Category: How to Cook With Douchi

How to Cook With Caiziyou / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / Noodles / Plant / Pork / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Mapo Eggplant Noodles ft. Dried Knife-Cut Noodles

Mapo Eggplant Ragu for Your Noodles Mapo eggplant noodles came to me in the dark of COVID yesteryear, when many restaurants were still shuttered and even outdoor dining required proof of vaccination. My roommate had generously invited me along to sample the hype of a long-time Sichuan establishment in Manhattan—my initial cause for skepticism. “It’s supposed to be good,” she assured me. “I just want to try it out.” In our rustic COVID cabana (that staple of hastily-assembled wooden sheds replacing sidewalks and bike lanes with bare-bones seating for undaunted...

Sichuan Steamed Pork Belly With Yacai

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Caiziyou / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Huajiao / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / How to Cook With Yacai / Instant Pot-Friendly / Non-Spicy / Pork / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Sichuan Steamed Pork Belly ft. Yacai (Xianshaobai, 咸烧白)

Sichuan’s Ninth Great Bowl I rarely eat in my dreams. Even when I have been capable of lucid dreaming, I never recall eating. I do daydream, however—constantly—about the creamy, succulent slices of pork belly layered like so many perfect pleats across a steaming bed of Yibin yacai in traditional Sichuan 咸烧白 (xiánshāobái). Xianshaobai is a prayer sung in pork fat (too much lean meat and the magic disappears): classic, class-defying comfort food. No one is above xianshaobai. Xianshaobai is regional, like dumplings and 粽子 (zòngzi): The exact composition and style...

Vegan mapo tofu

How to Cook With Caiziyou / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Douchi / Plant / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan) / Vegetarian

Vegan Mapo Tofu: Chengdu Inspired! (麻婆豆腐)

Meatless Mapo ft. Dried Flower Shiitake This one’s for the tofu-loving vegetarians and vegans out there! Mapo tofu is so beloved, it’s one of the few Sichuan dishes that make it directly into colloquial English without translation. So many regions have their own variations of the dish now too. It’s only natural that vegan mapo tofu has become popular on its own, so this recipe is for Chengdu-inspired mapo tofu with dried shiitake mushrooms. In Sichuan mapo tofu, ground beef (not pork!) is more a flavoring agent than the undiscerning...

Steak Chow Fun

Beef, Lamb & Game / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Shaoxing Wine / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Non-Spicy / Noodles / Restaurant Classics / South (Guangdong)

Cantonese Steak Chow Fun (Ft. Dried Ho Fun Noodles)

Chow Fun Any Place, Any Time The most important thing to know about this recipe is that unlike all other recipes for Cantonese beef chow fun, this one does not require you to make or find freshly steamed rice noodles. Instead it shows you how to make do with dried rice noodles. And in fact, more than make do, make something genuinely great. But first, a bit of why I, who cook almost exclusively Sichuan food for my spicy girl, am making Cantonese noodles. Spicy Sichuan dishes are Fongchong’s favorite,...

Sichuan cold rabbit

Beef, Lamb & Game / Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Huajiao / How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Shaoxing Wine / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Cooking with Pixian Doubanjiang: Erjie Tuding (二姐兔丁) Second Sister Rabbit Cubes

A Chengdu Hawker Original Chengdu’s famous Erjie Tuding is based off a Sichuan 凉拌 (liángbàn)/cold-dressed dish traditionally eaten in the fall. It belongs to our reader-favorite Cooking with Pixian Doubanjiang recipe series, which highlights Sichuan doubanjiang cooking methods that are less well-known than classics like Mapo Doufu and Twice-Cooked Pork. If you’ve never thought of using doubanjiang in a cold dish, this is your sign!  There are several variations of Sichuan’s cold-dressed rabbit (凉拌兔丁, liángbàn tùdīng; also 麻辣兔丁, málà tùdīng), but the most famous is Chengdu’s 二姐兔丁 (èrjiě tùdīng), “Second Sister Rabbit Cubes.”...

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...

