Category: Restaurants, Travel & Interviews
New Edition Includes the Secrets to Tianshuimian If you follow this blog or cook with products from The Mala Market, it’s a pretty safe bet that you are already a big fan of Fuchsia Dunlop, the British chef and author who pretty much single-handedly introduced the West to real Sichuan food. Her book Land of Plenty was published in the U.S. in 2001 and has reigned as the definitive English-language Sichuan cookbook ever since. But China has changed at breakneck speed since Fuchsia became the first foreigner to study at...
Farmed and Foraged All talk of sensational spices—Sichuan pepper and mounds of chilis—aside, there are a lot of other factors that make Sichuan food very special. There’s the rambunctious, jovial air of celebration that turns meals into parties; there’s deep umami flavors and ferments brewing in every home; and there’s this great diversity of ingredients and techniques underneath it all. But to me, what makes Sichuan food really amazing is its focus on freshness and reliance on local ingredients, which is on ample view in a springtime Chengdu market. While...
China’s Most Deliciously Diverse Province Have you noticed that there’s a new Chinese cuisine making waves in some larger American cities? Yunnan restaurants are popping up along the coasts, giving more people a chance to try the diverse dishes of the province for the first time. Home to hundreds of distinct ethnic minority groups, the food of Yunnan is a wondrous mix of Chinese and Southeast Asian influences—which alone gives you some idea of its great appeal. Fortunately for us cooks, a dedicated Yunnan cookbook has also just been published,...
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...
Expect Spice, Texture and Booze This week we have a dispatch from our man in Chengdu about the Sichuan hotpot experience. If at all possible you want to experience it in Chengdu or Chongqing, but he also gives some clues as to how to make mala hotpot at home. I’ll follow up soon with a recipe for the real deal. And we also have some dang-good, readymade hotpot soup bases in the Market. By Jordan Porter—Hotpot has become the poster child for Sichuan cuisine and the intensity of its desire...
A Pickle a Day By Jordan Porter—Holler out “paocai,” the Chinese word for pickles, at nearly any restaurant in Chengdu and the wait staff will deliver a bowl of delicious homemade pickled veggies to your table. I say nearly, because at some places the communal pickle jar (or urn, or bucket, or box) is self-serve, and you scoop them up on your own. Either way, a house-made pickle comes standard at every restaurant in the city. The best part? It’s free! Pickled and fermented ingredients, from the famous douban paste...
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...
The Straight-up, Lo-down on the Infinite Chengdu Noodle Varieties The Mala Project’s first-ever guest post is by Jordan Porter, owner and chief experience officer at Chengdu Food Tours. A Canadian who has lived in Chengdu since 2010, he began his culinary tour company in 2015 and has since led tours of the streets of Chengdu and the countryside of Sichuan for travelers like you and me and for food VIPs (many of whose articles you probably read, after Jordan schooled them in Sichuan cuisine). As many of you know, I also...
Chengdu Taste Coming to a City Near You? We Ask the Owners When it’s silent for too long on this end, you know it means Fongchong and I have been traveling or, in this case, spending our summer in Northeast Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, America’s most progressive Chinese enclave. Without a kitchen while we play in the sun, hang with dear old friends, and Fongchong goes to summer school, we use the time off from cooking Sichuan to eat other people’s Sichuan cooking and get newly inspired....
Inspired by the San Gabriel Valley: The Best of the Best I promise I’m going to get back to cooking and sharing recipes soon, but I have to entice/torture you one more time with the best dishes I had during my summer in Los Angeles. I picked up Fongchong from summer school everyday and we headed straight for the San Gabriel Valley, a miniature China with the widest array of regional Chinese cuisines to be found in this country. I know this fact thanks partly to the fantastic reporting of...
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...
A Spicy Girl Shops for Spices I just returned from a trip to Chengdu (and Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai). I never get enough of Sichuan, which may explain why I always try to bring all its goodies back with me. This is just some of the Sichuan spicy stuff I stuffed in my luggage, bought at Chengdu’s jaw-dropping wholesale spice market, its fascinating supermarkets and wet markets and a sidewalk artisan food stall with the best sauces on earth (really!): Three kinds of freshly dried Sichuan chili peppers, or lajiao,...
