Category: Non-Spicy

Sichuan la rou

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Douchi / Non-Spicy / Pork / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Sichuan Wind-Cured Pork Belly (Larou, 腊肉), Part 2: Smoking + Cooking

The Definitive Guide to Smoking and Cooking Larou This is a continuation of Sichuan Wind-Cured Pork Belly (Larou, 腊肉), Part 1. The previous post covers selecting, brining and air-drying this traditional cured meat and Spring Festival staple. Part 2 covers how to cook and eat your larou no matter whether you smoke, boil, steam or stir-fry!  Earlier this month I delivered a lot of words and a single recipe. All for the promise of juicy, resplendent pork belly, just like my mama’s mama’s mama used to make it. This time around...

Sunning the la rou pork belly

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Huajiao / Non-Spicy / Pork / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Sichuan Wind-Cured Pork Belly (Larou, 腊肉), Part 1

A Spring Festival Staple Some of us (namely me, but maybe you) have been planning on making Sichuan-style cured pork belly every winter for years but have been slightly daunted by the process. Even if you haven’t always had this wind-cured pork belly in your sights you will now, after reading this recipe and realizing it’s not as hard as it looks, and that after the moderate effort of curing you will have a long-lasting stash of smoky, savory goodness at the ready. The key is mainly timing. Look for a...

Three Umami Dumplings by No Sweet Sour

Bao & Dumplings / Chinese New Year / Fish & Seafood / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Non-Spicy / North (Shanxi, Beijing) / Pork

No Sweet Sour: Three Umami Dumplings in Emerald Jade Wrappers (Sanxian Jiaozi, 三鲜饺子)

Dumpling Lessons If you have followed this blog for long, you have probably noticed a conspicuous lack of dumplings. It’s not that we don’t like dumplings, but more that we’ve never mastered making them from scratch. We almost always use pre-made dumpling wrappers in our house, to less-than stellar effect. (Though we usually serve them in a Zhong dumpling sauce, which makes anything taste good.) Besides being less fresh and tasty, they are also drier and significantly harder to work with in folding and pleating dumplings than freshly made dough....

Hand-Torn Flat Cabbage With Chinese Sausage and Garlic

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / Non-Spicy / Plant / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Hand-Torn Flat Cabbage With Chinese Sausage and Garlic

Family Day Treat February 14 may be Valentine’s Day in your house, but in our house it’s Family Day. It’s the day, in 2011, that Craig and I first met Fongchong and she became our daughter. This year we celebrate the end of her ninth year with us, and, as always on this date, we’ll cook some of her favorite foods. Forget steak, scallops or chocolate, all of which she can take or leave, what will really make her happy is a big plate of cabbage. Not just any cabbage,...

Gai lan with oyster sauce and fried shallots by The Mala Market

Non-Spicy / Plant / South (Guangdong)

Blanched Gailan ft. Fried Shallots: Teoswa (Chaoshan) Food With Diana Zheng

Tasty Chinese You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of Just when you think you’ve schooled yourself on most—or at least many—of China’s regional cuisines, along comes one that is wildly interesting and influential but also surprisingly obscure—even in China itself. I’m talking about Teoswa cuisine from southeastern Guangdong province. After a dozen years of food study and travel to China, the sum total of what I know about Teoswa comes from 2019. That is when Netflix unleashed a documentary series on the region’s foodways and when I met Diana Zheng, who wrote...

Cold Dishes / Non-Spicy / Noodles / Plant / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan) / Vegetarian

Sichuan Fava Bean and Radish Noodle Salad

Green Salad or Noodle Salad, You Choose After Jordan Porter wrote a piece for this blog about the bounty of Chengdu markets in the spring, I got to thinking about fava beans in a new way. I mean, I often think of fava beans, or broad beans as they are also known, since they are one of the main components of Pixian doubanjiang. They are the “bean” in that chili bean paste, and therefore the umami backbone of a great deal of Sichuan food. The broad beans in doubanjiang start...