Sichuan mala hot pot with beef tallow

Beef, Lamb & Game / Chinese New Year / Fish & Seafood / How to Cook With Caiziyou / How to Cook With Chinese Spices / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / How to Cook With Shaoxing Wine / Plant / Restaurant Classics / Soups & Stews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Sichuan Mala Hotpot, From Scratch (Mala Huoguo with Tallow Broth)

Hotpot Party at Your House Although this recipe for mala hotpot first published in early 2018 is the most popular recipe on our entire blog, we have revised and updated it as of November 2020. Why? Well, when I first developed it, there weren’t many recipes for Sichuan hotpot online in English—and none at all, that I could find, that included beef fat (tallow), a style of hotpot broth widely loved in Chongqing and Chengdu. There probably were Chinese-language online videos and recipes for it, but they were less accessible...

Tiger skin peppers

How to Cook With Caiziyou / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Plant

Tiger Skin Peppers (Hupi Qingjiao)

Chengdu Challenge #23: A Tiger on the Plate You can see in the photo above why this dish is called 虎皮青椒 (hǔpí qīngjiāo), or tiger skin peppers: The peppers are seared in the wok on both sides until the skin is puckered and striped with black char like a tiger. While this side dish is seriously delicious, it does not take itself too seriously. It is yet another example of a whimsical, poetic Chinese name for a fairly simple food. (The Chinese must find the tiger a whimsical animal, because...

How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Tianmianjiang / Pork / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Stir-Fried Bacon in Sichuan Bean Sauces (Chao Larou, 炒腊肉)

Chengdu Challenge #20: Once-Cooked Pork Stir-fried bacon in Sichuan bean sauces is a cousin to 回锅肉 (huíguōròu), or twice-cooked pork, and in many ways, the more appealing cousin, because A) you only have to cook it once; and B) it’s bacon! It may be the less popular cousin in Sichuan, but it’s definitely a Sichuan native, and I’ve had it there several times, made with the highly smoked, supremely rich local bacon (larou). For authentic twice-cooked pork, you have to boil a pork belly, chill it, slice it and stir-fry it. For...

Fish & Seafood / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Yacai / Sichuan Pantry Compatible

Mala Crawfish Boil (Mala Xiaolongxia, 麻辣小龙虾)

Chengdu Challenge #18:  Let the Good Times Roll It’s crawfish season in the U.S. South, and that can mean only one thing (to me): It’s time to try the Mala Crawfish (麻辣小龙虾, málà xiǎolóngxiā) recipe in Sichuan Cuisine in Both Chinese and English. I love a good New Orleans-style crawfish boil—where they boil the crawdads in a spicy broth, mound them up on a newspaper-covered table and invite you to dig in for the feast—so I figured Sichuan crawfish had to be just as fun and delicious. Enter: Mala Crawfish Boil. While Louisiana farms...

How to Cook With Douchi / Plant / Vegetarian

Roasted Potatoes in Chinese Black Bean Sauce

Food52 Chili Oil I promise this is my last post about chili oil for the foreseeable future, but I had to share this one because I’m so happy that it’s on Food52, the absolute best food site/blog/community for recipes. My Chili Oil #3 features preserved black beans and crispy shallots. The preserved black soybeans (douchi) make it particularly rich and intense. They make a statement. But even so, this oil has multiple uses—as a stir-fry sauce for clams (or chicken) with black beans; mixed with soy sauce as a noodle...

Mapo tofu

Beef, Lamb & Game / Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Douchi / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / Plant / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

The Queen of Mapo Doufu Recipes (Mapo Tofu)

Chengdu Challenge #10: The Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine’s Mapo Doufu Recipe Best tofu dish in the world? Mapo doufu, without a doubt. You may be thinking that’s not saying much. But it is. In fact, forget that it features tofu. I’ll put this beefy, spicy, doubanjiang chili bean dish up against your favorite American beef-and-bean chili any day. I’ve been making mapo doufu—“pock-marked mother’s bean curd”—for years. It was one of the first dishes I learned from our brilliant chef Qing Qing back when I organized cooking classes for travelers...