This Banquet-Style Classic Pairs Briny Clams and Savory Douchi

I’ve been eating Cantonese-style clams with black bean sauce (chǐzhī chǎo xiàn, 豉汁炒蜆)
pretty much all my life. Growing up in San Francisco, my Cantonese family often cooked with fermented soybeans—called douchi (dòuchǐ, 豆豉) in Mandarin and black beans in English—especially in my grandfather’s Cantonese claypot rice with mushrooms and sausage (bāozǎi fàn, 煲仔饭) and in one-pot spare ribs lacquered with black bean sauce (chǐzhī páigǔ, 豉汁排骨). But it wasn’t until I had it in Hong Kong, at the legendary Tung Po restaurant, that I saw this dish’s true potential.

If you’ve never been, Tung Po is often described as one of Hong Kong’s wildest dining experiences. It’s also a living remnant of the city’s historical dai pai dong (dà páidàng, 大排档) seafood restaurants, a boisterous, kerosene-fueled open-air cooking culture that was once found all across the city in alleyways, and now wet markets, and largely defined Hong Kong’s culinary soul. A friend insisted I visit on a Saturday night, so I did, without knowing quite what to expect. The restaurant is tucked inside an unassuming government building on an eerily quiet block in North Point, but when I stepped out of the elevator on the second floor, I was thrown into a raucous dining room pulsing with life. Everywhere I looked, there were red-faced diners shouting for waiters, beer bottles clicking against porcelain bowls, and platters of seafood spilling across the table.

I tried a variety of dishes that night—typhoon shelter shrimp showered in fried garlic, golden salt-and-pepper squid, and jet-black squid-ink spaghetti—but the clams with black bean sauce were particularly unforgettable. Unlike the versions I’d known back home, these open-shelled bivalves—glossy with black bean sauce, mixed with red and green peppers, and showered with confetti-like pieces of cilantro—were dressed to match the festivities. They sat atop a throne of bean sprouts, regal and glistening. To my surprise, they were even a bit spicy, thanks to the addition of some spicy red chili peppers, an uncommon touch for a Cantonese dish that is a signature flair of Tung Po’s cooking. 

While this particular version of black bean clams stands out in my mind, the dish feels pretty special in any setting, because, while it is a quintessential Cantonese stir-fry, my family never made it at home. We thought of it strictly as a restaurant dish, reserved for family gatherings, Sunday dim sum brunches and roundtable birthday dinners. So, for me, it always felt like special-occasion food. And I’m not alone in this association. Most Chinese Americans I know grew up with this dish, enjoying it at similar family gatherings.

My friend Allen Cao, for instance, also grew up eating this dish, but on the other side of the country. Allen was born in Changle, just outside Fuzhou, Fujian’s capital, and grew up in Philadelphia on a steady rotation of Fujianese homestyle cooking: platters of boiled conch dipped in wasabi soy sauce, slippery rice noodles in a bright ​​vermillion broth made from red koji rice (红糟, hóng zāo), and bowls of glutinous rice balls stuffed with savory filling of pork and seaweed (元宵, yuánxiāo). While these dishes were very different from the foods my parents cooked, our disparate food worlds collided at Cantonese restaurants. 

Allen and I both remember the same ritual: families packed into round tables, waiters balancing plates of glossy stir-fries and petite bowls of perfectly steamed rice. My family ordered clams with black bean sauce alongside a whole steamed fish or braised beef with radish. For Allen, a trip to Joy Tsin Lau, a neighborhood Chinatown banquet hall, meant Cantonese staples such as salt and pepper frogs, West Lake beef soup and, of course, clams stir-fried with black beans. Allen’s father, Jimmy Cao, had spent some time working in Cantonese restaurants, so he occasionally made the dish at home for his family.