Crispy Sichuan-Pepper Pulled Pork by The Mala Market

How to Cook With Huajiao / Non-Spicy / Pork / Sichuan Pantry Compatible

Sichuanish BBQ: Crispy Sichuan-Pepper Pulled Pork

Sichuan BBQ Pork Candy Here’s the extent of this Sichuan-ish BBQ recipe for crispy Sichuan-pepper pulled pork: Get a pork shoulder with a nice fat cap; score the fat in a diamond shape; rub the whole thing generously with kosher salt, sugar and freshly ground Sichuan pepper; put it in the oven at very low heat, and leave it there. Take it out many hours later, pull it apart with some forks, and marvel at its perfect mix of moist, tender meat and crispy, spicy fat. Really, there’s not much...

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / Non-Spicy / Plant

Itty Bitty Baby Bok Choy in Vinegar-Oyster Sauce

Gilded Bok Choy So I made some itty bitty baby bok choy stir-fried with loads of garlic and drizzled with Zhenjiang vinegar, oyster sauce and soy sauce for dinner not long ago. Before we pounced on it, I took a throwaway (neither styled nor lighted) photo of it and later posted it to Instagram. Whereupon, everyone else seemed to want to pounce on it. It reminded me that to most of us, even those of us who are avid meat eaters, there’s nothing more enticing than a plate of well-cooked...

Non-Spicy / Pork / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

All-Purpose Pork and Pickled Green Bean Stir-fry (Roumo Jiangdou)

If Laab Were Sichuan As you all know, I did not grow up in Sichuan watching my mom cook dinner every night and learning her secrets for family-style, home-cooked food, and neither, for that matter, did Fongchong. Therefore, the Sichuan food I know and try to recreate here is generally restaurant dishes. Some of them are rather quick and easy, but most are not. However, we do cook quick-and-easy Sichuan food in our house, and this is one of those homey, any-night recipes I’ve learned on my own. Roumo jiangdou,...

Braises / Chinese New Year / East (Jiangnan, Shanghai) / How to Cook With Shaoxing Wine / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Non-Spicy / Pork / Restaurant Classics

Classic Shanghai Pork Belly: Hongshaorou (红烧肉), Red-Cooked Pork

Inspired by Red Cook: Hongshaorou I can’t tell you how many times I’ve red-cooked something. I’ve red-cooked the traditional pork belly many a time and have also tried red-cooking pork shoulder, chicken thighs and beef short ribs. But I’ve never settled on a favorite 红烧肉 (hóngshāoròu), red-cooked meat, recipe or method. Perhaps because I’m not Chinese, and my mom (or other family member) did not hand one down to me. But I have to have one. Because I have to pass the family red-cooking recipe down to my Chinese daughter. Otherwise,...

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Yacai / Non-Spicy / Plant / Pork / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Sichuan Dry-Fried Green Beans (Ganbian Sijidou, 干煸四季豆)

Chengdu Challenge #16: Frying, Old-School vs. New Yes, I know it seems wrong to deep-fry green vegetables, but oh, it tastes so right. 干煸四季豆 (gānbiān sìjìdòu) actually means dry-fried green beans, but almost everyone nowadays quickly deep-fries them. That’s how the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine teaches the dish, and that’s how I’ve always done it. But when I was researching the dish, I found that the recipe for ganbian sijidou in Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook calls for dry-frying the green beans the old-school way, for more than two hours,...

Bao & Dumplings / Non-Spicy / Plant / Restaurant Classics / Vegetarian

Steamed Bao (Foldover Buns, Guabao, 割包)

Chengdu Challenge #9: Bow to the Bao In my constant quest to fatten up my daughter without resorting to junk food, bao has been a go-to recipe. As a child who shuns all fried foods, most dairy and anything sweet, about the only fattening thing she loves is soft, yeasty bread. We discovered this at her first Thanksgiving dinner, when the only things she put on her plate were turkey and the Sister Schubert yeast rolls. She dug out the middle of the rolls, leaving the crusty exterior behind, and ate through...