My first book, Sichuan Cookery (published in the US as Land of Plenty), was chosen by the Observer Food Monthly as one of the ten best cookbooks of all time! Crazy, but delightful!
Sichuanese cuisine
Chengdu spice stall
My acupuncturist friend Simon came for lunch the other day, and one of the dishes I cooked was that old favourite mapo doufu (Pock-Marked Old Woman’s beancurd). For some reason we ended up talking about Sichuan pepper, and Simon mentioned that he had some stocks in his pharmacy. I doubted that it would be as zingy as the best stuff, so I sent him home with a sample of the pepper I use (a gift from my chef friend Yu Bo), with strict instructions to try his regular pepper first, and then try chewing a bit of mine. His comments, copied below with his permission from an email he sent me yesterday, are a good illustration of what it’s like trying fantastic Sichuan pepper for the first time!
Can you spot me in the front row?!
I’m very happy to announce that I am collaborating with American businesswoman Diane Drey on a programme of short English-language cooking courses at my old school, the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu. Diane ran a successful pilot programme in March this year, and the next courses will be running in October 2010 and March 2011. The two-week courses will offer an introduction to the arts of the Sichuanese kitchen, including cutting, creating complex flavours and preparing a range of classic Sichuan dishes. The cost includes a welcome dinner, ten days of cooking instruction, excursions to some local tourist attractions, and a banquet at my friend Yu Bo’s fabulous restaurant. Diane can also make suggestions or assist you with accommodation.
In the future, we hope also to be able to offer bespoke, private courses for groups of chefs and other culinary professionals.
For further information, please drop me a line via the contact page, or visit this website.
Another brand of ya cai, bought in London’s Chinatown. Not as good, in my opinion, as the one highlighted in my previous post, but perfectly usable in Sichuanese cooked dishes.
I was very happy to discover today that my local Chinese supermarket stocks Sichuanese ya cai 芽菜, a speciality of the southern Sichuanese city of Yibin, and a vital ingredient in dishes like dry-fried green beans 干煸四季豆 , dan dan noodles 担担面 and dry-braised fish 干烧鲜鱼. You can use other Chinese preserves, like Tianjin preserved vegetable, as a substitute, but they are not as good as the real thing. Here, the preserve is sold in little sachets, chopped and ready to use. Apparently the shop had been selling it for some time, but I hadn’t noticed!
If any of you have tried asking for ya cai in Chinese shops, you may have found that the staff there point you in the direction of beansprouts, causing great confusion on both sides. This is because the Chinese characters for Sichuanese ya cai are exactly the same as the characters for beansprouts, and most people outside Sichuan have not heard of ya cai! Perhaps my photographs of the sachets will help you track it down. Continue reading…
I’m quite chuffed to read this thread on a Chinese web discussion board about Gong Bao chicken (apologies to those of you who can’t read Chinese). The poster said she’d tried more than ten different recipes without any success – until she tried mine from Land of Plenty/Sichuan Cookery, which she said produced as good as dish as one in a good Sichuanese restaurant!
Posted by Fuchsia
on November 18, 2009
Chinese cuisine, Chinese food culture, Food and health, Sichuanese cuisine / 19 Comments
Chinese cuisine, Chinese food culture, Food and health, Sichuanese cuisine / 19 Comments
shui zhi yu - as seen on the Barshu menu
An illuminating little story from Sichuan, told to me by my friend Dai Shuang, the wife and business partner of the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo (who you will meet in the ‘Rubber Factor’ chapter of my ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’):
A friend of Yu Bo and Dai Shuang’s, an American chef who works in Shanghai, was complaining that many Sichuanese dishes, including mala yu, were too oily. As I’m sure you blog readers, will agree, this is a common western complaint about Sichuanese cuisine, and even Chinese cuisine in general.
Anyway, later that day, Dai Shuang and Yu Bo watched their American friend make some mashed potatoes, and they were incredulous at the amount of milk and butter he added – Dai Shuang said it was so rich she could hardly bear to eat it.
That evening, they offered him some of that classic Sichuan supper dish, hui guo rou (twice-cooked pork), and asked him if he found it oily – he did. So Dai Shuang pointed out that his mashed potato had been full of butter, and that they had been expected to eat it all, whereas with the Sichuanese dish, almost all the oil had remained on the serving dish. Moreover, the oil used in Sichuanese cooking was mainly vegetable oil, whereas in Western cooking it was often less-healthy animal fats. ‘It’s very funny’, she said, ‘The way Westerners think Chinese food is so oily, while we think Western food is so oily!’ Continue reading…
In October, I posted something on this blog about unsavoury flavours in Chinese cuisine (‘Stinky to sublime’, 17 October 2008). And last week a New York Times journalist who was researching an article about science and superstition in the kitchen emailed me to talk about them. This is the piece he wrote; it was published alongside one of the recipes from my Sichuanese cookery book. The recipe, for a whole fish braised in chilli bean sauce, has a particular resonance for me, because it is the first Sichuanese dish I ever attempted to cook! This was some time before I went to live in Chengdu, and I made it from a recipe in Yan-kit So’s Classic Chinese Cookbook. Little did I know how important this kind of cooking would become in my life…
The Financial Times this weekend has published one of my articles, about how most of my Christmas recipes have been infiltrated by Chinese ingredients and cooking techniques. Even that archetypal English staple, mince pies – for years now, I have made them in the shape of Chinese jiaozi dumplings. If you follow this link to the FT website, you will be able to see some lovely colour photographs of a salad made with leftover turkey and some jiaozi mince pies. Otherwise, here are the basic recipes: Continue reading…
Last night, I finally made it to Gourmet San (or ‘The Old Place’ as it’s known in Chinese) on the Bethnal Green Road in East London, spurred on by Jay Rayner’s enthusiastic review in the Observer. It was filled with trendy young Chinese people, and the atmosphere was immediately charming.
Spicy Sichuanese dishes feature heavily on the menu – Geleshan chicken in a pile of chillies, twice-cooked pork and so on – with some Xinjiang-style lamb kebabs laced with cumin for good measure. It’s hearty, colourful food, served on vast platters. Despite the lavish use of dried chillies and Sichuan pepper, however, the food we ate didn’t seem to me very Sichuanese – there was a noticeable absence of chilli bean paste and sweet fermented paste, the classic spices of twice-cooked pork, and various ‘Sichuanese’ dishes weren’t cooked in the Chengdu or Chongqing style. Continue reading…
