Category: Cold Dishes

Chinese New Year / Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Noodles / Plant / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan) / Vegetarian

Liangfen of Happy Tears (Shangxin Liangfen, 伤心凉粉) From NYC’s Málà Project

Great Sichuan Restaurant Recipes: Tears of Joy or Heartbreak?  A Controversial Jelly Noodle Have you ever been to a Sichuan restaurant and seen a bowl of something that looks like big fat noodles but on closer inspection is actually jiggly strands of jelly? Ranging from translucent to opaque white or yellow, they usually glow with a chili-oil sauce and fresh and crunchy garnishes. When you manage to capture these slippery guys with your chopsticks, they slither down your throat so easily. They are an enigma, at once hot and spicy...

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Huajiao / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Plant / Restaurants, Travel & Interviews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Roasted Chili Eggplant (Liangban Qiezi, 凉拌茄子) from Chengdu’s Ying Garden

Great Sichuan Restaurant Recipes: Green Food vs. Red Food When people think of Sichuan food, they think of red. The three ingredients most identified with the cuisine—red chilies, red Sichuan peppercorns and red chili bean paste—present a united front of red in the bowl or plate when they are all in use. But what the West tends to forget is that Sichuan has some magnificent green food. Not just green leafy vegetables, which make up the majority of any full meal, but green chilies, green Sichuan pepper, green onions and...

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Plant / Vegetarian

Cooking With Laoganma: Spicy Chili Crisp Potato Salad (Liangban Tudou, 凉拌土豆)

The Godmother Miniseries: Potatoes As many from-scratch recipes as I publish, what really drives traffic to my website is The Godmother, aka, Laoganma, whom I first wrote at length about in early 2015. People all over the world love these Guizhou-made chili oils as condiments and are also looking for ways to cook with them. So who am I to disagree? I have one very popular recipe on the site for LGM Black Bean Chicken, but I cook with both the Spicy Chili Crisp and the Chili Oil With Black...

Beef, Lamb & Game / Chinese New Year / Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Spices / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / Restaurant Classics / Restaurants, Travel & Interviews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Mala Beef Jerky (Mala Niurougan): Inspired by Houston’s Mala Sichuan Bistro

Award-Winning Sichuan A few days ago, Jianyun Ye, the chef at one of my favorite Sichuan restaurants, Houston’s Mala Sichuan Bistro, was nominated for a James Beard Award as Best Chef Southwest. Two other Chinese chefs working in authentic Sichuan restaurants owned by mainland Chinese restaurateurs also got regional Best Chef nods for 2017: Ri Liu at Atlanta’s Masterpiece (which we visit frequently) and Wei Zhu of Chengdu Gourmet in Pittsburgh. Check out those locations. Not NYC, SF or LA, but Houston, Atlanta and Pittsburgh. Dare I believe that all...

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Yacai / Plant / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan) / Vegetarian

Sichuan Cucumber Three Ways: Hot-and-Sour, Mala and Sesame (Paihuanggua)

Cool as a (Spicy) Cucumber Sichuan knows how to treat a cucumber: with spice! Here are three cucumber preparations, using three different forms of chili pepper, and resulting in three very different tastes. The first is hot-and-sour and similar to a Western quick pickle with the addition of pickled or fresh red chilies. The second is mala, the smacked cucumber smacking strongly of that incomparable toasty chili and tingly Sichuan pepper taste that makes mala so addictive. And the third is so flavor-packed with chili oil, sesame paste and yacai preserved vegetable that it...

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Huajiao / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Plant / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan) / Vegetarian

Hot-and-Sour Eggplant (Suanla Liangban Qiezi)

Chengdu Challenge #28: Eggplant, a Girl’s Best Friend What to send to school in your daughter’s lunchbox when she’s changing high schools as a sophomore and facing a lunchtime cafeteria where she knows no one and has no one to eat with? Her favorite vegetable, of course. The vegetable that makes her feel happy as she eats it no matter what is going on around her or how alone she feels. For Fongchong, that vegetable is eggplant. Now, I’d rather go over there and eat lunch with her in that...

Chinese New Year / Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Sesame / Poultry / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Mouthwatering “Saliva Chicken” (Koushuiji, 口水鸡)

Chengdu Challenge #22:  You Know You Want It: Saliva Chicken Which name do you prefer for Sichuan cold chicken in red-hot chili oil? Saliva chicken (let’s translate it as “mouthwatering” chicken)?  Bobo chicken? Bon bon chicken? Bang bang chicken? From what I can tell from multiple Sichuan restaurants, cookbooks and the Web, the names are almost interchangeable, and there’s no real consensus on the ingredients and proportions in each. They are all based on homemade, high-quality chili oil (hong you), of course, and from there include varying proportions of soy...

Cold Dishes / Restaurants, Travel & Interviews

San Gabriel Valley: Best Sichuan Cold Dishes in the U.S.?

Inspired by the SGV: The Only Minority in the Restaurant By way of explanation for the paltry number of recent posts, I mentioned last time that Fongchong and I are living in Los Angeles for the summer. Or Pasadena, to be exact. I also noted that we are spending the majority of our time eating our way through the San Gabriel Valley, the epicenter of Los Angeles’s Chinese community and the vanguard of Chinese food in America. Several of the SGV’s cities are majority Chinese, so the only minority in the restaurant is...

Cold Dishes / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Quick Sichuan Pickled Vegetables (Sichuan Paocai)

Paocai Inspired by Manhattan’s Cafe China Life has gotten in the way of serious cooking recently. And of blogging too, you may have noticed. You know how that it is, I’m sure, when there’s little time to do even the things you most love to do. For me over the past month, there was Fongchong’s graduation from middle school, multiple family birthdays, a trip to New York and, finally, a temporary move to Los Angeles. Not that I’m complaining! A summer in L.A. brings infinite eating rewards—especially since we’re staying only minutes...

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Noodles / Poultry

Jisi Liangmian (鸡丝凉面): Cold Noodles ft. Shredded Chicken

Chengdu Challenge #19: Jisi Liangmian, White Cloud in a Perfect Storm Fongchong’s latest obsession is these 鸡丝凉面 (jīsī liángmiàn), Cold Noodles With Shredded Chicken. It’s a regretfully boring name for something so singularly, aggressively tasty, so you’ll have to take my word for it—you really want to try this. Liangmian with chicken totally deserves a more poetic name, like Ants Climbing a Tree, another beloved Sichuan noodle. Something like, perhaps, White Cloud in a Perfect Storm. Or maybe not. But just don’t let the boring name fool you. Especially since cold...

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Huajiao / Poultry

Jiaomaji (椒麻鸡) Cold Chicken in Sichuan Pepper-Scallion Oil

Chengdu Challenge #2: The Magical Combo of Cold Chicken and Hot Peppers For the most part, chicken is chicken. But 椒麻鸡 (jiāomájī) sauce, now that’s a discovery! Jiaoma refers to Sichuan pepper, and the sauce is made by mixing the peppercorns together with a load of scallions and adding oil. Combine that with red-hot chili oil and Sichuan pepper oil and a little starter of cold chicken, jiaomaji, is the most exciting thing on the table. That’s what’s so brilliant about Sichuan cuisine. It has a million ways to make plain...