Category: Sichuan Pantry Compatible

Non-Spicy / Plant / Pork / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Pork, Green Pepper and Potato Stir-Fry (Qingjiao Tudou Rousi, 青椒土豆肉丝)

Chengdu Challenge #5: All-American Ingredients Make an All-Chinese Potato Stir-fry Yes, the potato is a Chinese vegetable! In fact, it is the star of this stir-fry, the main attraction, with the pork in a supporting role. In Sichuan you most often see potatoes cut in matchsticks and quickly stir-fried with a hit of vinegar. They’re just barely cooked, really, still crunchy and crisp, and as weird as that sounds to a Westerner, they are delicious. This recipe for a similarly prepared potato and pork stir-fry just fills it out with pork...

How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Plant / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan) / Vegetarian

Sichuan Yuxiang Eggplant (Yuxiang Qiezi, 鱼香茄子)

  Chengdu Challenge #3: ‘Fish-Fragrant’ Husband Treat This Sichuan classic is many people’s, including my husband, Craig’s, favorite Chinese dish. If dandan noodles was my aha moment—You mean this is what real Chinese food actually tastes like?—yuxiang eggplant was his. We first had it on our first trip to Chengdu, in 2007, where despite all the amazing pork-centric food we gorged on, this vegetable dish stood out for its luxurious texture and perfect sweet-sour-salty-bitter-umami balance. We’ve had it many times since, both in Sichuan and at home in the U.S.,...

Dan dan mian

How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / How to Cook With Tianmianjiang / How to Cook With Yacai / Noodles / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Sichuan Dandanmian ft. Yacai (Dandan Noodles, 担担面)

Chengdu Challenge #1: First Love Dandanmian was the first real Sichuan dish I ever had, when Grand Sichuan International, the first real Sichuan restaurant in Manhattan in decades, opened close to my home in Chelsea in the mid-’90s. I’ll never forget the moment when they sat it on the table. It looked like a plain bowl of boiled noodles with some ground pork on the top, but then I realized I needed to stir it up myself and began to turn the noodles and crispy pork  over in the pool of...