Popular Guizhou Chinese Food, Snacks & Cuisines

Guizhou Province, in southwest China, has beautiful landscape, colorful minority customs and mouth-watering food; distinctively spicy and sour food. If you like spicy or other strong-flavored food, Guizhou will be a culinary paradise for you.

You may wonder why Guizhou people like to eat spicy food, how they prepare their dishes, what to eat in Guizhou, and what to do if you don’t like chili. Follow me to find the answers, or to begin the quest to discover your favorite Guizhou dish.

Although Guizhou's food is many, but also inseparable from spicy, Guizhou is very warm all year round, and close to the sea, very humid, people like to eat some peppers to eliminate moisture in the body, but foreigners to travel a lot of times are still not very accustomed to the local diet, so local characteristics have become people's first choice. For people with a bad stomach, it is also necessary to be selective when eating, no matter how delicious it is, it should be appropriate to avoid gastrointestinal resistance, which will make people very uncomfortable.

Why Is Spicy Food So Popular Among Guizhou People?

One reason is that the Guizhou climate is humid with lots of rainfall, and the gloomy and cold weather can easily lead to illness. People eat spicy food to dispel the cold and wet.

Another reason is that salt was a scarce commodity in ancient Guizhou. Even as recently as decades ago, salt could not be produced in Guizhou and it was difficult to transport it in, but the mountainous environment was always suitable for growing chili pepper.

For these two reasons, Guizhou people in past times used chili as seasoning, and the habit became a tradition.

Here is one more thing hard to believe but it’s true, that chili itself can be a snack in Guizhou. People fry dried chili along with oil, salt, peanuts and sesame to make a dish of crisp chili. This can be a side dish or a snack.