Wu Wei Tiao He: How Chinese Cooking Layers Five Tastes Into One

What this article answers

What wu wei tiao he means

Remove odors, set salt as the base, and layer the five tastes into one

How much salt to use

About 1% of the whole dish, 0.6–0.8% for soups. The other tastes sit on top of the salt

Which tastes to layer

One main taste per dish. The others play a supporting role and round off its edges

When to stop

If you can name a supporting taste as sweet or sour, you have added too much

How it differs from Japanese cooking

Japanese cooking removes and stops there. Chinese cooking removes, then layers into one

A mapo tofu recipe lists 5 or 6 seasonings that taste different from each other: doubanjiang (豆瓣酱, fermented chili bean paste), sweet bean sauce, soy sauce, wine, and sugar. A Japanese simmered dish gets by on 3: dashi (Japanese stock), soy sauce, and mirin (sweet rice wine).

Wu wei tiao he (五味调和) means bringing the five tastes together into one, so that none of them sticks out. The five are sweet, sour, bitter, spicy (the old texts say pungent), and salty.

In the kitchen, it comes down to this. Remove odors before you layer anything, build a base with salt, choose one main taste, and keep the others in support.

This article covers which tastes to layer, in what order, and where to stop. The same five tastes also appear in Chinese dietary tradition, where they guide the choice of ingredients for the eater’s body and the season. That is covered in food as medicine in Chinese cooking. How Chinese cooking judges a whole plate, color and aroma included, is in color, aroma, taste, and shape in Chinese cooking.

Five tastes layered on a base of salt

The kitchen work falls into three stages.

Stage	What you do	Rough amount	Where to stop
Remove odors	Coat with liao jiu (料酒, Chinese cooking wine), ginger, and scallion, or dip in boiling water	Liao jiu: 15–30 ml (1–2 tbsp) per 200 g of meat	Move on once the odor is gone. No need to keep the aroma
Bring out the ingredient with salt	Combine the salty seasonings, then make up the rest with salt	About 1% of the whole dish, 0.6–0.8% for soups	Taste at serving temperature; stop when the ingredient’s own flavor is clear
Layer sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy	Choose one main taste and round off its edges with the others	One main taste per dish	Just before you can name a supporting taste as sweet or sour

Sources: this site’s articles on liao jiu marinades and on saltiness.

The three stages follow the same order as a book written more than 2,000 years ago.

Lüshi Chunqiu frames harmony as order and amount

The Lüshi Chunqiu (吕氏春秋) was compiled in the 3rd century BC under Lü Buwei of the state of Qin. One of its chapters, Ben Wei (“The Root of Flavor”), discusses the taste of food.

Line in Ben Wei	Meaning	In the kitchen
滅腥去臊除羶	Remove the smell of fish, the odor of game, the smell of mutton	Remove odors before seasoning
調和之事、必以甘酸苦辛鹹、先後多少	Harmony uses sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty, and changes with the order and the amount	When and how much matters more than what
其斉甚微	The differences in the mix are very small	A small change in order or amount gives a different taste
鼎中之変、精妙微繊、口弗能言	The changes in the pot are subtle, beyond words	Cook by ratio, then finish by tasting

Sources: Lüshi Chunqiu, Ben Wei (references).

Ben Wei also says that odors are removed by how strong or gentle you keep the fire. That points the same way as Chinese prep today: burning off wine over high heat, or dipping ingredients in boiling water.

Remove odors first, then set the salt

Following the order of Ben Wei, build two foundations before you think about sweet or sour.

Remove odors with wine, ginger, scallion, and blanching

For meat or fish, coat it with liao jiu (a cooking wine such as Shaoxing), 15–30 ml (1–2 tbsp) per 200 g, then lay ginger and scallion on top and let it sit. As the wine evaporates, it carries odor compounds away with it, and the aroma of ginger and scallion covers what remains.

Cook bone-in meat or offal for 2–3 minutes in boiling water with ginger, scallion, and liao jiu, then throw out the water with the scum and fat. This blanching is called chao shui (焯水).

Layering sweet or sour on top won’t drive odor compounds out of the pot. Get them out before seasoning: carried off with the evaporating wine, or thrown out with the water.

