Cooking Appliances to Make Chinese New Year 2025 Go with a Bang!

As the Year of the Snake ushers in wisdom, intuition, and transformation in 2025, hundreds of millions of people worldwide will welcome the Chinese New Year with family gatherings, community festivities and symbolic foods.

In this article, we'll explore the significance of New Year’s Chinese cuisine and look at which appliances can make life easier when you’re cooking for a family feast.

Central to what is generally considered to be the most special occasion on the Chinese cultural calendar, are the sumptuous Chinese New Year feasts shared with family. Unless you’ve bagged yourself and your loved ones a table at your favourite Chinese restaurant, the occasion can involve a lot of cooking, from rice cakes and potstickers to pan fried whole fish and pork belly. Mouth watering yet?

Chinese New Year celebrations begin on New Year’s Eve, Tuesday, 28th January 2025, with family dinners marking the occasion. The following day, Wednesday, 29th January 2025, is Chinese New Year’s Day. Chinese communities and people of Chinese descent in Australia will celebrate for 16 days, culminating in the Lantern Festival on Wednesday, 12th February 2025.

Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, marks the beginning of the lunar calendar a major event in Chinese culture. Evolving over a period of more than 3,000 years, it involves community festivities, family reunion dinners, traditional rituals and symbolic foods.

Chinese New Year is steeped in tradition, and one of the essential elements is the preparation and consumption of ‘lucky’ foods. These symbolise prosperity, good health, good luck and happiness. Let's delve into some of these auspicious dishes:

To cook up the best Chinese New Year celebrations, you’ll need the right appliances to prepare the best feast any of your family or guests can remember. With these cooking companions in your corner, you’ll be on track for a very Happy New Year!

The heart of Chinese cooking, a good wok ensures the quick and even stir-frying essential for many traditional dishes. With their precision, safety and portability, electric woks can actually offer a few advantages over traditional gas ones.

Look for an electric wok with adjustable temperature control to achieve the high heat required for authentic stir-frying. Non-stick surfaces make for an easier cooking process and cleanup. Models with a tempered glass lid allow you to monitor the cooking progress without losing heat.

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A kitchen essential for any Chinese household, a rice cooker takes the effort out of cooking rice, leaving you free to focus on other dishes.

If you can, opt for a rice cooker with advanced technology for precise cooking. Fuzzy logic technology ensures perfectly cooked rice by adjusting time and temperature throughout the cooking process, based on the current state of the rice. Some models offer multi-functional capabilities, allowing you to prepare different types of rice and even steam vegetables simultaneously.

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Both pressure cookers and multicookers with pressure cooking capabilities are ideal for braising meats and preparing dishes that traditionally take a long time, allowing you to focus on whipping up the rest of your New Year banquet!

Ideally, choose a versatile model with multiple cooking functions such as sauté, steam, and slow cook. Look for safety features like a steam release valve and lid-locking mechanism. The ability to program cooking times and pressure levels can make this already convenient cooking method even more so.

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Essential for preparing dumplings, buns, and other dim sum delicacies, a steamer is a versatile tool for various Chinese dishes.

If you can, it’s good to select a steamer with multiple tiers that enable you to steam different dishes simultaneously. Bamboo steamers are more traditional, while electric steamers offer adjustable settings for various cooking needs and usually have dishwasher-safe components.

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Perfect for a traditional Chinese hot pot feast, ‘steamboats’ allow everyone to cook their own ingredients at the dining table, making for a really fun and communal eating experience. The pot holds a base broth into which you can place everything from prawns and chicken, to tofu and thinly sliced beef, cooking and eating it as you go.

Hot pot cookers with a split design allow for both hot pot and grill functions, so if you want to get a nice sear on your protein before immersing it in the tasty broth for a few seconds, you can. Adjustable temperature controls cater to different cooking preferences, and non-stick coatings make for easy cleaning.

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A dedicated tea maker can elevate your New Year meal by letting you brew traditional Chinese teas to perfection. No more bitter or astringent cups of green or oolong.

Models with temperature control settings allow you to brew various types of tea perfectly. Tea makers with automatic steeping and warming functions preserve the flavours of your favourite teas, while removable and dishwasher-safe components make for easy cleaning.

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This handy little gadget speeds up the process of making dumplings, a significant part of Chinese New Year celebrations!

Opt for a dumpling maker that’s easy to use and clean. Some models come with multiple moulds for different dumpling and wonton sizes and shapes, while others are simple manual little presses that have one function and you can pick up for a couple of dollars. A durable and food-grade construction ensures longevity, and a non-stick surface can prevent the dough from sticking.

A waffle maker lets you add a sweet touch to your feast with homemade egg waffles, a popular treat during Chinese New Year.

If you’re catering to large numbers, it’s a good idea to get a maker with the capacity to cook a few waffles at once. You should also look for a machine with a non-stick coating for easy waffle removal and cleaning, because nobody wants to be dealing with cooked-on spills and mess. Adjustable temperature and browning settings, meanwhile, let you to choose your preferred level of crispiness.

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A food processer will become your best friend as you use it to quickly chop, slice, and dice vegetables and other ingredients used in Chinese dishes.

Choose a food processor with multiple blades and attachments for greater versatility, and variable speed settings for greater precision. A larger capacity is always useful, and look out for safety features, such as locking mechanisms.

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Whether you’re making fresh juices to balance out the flavours of your New Year feast, or symbolic drinks like plum juice (a sweet year ahead) or mandarin (luck and prosperity), a juicer can add a refreshing element to your celebration.

Opt for a juicer with a powerful motor and efficient extraction system, multiple speed settings to handle different fruits and vegetables. Easy-to-clean components, preferably dishwasher-safe, streamline the juicing process. If you intend to only juice mandarins or oranges, a more simple citrus press may suffice, and if you value retaining more nutrients from the ingredients, a cold press juicer is the way to go.

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If you’re not of Chinese descent but are lucky enough to have been invited to enjoy some of these lucky Asian delicacies, it’s a nice touch to learn how to say Happy New Year in Chinese. There are lots of ways to do this, but there are a couple of popular phrases that should serve you well.

The most widely spoken language in China is Mandarin, and the words ‘Xin nian kuai le’ (pronounced shin nee-an kwai le), are often used to wish people you don’t know well ‘New Year happiness.’ An informal version used with friends and family is ‘xin nian hao’ (pronounced shin nee-an how).

Cantonese is spoken more in Hong Kong, Macau and the Guangdong province. To people hailing from these areas, ‘Gung hay fat choy’ is a popular Chinese New Year greeting, meaning ‘Wishing you prosperity’.

Whether you're cooking for a large family reunion or an intimate gathering, the right tools in the kitchen can make for much easier preparation of your fortune-flavoured feasts. May the Year of the Dragon bring you strength, power, and success, along with a table filled with delicious and auspicious dishes. Happy Lunar New Year!

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