doesn’t get any better. Like it or not, it will always take your breath away!