Liu Zhenchao stands at a kitchen counter in Germany, filming himself making baozi. He chops onions, minces beef, and mixes the filling by hand. Then, instead of making dough from scratch, he reaches for a supermarket box. Inside is a sheet of premade pizza dough.
"Both pizza dough and traditional baozi dough rely on yeast to ferment," the 27-year-old student from Hefei said, slicing the dough into rounds. "It allows the dough to expand, whether you steam it or bake it."
Viewers called him a genius. The shortcut cut the work in half. Like Liu, a growing number of Chinese students abroad are filming cheap, improvised versions of home dishes. One hashtag for international students' "hunong" cooking, meaning casual or "halfhearted" cooking, has drawn more than 2.1 billion views. In March, a student in Italy posted a tutorial for gong jin bao dan, crispy fried eggs in a sweet-and-sour sauce, and collected more than 2 million likes. Others rushed to try it.
Chinese students are the world's largest group of students abroad. More than 570,600 left China to study in 2025, according to the Ministry of Education. Their kitchen experiments, made with whatever they can find, have been jokingly called the country's "ninth cuisine," after its eight regional cooking traditions.
Liu began cooking after he arrived in Germany in 2020 for a master's degree. A cafeteria meal cost about 6 euros; cooking at home kept him under 5 euros. Money was only part of it. The novelty of Western food wore off. "The longer I stayed abroad, the more I found myself craving the familiar tastes of home," he said. Stir-fried shredded potatoes with green peppers suited him better than cheese and steak.
Key ingredients were often missing, so he improvised. He has stir-fried Italian spaghetti with green peppers and pork in place of Chinese noodles. During exams he studied from morning until midnight, so dinner had to be fast as well as tasty. "If the food doesn't turn out well, I feel like I have nothing to look forward to that day," he said.
He started posting videos in 2024 to record daily life. Cooking is what viewers wanted. He now has more than 780,000 followers. Local friends who tried his pizza-dough baozi found the trick "magical." Some made them at home. His Italian friends compared Chinese dumplings to filled pasta.
Hu Zhiwen, a scholar of food studies, said cooking videos can trigger memories of smell, taste, and texture. For students far from home, a familiar dish offers comfort, a bit of independence, and a way to connect with others.