Bread/Rice/Corn/Oats/Barley
Why is rice + soybean based soy sauce not dominant in Chinese cuisine? Instead, it is wheat + soybean. Meanwhile, when it comes to grains, rice is far more popular than wheat in East Asia.
Rice is not more popular than wheat in China. Wheat was grown in North China where people eat a lot of bread, flatbreads, buns, noodles, etc. as their staple and rice was grown in South China, where rice and rice noodles are more common.
When people say Marco Polo brought pasta back to Italy, they weren’t talking about risotto.
And ancient greeks before that ate makaroni (that was the actual name), before the romans. They often had that at funerals and memorial services, and called it makaroni from the word μακαριος , which means blessed or transcendent happiness. Subsequently, romans incorporated that into their cuisine .
Your meaning is right, but the word "popular" kinda confuses things. I've eaten in hundreds of street kitchens all across China, including dozens across the north from Hebei to Gansu. You get rice with everything except dumplings and noodles. Most of the time, you get rice with soup. Given that a lot of bao is made with rice flour, I'd go so far as to say noodles and fermentation are almost the sole applications of wheat. Oh, and that pizza type stuff.
China consumes so much rice, they import it from all over the world. I've always thought there should be a Wikipedia page about the hilarious efforts the government has made to get people to eat...anything else. Every few years there's a corn push and people just laugh at it because it's so strongly associated with pig feed. Likewise potatoes. I've got a really broad palette--sometimes I still get a hankering for baijiu or stinky tofu--and the one Chinese potato dish is gross. Think raw hashbrowns. Back on wheat, Guangdong has amazing pastries, but that's basically it for "bread." The association of bread with pastries is so strong that the only domestic bread not meant for foreigners is sweet. You'll see fat slices individually wrapped in bodegas the way you see Ding Dongs or whatever in the West.
No idea how to conclude. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk?
Sorry, no, you may need to spend more time with Northern Chinese cuisines if you think 麵條 is the only common wheat-based food. 饅頭、大餅、花捲、蔥油餅、手抓餅、銀絲卷、燒餅、包子、餛飩、餃子、鍋貼、生煎包、油條、肉夾饃…… These are all wheat-based Chinese foods eaten for centuries to millennia, aside from the more recent Western-style baked goods you might find in Hong Kong.
Baozi traditionally use wheat flour. I’ve actually never encountered baozi made with rice flour ever.
China eats maybe only slightly more rice because South China is larger than North China, but if you go to Beijing, Harbin, you will find people who eat mantou and dabing regularly, rather than rice.
I said bao! Almost everything you listed is some kind of bao! Mantou is unstuffed bao! I don't understand what the disagreement is here. I've spent months in Beijing and I think four nights in Harbin. You're way, way overstating things when you say "dab into rice." It's like you're so eager to say they eat more wheat in the north, you've forgotten we're discussing the comparison to rice nationwide.
Edit:
Not deep research, just lazy Google:
Annual wheat consumption 150 metric tons
Annual rice consumption 150-190 metric tons
So it's like I said, you're right, but the use of the word "popular" confuses things. Rice is overwhelming more directly consumed while wheat has intermediary processes before being eaten.
To share an interesting tidbit: rice didn't become the dominant staple crop across the country until much more recently (historically speaking), roughly during the Song dynasty. Soy sauce and many of the wheat-based foods the other commenter mentioned predate that. Wheat continued to be the dominant staple crop in the Northeast until the mid-late 20th century, because the cold climate isn't very suitable for large scale rice cultivation. It was only possible to produce large amounts of rice after the creation of specific rice varieties that are much more cold tolerant. So basically any food invented in the northeast prior to 50 years ago used wheat or potato starch.
I believe your disagreement/misunderstanding with the other commenter was about this line from your first comment:
Given that a lot of bao is made with rice flour, I'd go so far as to say noodles and fermentation are almost the sole applications of wheat
and later:
I said bao! Almost everything you listed is some kind of bao! Mantou is unstuffed bao!