Salt at about 1%, with the other tastes on top

Chinese cooks call salt the master of a hundred tastes. Sweet, sour, and spicy only come together once salt has made the ingredient’s own flavor clear.

The saltiness people tend to find pleasant is about 1% of the whole dish, and 0.6–0.8% for soups.

Chinese cooking layers several salty seasonings: soy sauce, doubanjiang, oyster sauce. Combine those first, then make up only the shortfall with salt.

Taste at the temperature you will serve at. Saltiness feels weaker the hotter the food, so a dish that tastes right hot turns salty as it cools.

Pick one main taste, keep the rest supporting

Once the salt base is in place, layer sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy. Add them all at equal strength, and every taste goes blurry.

One dish, one character

Sichuan cooks say yi cai yi ge, bai cai bai wei (一菜一格，百菜百味): one dish, one character; a hundred dishes, a hundred flavors. In Sichuan, each set combination of seasonings is called a flavor profile, and in 2025 an industry group set 24 of them as a standard.

Each profile is described by which taste leads and which supports.

Dish	Main taste	Supporting tastes
Hot and sour soup	Sour (on a base of salt)	Spicy
Kung pao chicken	Spicy, with salt and umami	Sweet (just enough to linger in the aftertaste)
Mapo tofu	Numbing and spicy, with salt and umami	Sweet and sour both kept in the background

Sources: explanations of Sichuan flavor profiles (references). Hot and sour has salt as its base, sour leading, and heat in support. Kung pao is fragrant heat with salt and umami and a faintly sweet aftertaste. The ma la (numbing-hot) profile of mapo tofu is thick numbing heat, salty, savory, and fragrant.

Narrowing it to one main taste lets the supporting tastes work to set it off. For building a meal from dishes with different flavor profiles, see how a Chinese meal is put together.

Sweet softens sour and spicy, salt lifts sweet

A taste can seem stronger or weaker depending on what sits next to it.

• A little sweetness softens the edge of sour or bitter.
• A little salt makes sweetness clearer.
• Sweet and sour together round off the sting of spicy heat.

Supporting sweet and sour are there to round off the main taste. Don’t add so much that they taste sweet or sour on their own.

Don’t layer more onto strong-flavored foods

Suiyuan Shidan (随园食单), a Qing dynasty cookbook by Yuan Mei from 1792, says foods too strong in flavor should be used alone and not combined with others. It names eel, soft-shell turtle, crab, beef, and mutton, among others.

The same book says to pair light with light and rich with rich. Crab is eaten with nothing but ginger and vinegar. When the ingredient’s flavor is strong, don’t layer sweet, sour, and spicy on it. Layering is for mild ingredients such as tofu or chicken breast.

Timing changes the edge of a taste

The “order” in Ben Wei means the order things go in. The same amount gives a different result depending on when it is added.

What	When to add it	How it tastes in the end
Liao jiu	At the start of the stir-fry, down the side of the wok	High heat drives off the alcohol and odors, leaving only aroma
Vinegar (to soften the sourness)	Early, and bring it to a boil	The acetic acid boils off and the edge goes
Vinegar (to keep the sourness sharp)	Just before you turn off the heat	Sourness and aroma stay as they are
Sugar	Any time	It doesn’t evaporate, so the sweetness stays even if added early. It burns easily when reduced
Aromatic oil (sesame or scallion oil)	2.5–5 ml (½–1 tsp) just before plating	Puts back on the surface the aroma that heat drives off

Sources: this site’s articles on flavor design and on ming you (finishing oil).

Hot and sour soup leads with sour, so the vinegar goes in just before the heat goes off. In a dish like sweet and sour pork, where sweet and sour are cooked together into a glaze, add the vinegar early and boil off its edge before it meets the sugar.

Stop just before a taste stands out

Ben Wei lists good flavor in the form “X but not too X.” Each taste is at its best when it stops just short of going too far.

