Asian cuisine

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Asian cuisine styles can be broken down into several tiny regional styles that have roots in the peoples and cultures of those regions. The major types can be roughly defined as East Asian with its origins in Imperial China and now encompassing modern Japan and the Korean peninsula; Southeast Asian which encompasses Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Viet Nam, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines; South Asian derived the states that once made up British India – Burma, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan as well as several other countries in this region of the continent;^[1] Central Asian and Middle Eastern.

[edit] Terminology

In the United Kingdom, "Asian cuisine" generally refers to South Asian cuisine, while in the United States and Australia it usually refers to East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) and Southeast Asian cuisine, in addition to South Asian cuisine.

In much of Asia, the term does not include the country's native cuisines. For example, in Hong Kong and mainland China, Asian cuisine is a general umbrella term for Japanese cuisine, Korean cuisine, Filipino cuisine, Thai cuisine, Vietnamese cuisine, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisine and Indonesian cuisine; but Chinese cuisine and Indian cuisine are excluded.

The term Asian cuisine might also used to address the eating establishments that offer wide array of Asian dishes without rigid cuisine boundaries; such as selling satay, gyoza or lumpia for appetizer, som tam, rojak or gado-gado for salad, offering chicken teriyaki, nasi goreng or beef rendang as main course, tom yam and laksa as soup, and cendol or ogura ice for dessert. In modern fusion cuisine, the term Asian cuisine might refer to the culinary exploration of cross-cultural Asian cuisine traditions. For example combining the culinary elements of Vietnam and Japanese, Thai and Malay, or Indonesian and Chinese.