Steaming

Cantonese cuisine, steamed fish, seasoned with soy sauce, coriander and Welsh onion

In Japan, glutinous rice is steamed to prepare mochi rice cakes. Traditional Japanese sweets or wagashi making involves steaming rice or wheat dough for making mochigashi and manju.

Chinese steamed eggs

In Western cooking, steaming is most often used to cook vegetables—it is rarely used to cook meats. However, steamed clams are prepared by steaming. With Chinese cuisine, vegetables are usually stir fried or blanched and seldom steamed. Seafood and meat dishes are steamed. For example: steamed whole fish, steamed crab, steamed pork spare ribs, steamed ground pork or beef, steamed chicken and steamed goose.

Rice can be steamed too, although in Chinese cooking this is simply referred to as "cooking" rather than "steaming". In Thailand steaming is the definition of minimalist cooking.[9] Wheat foods are steamed as well. Examples include buns and Chinese steamed cakes.

Steamed meat dishes (except fish and some dim sum) are less common in Chinese restaurants than in traditional home cooking, because meats usually require longer cooking times to steam than to stir fry. Commercially sold frozen foods (such as dim sum) formerly had instructions to reheat by steaming, until the rise in popularity of home microwave ovens, which have considerably shorter cooking times.

Staple foods

• Mantou, steamed bread
• Wotou, Chinese cornbread

Chinese steamed eggs similar to custard with local variety of ingredients and vessels.

Dim sum (Shaomai, Baozi, dumpling)

Rice

• Steamed rice with crab, Fujian cuisine called 蠘飯 (蟳飯).
• Steamed Pork with rice: pork steamed with crushed rice called 粉蒸肉.

Seafood

• Fish: Chinese perch, grouper, Japanese black porgy.
• Crab: Chinese mitten crab, Shanghai cuisine for the autumn.

Soup

• Steamed Pork Rib Soup: a Jiangxi cuisine called zh:煨汤.
• Buddha Jumps Over the Wall: a Fujian cuisine.
• Winter Melon Soup: use a hollowed out and sculpted gourd as a vessel.
• Qi Guoji Steamed Chicken Soup: soup of chicken cooked with double steamer, a Yunnan cuisine called zh:汽锅鸡.

Sweets

• Milk Pudding: called Daliang Milk Pudding (大良双皮奶) as said to be made in the 1850s in Daliang in Foshan, Guangdong.
• Guilinggao: also known as Turtle Jelly, a jelly-like Chinese medicine, also sold as a dessert.

• 
  variety of dim sum
• 
  Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, or Buddha's Temptation
• 
  A small bowl of winter melon soup.
• 
  Steamed silkie Soup.
• 
  Turtle Jelly

Bread

Chawanmushi (Savory egg custard): beaten egg, dashi soup and ingredients (chicken, shrimp, ginkgo nuts, kamaboko and mitsuba) into a bowl with a lid.

• Odamaki-mushi: udon in a cup of chawan-mushi. Osaka specialty.

Glutinous rice. Instead of boiling, glutinous rice is steamed to eat. *Okowa おこわ (強飯) (okowa) as it is called, receipts with ingredients and vessel chestnuts (kuri okowa) or wild herbs (sansai okowa) are popular.

• 赤飯 (Sekihan, red rice): served at festive occasions with azuki bean and color agent added to enhance red color.

• Mochi: prepared with steamed rice and kneaded.

There are receipts where sauce is added to the main ingredients, aiming to control smell or aroma, or keep moisture to the ingredients.

• Awayukimushi: egg meringue over fish or seafood and keep moisture as well as retain aroma.[10]
• Kaburamushi: grated or shredded turnip covers crabs and fish to keep moisture.[10]
• Sakamushi: add sake to steam sea bream and clams which will reduce fishy smell.

Receipts named after the container.

• Dobin-mushi: matsutake and fish in a pot together with dashi soup.
• Yugama: yuzu citrus is hollowed out into a cup[11] to hold and add zest to the food.[12]

• Sea bream milt steamed in yugama[13]

Sweets: steaming is an important process in Japanese sweets making such as manjū, yōkan, uirō, karukan or suama.

• 
  Chawanmushi (foreground)
• 
  Manjū
• 
  Mochi as offering to the deities

• Gyeran-jjim, a custardy dish