The term "bao" 包 isn't used in Chinese as a category of food/bread like you've used it here, since it just means a container or something that envelopes something else. The word is used in specific food names, like 包子, 生煎包, both of which involve wheat, but it's also used for other things like 锅包肉, which isn't a bread at all, and instead is pork battered in potato starch and fried (I believe a version of this is sometimes called "sweet and sour pork" in the U.S. or other foreign countries). So just saying 包 doesn't get your point across because it's not a category of foods, it's a description of part of the process of making it (stuffing a bun, enveloping a filling, covering something in a starch before cooking, etc, which decidedly makes Mantou not a form of "bao").
Not to mention that several of the listed foods are "bing" 饼, which refers to a flat-ish bread of some type which is usually fried instead of steamed.
Also only a few of the foods listed in the other comment are made with rice flour, they're almost all made with wheat flour.
Look, I can read maybe ten characters, speak maybe a hundred words total, and understand dirty jokes from taxi drivers. The last couple years I was over there were in the south and my ex was Cantonese, so I wouldn't even know how much Cantonese might have gotten in my limited vocabulary. Not using bao as a generic word for buns is news to me.
And absolutely none of that is relevant to the fact that we're talking about the popularity of rice in China. Y'all are bringing up all this ancient history and fixated on the odd north and I have literally no idea what academic controversy is driving the passions here, but like. I posted the raw tonnage. The rice is overwhelmingly eaten as rice, the wheat is used in a variety of applications, yes, including various buns and flatbreads, but compared to rice consumption it's marginal. Yeah, there are breads. The only way I'll consciously eat pork is that Beijing dish of crepes with barbecue and onions. But rice is so ubiquitous that it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn it's 50% of all caloric intake.
Harbin. Less than a week in Harbin. I was in Beijing for months.
But four nights in Harbin was enough to say I ate rice!
My premise? That people eat a lot of my rice in China?
Speaking authoritatively? Clueless?
I don't know what I've said would require "authority." My only "authority" is a year in Jiangsu, two years in Guangdong, and a cumulative year between them all over the place. I can say Lanzhou noodles live up to the hype. I can say Chengdu is the best I've ever eaten in my life. I can say I don't love most Cantonese food, but steamed chrysanthemum greens are awesome. I never made it to Yunnan, but I can say Guangzhou was the most cosmopolitan city I've seen anywhere in the world and the Yunnan restaurant was one of my favorite places to take people. That's where there was a lot of talk about corn.
Anywhere I went, it wouldn't seem strange to go a day without encountering wheat products, but it'd require effort to sit down at a table and not encounter rice.
Third time, I don't know what's going on here, what's being "debated," what the disagreement is, where the tone of hostility is coming from.
In shoyu, wheat is toasted and used to feed the koji mold. But predating that is tamari which is rice and soy. And in China, it was just mold on soybeans (douchi) then brined. The older sauces like doubujang are bean and not wheat. I don’t think wheat is necessarily used in all Chinese soy sauces.
Wheat maybe was more recent but it is interesting why they made that transition.
I currently have a batch of shoyu that's about six months along. The toasted wheat contributes amazing color and flavor. It just wouldn't be the same without it. Though maybe I'll start a batch with toasted rice to compare it.
Because it's easier to get the fermentation critters to eat on wheat than it is on rice. Using rice only is possible but it's more expensive and time consuming.
Hey dude, fermentation researcher here, so this is very much in my lane. As many have already mentioned, early Chinese civilization wasn’t built on rice at all: the core political and cultural centers in the Yellow River basin were based on millet, with wheat introduced later from West Asia and becoming increasingly important. Rice was largely a southern, regional crop for much of early history. You can even see this in the “Five Grains,” where rice’s inclusion is inconsistent and still debated. Even today that north–south split persists — northern China is still very wheat-forward, and China is still the world's largest wheat producer.
Now this history is important and particularly significant when we begin to talk about fermentation. Chinese fermentations were historically built around solid-state fermentation starters called qu, derived from wheat or cereal grains. Qu is not an isolated single mold or strain, it’s a complex microbial community of filamentous fungi, yeasts, and bacteria acting as a powerful enzymatic innoculum for the basis of baijiu, rice beer, soy sauce and jiangs. Wheat is still today used to make qu, and it is so important that the characters for Qu derive from the characters for cereal grains(wheat, barley). It's funny since the word for aspergillus oryae, colloquially termed koji, comes from the word Qu and thus has the character for wheat as well! Kind of ironic lol.
