Chinese takeaway dishes are crowd-pleasers for a reason: comforting, packed with flavour and impossible to resist. But while ordering in is easy, recreating those favourites at home can feel daunting.

Around the world, there's a dizzying variety of pastes used in cooking: sweet, salty and savory, cooked and raw, meat-based and plant-based, fermented and unfermented, just to name a few. Mashing or ...

Pad thai is made by stir frying thin flat rice noodles in garlic, chai poh (Chinese sweet-salty preserved radish), dried shrimp and tofu, with a sauce made of fish sauce, tamarind paste and palm sugar ...