Line in Ben Wei	Meaning	Cue in the kitchen
甘而不噥	Sweet but not cloying	Before sweetness lingers so long you don’t want the next bite
酸而不酷	Sour but not harsh	Before it stings your nose
辛而不烈	Spicy but not fierce	Before the heat hides every other taste
澹而不薄	Light but not thin	If more salt makes the ingredient’s flavor clearer, it is still thin
肥而不𦢈	Rich but not greasy	No pool of oil on the plate

Sources: Lüshi Chunqiu, Ben Wei (references).

If you can name a supporting taste, you have added too much. Taste kung pao chicken: if sweetness hits first, the sweet has overtaken the main taste.

When tasting leaves you unsure, change one taste at a time. Add two at once, and you can’t tell which seasoning changed the taste.

Japanese cooks remove; Chinese cooks remove, then layer

Japanese cooking also preps ingredients by removing odors and anything unwanted. The difference is what happens next.

Cuisine	What prep removes	After removing
Chinese	Odors, blood, fat (liao jiu, ginger, scallion; chao shui)	Layer sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy on a salt base and bring them together into one taste
Japanese	Bitter scum, odors, excess fat and water (a quick scald, parboiling)	Season once, in a simmering liquid mixed to a set ratio, and add fresh garnishes just before eating

Sources: this site’s articles on subtraction in Japanese cooking and on chao shui.

Japanese cooking lets the ingredient lead and builds flavor by not layering too much seasoning. Chinese cooking brings out the ingredient with salt, then layers the other tastes to remake it as one taste. Both start from removing, and head in opposite directions.

When to layer and when to stop

How much to layer depends on how strong the ingredient is and which taste leads.

When	What to do	Why
The ingredient is mild, like tofu or chicken breast	Layer sweet, sour, and spicy freely	The layered tastes don’t drown out the ingredient
The ingredient is strong, like crab, mutton, or eel	Stop at ginger and vinegar	Layered tastes clash with the ingredient
You use soy sauce, doubanjiang, or oyster sauce	Combine them first, then add only the salt still missing	All of them contain salt, so salt added first makes the dish too salty

Common failures and fixes

Too much salt, too much sourness, and a flat taste can be fixed. Too much heat and a fishy smell can only be partly saved.

Problem	Cause	Fix it now	Prevent it next time
Too salty	Soy sauce, doubanjiang, oyster sauce, and salt were layered, and their salt added up	Add more of the main ingredients or stock to dilute it, and round it off with vinegar or sugar, which contain no salt	Combine the salty seasonings first, then add only enough salt to reach about 1% overall
Too sour	In a sour-led dish, the vinegar went in just before the heat went off, and the edge of the acetic acid stayed	Add sugar 2.5 ml (½ tsp) at a time to round off the sourness, or bring it back to a boil to drive off acetic acid	To soften the sourness, add vinegar early and boil it. Add it last only when you want it sharp
Too spicy	In a dish where heat should support, doubanjiang or chili went in at a lead amount. The sting lingers on the tongue and masks salt, sweet, and sour	Add more of the main ingredients to dilute it, and add sugar and vinegar a little at a time to round off the heat	Choose the one main taste first, and keep supporting heat to an amount you notice in the aftertaste
Flat, under-seasoned	Salt fell short of 1% of the whole dish. The ingredient’s flavor never came forward, and the added sweet, sour, and spicy came out scattered	Before adding sugar or vinegar, add salt a pinch at a time and taste at serving temperature	Build a base of about 1% with salty seasonings and salt, then layer sweet, sour, and spicy
A fishy smell	Tastes were layered without removing odors first. The fishiness mixed with the sweet and sour and stayed	Pour liao jiu down the side of the wok, burn it off over high heat, and add ginger and scallion	Before seasoning, remove odors with liao jiu, ginger, and scallion, or by blanching

Four things to remember

Wu wei tiao he doesn’t mean using all five tastes. It means taking an ingredient with its odors removed, building a base of salt, raising one main taste, and rounding it off with the others.

• Remove odors before seasoning, with liao jiu, ginger, and scallion, or by blanching.
• Salt at about 1% of the whole dish. Combine the salty seasonings first, and make up only the shortfall with salt.
• One main taste per dish. Stop supporting tastes before you can name them.
• When tasting, change only one taste at a time.

For strong-flavored ingredients, stopping without layering is part of wu wei tiao he too.