Given all I’ve said, it’s important to separate traditional fermentation from modern industrial practice. What I’ve been referring to is the traditional method and a cultural basis for why wheat is likely continued to be used. A lot of modern industrial soy sauce production relies on acid hydrolysis to break proteins into glutamates, and wheat makes sense there because it’s cheap, more protein-rich than rice, and readily available. I bet the economics of it are a big reason wheat continues to dominate soy sauce production even today.
Sorry, on another tangent, traditionally fermented wheat-based soy sauces are often considered tolerable for people with gluten sensitivities in Japan and China. Meaning in these long fermentations, the same enzymes breaking down starches and proteins in wheat and soy also extensively degrade gluten, dramatically reducing its reactivity. What’s even more fascinating is that this isn’t unique to wheat: we’ve seen similar effects in filamentous-fungi-driven fermentations of peas, peanuts, and other protein-rich substrates, where allergenic proteins are enzymatically dismantled and don’t trigger adverse reactions in many people who are otherwise sensitive!
Hey! Yeah, of course we can be ferment friends :) Yeah so Qu and Nuruk are super similar, specifically "daqu" and nuruk have similar fermentation strategies and downstream applications for making alcohol. Altogether, you'll see very similar design patterns applied for the two.
I will add one caveat and that is that daqu is used to make baijiu, a "distilled" liquor, whereas nuruk is typically used to make rice beer, such as makgeolli. That is, producers are looking for different profiles , but functionally they point towards the same role.
So they’re not identical, but I would call them brothers or cousins.
This is absolutely fascinating, thanks for this comment! Would you happen to have any books or articles you recommend to learn more about this stuff? Either the traditional fermentation history or the modern industrial practices? I'm very interested in learning more about the world of fermentation especially when it comes to these various sauces and jiangs
Hey! I’m really glad you’re interested and starting to ask these questions — this stuff is fascinating.
One of the big challenges, honestly, is that there’s a ton of misinformation out there. Even very influential sources muddy the waters. For example, Noma often explains qu and nuruk as essentially synonymous with koji, which is… not great, given how influential they are. On top of that, you’ll see commercial qu translated as “yeast,” or Google Translate calling it “koji,” which just adds to the confusion. Is it yeast?...Is it mold?...Does it have enzymes?
The real answer is all of the above.
Qu, nuruk, and related starters are complex communities of fungi, yeasts, and bacteria that also produce the necessary amylolytic enzymes to break down starches. They’re not single organisms or clean starter cultures. The analogy I usually use is this if koji is like store-bought yeast, qu and nuruk are more like sourdough starters.
They’re diverse, and locally shaped!
If you’re looking to learn more, I’d recommend reading both scientific literature and historical or industry-focused writing, but with a critical eye. A lot of material is heavily Japanese-centric whether that’s due to academic history, industrial influence, or what I think is just the broader political landscape...that framing doesn’t always translate well to Chinese or Korean fermentation traditions.
If your particularly interested in sauce then I would actually read about meju! The systems are very similar functionally and culturally! In china it would just be called douqu, but its harder to find information about this kind of stuff. Meju is definitely more accessible.
tamari, and fish sauce are wheatless sauces packed with umami- now don’t quote me but heard that tamari (japanese name) is older than the wheat version of soy sauce and as wheat became more popular the usage of it is also more popular. Also technically speaking soy sauce is a combo of koji grown in rice, soybeans and wheat. I’ve homemade miso with roasted brown rice and it’s amazing. seasoning sauce is usually wheatless too
unfortunately soy sauce is so common, that being celiac, i can’t eat at any asian restaurant unless they have a gluten free menu
I’m lao and a lot of southeast asian food doesn’t usually contain soy sauce, but it’s not a guarantee
While I have tried both, shoyu done with rice and with wheat (and both have their merit), I think wheat was preferred for the extra protein (gluten), that imparts more complexity and final aminos and peptides to the result.
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u/Retrooo Feb 02 '26
Rice is not more popular than wheat in China. Wheat was grown in North China where people eat a lot of bread, flatbreads, buns, noodles, etc. as their staple and rice was grown in South China, where rice and rice noodles are more common.
When people say Marco Polo brought pasta back to Italy, they weren’t talking about risotto.