Last year, when Allen and I first decided to start researching Chinese foodways together, with the idea of bringing attention to the dishes we both love (especially classic Fujian foods), we also started talking about black bean clams. We compared notes about the versions we had in our childhoods and worked on creating recipes that captured our preferred flavors. Allen also invited me to his dad’s house, to try his version. The dish, made from small yet meaty Manila clams tossed in a glossy sauce of fermented black beans, soy sauce and oyster sauce, didn’t stray far from what you’d find in the banquet halls of my childhood. 

After shadowing Allen’s dad in the kitchen, I workshopped a similar version at home and made a few tweaks to adapt it to my own preferences. The recipe below brings together everything I love about this dish: the briny yet sweet sauce, the simplicity and speed of the home-cooked version from Philadelphia, and the memories of my own family’s black bean-laden dinners in San Francisco. This version isn’t spicy like the one from Tung Po, but it still carries the same punchy, savory depth that captivated me on that irreverent night. 

The History of Clams With Black Bean Sauce

This dish traces its origins back to the coastal regions of Guangdong and neighboring Hong Kong, where seafood is abundant and douchi, one of China’s oldest known soybean ferments, is commonly used. In the mid-20th century, as Hong Kong’s dining culture flourished, clams with black bean sauce emerged as a quintessential wok-fried seafood dish in Hong Kong’s dai pai dongs. These bustling open-air stalls defined the culinary drumbeat of the city with fast, fiery and tasty meals. 

As Hong Kong’s seafood restaurants expanded in the postwar years, chefs began refining the dish with new garnishes and color. Over time, clams with black bean sauce traveled abroad with Cantonese migrants and was also adapted to dining preferences in other countries, as chefs sought out whatever ingredients and local clam varieties were available. In the U.S., Chinese American restaurants introduced a sweeter, thicker sauce, like the sauces they used in other Americanized dishes. Some chefs, both in the U.S. and Hong Kong, added red and green peppers for brightness, red onions for sweetness and cilantro for fragrance.

Key Flavors: Black Beans and Oyster Sauce

Finding the right ingredients is essential to capturing the spirit of this dish. The first ingredient you absolutely need, in any version of the recipe, is fermented black beans, which deliver extra-concentrated pops of earthy, funky umami. (The dish’s glossy, thick sauce made with black beans is known as chizi [豉汁, chǐzhī], whereas douchi refers to the beans themselves.) In this recipe, I used the Mala Market’s heritage version from Sichuan-based Tongchuan, where the beans are still fermented in clay jars according to techniques that date back to the 17th century. Fermented for three years, the beans are plump, moist and deeply savory with a hint of sweetness, worlds apart from the dry, salt-crusted Cantonese fermented soybeans I grew up with.

Equally important is the quality of the oyster sauce, since this condiment gives the dish its silky texture. I used the Mala Market’s Yangjiang Extra Pure Fujian Oyster Sauce, which is made with oysters harvested in Tongan Bay, north of Xiamen, in Fujian. Unlike companies like Lee Kum Kee, a popular brand that sells hundreds of sauces (including a commonly found oyster sauce), Yangjiang solely specializes in fish and oyster sauces. Its versions are, therefore, superb, even rave-worthy. Their oyster sauce is remarkably pure, clocking in at 75 percent oyster extract with nothing but sugar, cornstarch and wheat flour as flavorings and thickeners. It doesn’t make the dish taste any more fishy than a splash of fish sauce would. Instead, it heightens the briny sweetness of the clams and deepens their flavors without muddying them.

Together, these two ingredients form the backbone of this homestyle stir-fry dish. In the wok, the douchi and oyster sauce bloom with ginger, garlic and soy sauce, creating that signature wok hei that defines the best stir-fries. This dish is best served hot with a generous serving of rice; don’t skimp because you’ll need it to soak up the delicious, black bean sauce.

For more flavorful seafood classics, check out Zoe’s Cantonese Ginger Scallion Lobster (Cong Jiang Chao Longxia, 葱姜炒龙虾) and Taylor’s Salt and Pepper Squid ft. Sichuan Dipping Chilies (Jiaoyan Youyu, 椒盐鱿鱼) and Water-Boiled Fish With Tofu (Shuizhuyu, 水煮鱼).