Pizza Bao, Spaghetti Stir-Fry: Chinese Students Hack Home Cooking Abroad

The 27-year-old trainee from Hefei, capital of China’s eastern Anhui province, chops onions and minces beef for the filling, then seasons it and blends it by hand in a bowl.

When it comes time to make the dough, he unexpectedly reaches for a cardboard box from a regional grocery store.

Inside is a sheet of premade pizza dough.

“Both pizza dough and conventional baozi dough depend on yeast to ferment,” Liu informed Sixth Tone, slicing the dough into cool rounds. “It enables the dough to broaden, whether you steam it or bake it.”

Liu’s pizza dough baozi hack quickly struck home with Chinese trainees abroad. Audiences called him a “genius,” admiring a faster way that removed the requirement to make dough from scratch and cut preparation time in half.

Like Liu, a growing variety of Chinese trainees studying abroad are turning cooking videos into viral hits throughout Chinese social networks. On Douyin, the Chinese variation of TikTok, the hashtag “global trainees hunong cooking”– utilizing the term “to do something halfheartedly”– has actually collected 2.1 billion views.

The pattern goes back to March this year, when a Chinese trainee in Italy published a video on how to make gong jin bao dan, or crispy-fried eggs covered with a sweet-and-sour sauce. His dish guide video went viral, gathering more than 2 million likes and setting off a wave of netizens to try the meal and share their outcomes online.

Chinese trainees are the biggest abroad trainee population on the planet, with over 570,600 Chinese travelling in 2025 alone, according to China’s Ministry of Education.

For these trainees, improvised meals from back home made with whatever components they can discover have actually ended up being a classification of their own, jokingly called the nation’s “ninth food” after its 8 main local foods.

Home cooking

Liu traces his love of cooking to his youth, when he invested hours seeing cooking programs on television.

When he got here in Germany in October 2020 to pursue a master’s in engineering economics, it was just natural that he started preparing his own meals to cut expenses; a meal at the school lunchroom expense 6 euros typically, however cooking in your home kept his expenditures listed below 5 euros, he stated.

The option was not just about conserving cash. Liu matured with meals understood for their abundant sauces, strong tastes, and lively colors.

The novelty of Western foods rapidly subsided after he showed up. “The longer I remained abroad, the more I discovered myself yearning the familiar tastes of home,” Liu stated. “Common Chinese meals like stir-fried shredded potatoes with green peppers simply match my taste much better than cheese and steak.”

Recreating those very same tastes, nevertheless, was challenging. With lots of crucial active ingredients not available in German grocery stores, he found out to improvise, changing familiar components from home with regional ones. In one dish, he utilizes Italian spaghetti in location of Chinese noodles, stir-frying it with green peppers and pork.

For Liu, cooking likewise needed to fit around the extreme pressure of studying. Throughout test durations, he would study from around 9 a.m. up until midnight, so cooking needed to fast and basic, while likewise yummy and genuine.

“Good food is necessary to me,” Liu stated. “During test durations, when the pressure is currently so high, if the food does not turn out well, I seem like I have absolutely nothing to anticipate that day.”

When he released his Douyin account in 2024, he at first desired simply to catch his daily life abroad. As he shared more of his life overseas, cooking slowly took center phase.

“I discovered that cooking is what resonates most with audiences online,” Liu stated. He has actually given that brought in more than 780,000 fans.

“Such material likewise has an especially effective sensory appeal,” Hu Zhiwen, a vital food research studies scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, informed Sixth Tone. Pictures of cooking can activate memories of odor, taste, and texture, which resonate highly with audiences, he stated.

Food has likewise end up being a method for Liu to get in touch with his contemporaries abroad. He frequently welcomes regional good friends over to attempt his cooking, consisting of the baozi he made with store-bought pizza dough.

“They discovered it wonderful due to the fact that store-bought pizza dough is something they’ve seen all their lives, yet nobody had actually believed to utilize it in this manner,” Liu stated. “Some even attempted making them in your home.”

The food in some cases provides his good friends concepts for innovating foods from their own cultures, too. His Italian buddies, for instance, compared Chinese dumplings to their own filled pastas.

Cooking can use abroad trainees a course to self-reliance, psychological convenience, and cross-cultural connection, Hu, the food scholar, kept in mind. “When you remain in a brand-new environment, there is a natural desire to look for things that make life feel more familiar.”

In China, where food is deeply woven into daily life and local foods provide huge range, cooking can be more than a useful requirement, Hu included.

“Chinese trainees will be especially drawn to cooking when they transfer to locations where the food culture is noticeably various from what they matured with,” he stated.

For Chen Wan’er, cooking abroad was a various sort of difficulty. She had actually hardly prepared before leaving China, however after a month in the UK, she was making nearly all of her meals herself– and not just for the financial advantages.

In a brand-new nation, 7 hours far from her friends and family and without any close connections, cooking offered her days suggesting and shape. Even when a meal didn’t end up completely, she delighted in the complete satisfaction of making something from scratch.

Chen started recording her cooking and publishing it on China’s way of life platform Xiaohongshu, likewise called RedNote, however unlike Liu, she preserves a little audience of approximately 1,000 fans. She saw the account as a method to offer her moms and dads a window into her brand-new life abroad, letting them peek her everyday regimen and reducing their concerns about how she was doing.

Her moms and dads were shocked when they saw a video she published of herself making mian geda tang, a northern Chinese homestyle meal of little pieces of dough prepared in soup. Chen matured in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou, where noodles were not part of her household’s cooking custom and flour was seldom purchased. Now, living alone in Britain, she taught herself to make a meal she had actually never ever prepared before.

Away from home, Chen has actually found that she really delights in cooking without stressing about getting whatever. In the house, she was frequently reluctant to prepare with her mom close by, advising her not to make a mess.

“Here, I can simply let myself choose nobody monitoring me. The reality that I can feed myself is currently sufficient,” Chen stated. “I do not need to fret about whether the cooking area is untidy.”

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: Screenshots from Liu’s cooking videos on Xiaohongshu.)