Category: Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

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...

Chinese New Year / Fish & Seafood / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Laziji-Style Chongqing Lobster (Longxia, 龙虾)

A Mala Fish Fry We all know what it’s like to get inspired by a dish in a restaurant and feel you have to figure out its secrets for yourself so you can make it anytime the craving hits. My latest such obsession is Chongqing Lobster—though in this case I didn’t even eat it, but merely read about it in a review of New York’s new DaDong restaurant. But when I read this idea—Chongqing chicken where the chicken is replaced by lobster—I couldn’t get it out of my mind. How...

Shui zhu yu (water-boiled fish) from The Mala Market

Chinese New Year / Fish & Seafood / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Soups & Stews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Water-Boiled Fish With Tofu (Shuizhuyu, 水煮鱼)

Swimming Fire Fish Shuizhuyu, translated literally as water-boiled fish, may be the most misleadingly named dish ever. Far from swimming in a sea of water, the fish fillets float in a luxurious bath of mala spicy broth. Restaurateurs in the U.S. often give it a more fitting translation, the most creative I’ve seen being “swimming fire fish.” And yet, as I previously discussed when I published a recipe for shuizhu beef, shuizhu dishes are not as explosive as they appear at first sight. Yes, the main ingredient shares space with...

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,...

Chongqing Chicken

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Caiziyou / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / Poultry / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Chongqing Chicken Like It’s Made in Chongqing

The Truth About Sichuan Food There vs. Here At last I’ve eaten Chongqing Chicken in Chongqing, and not only was it delicious, it was revelatory. This new recipe for the dish is based on the version I had there. It won’t be for everyone—a main ingredient is crispy fried chicken skin!—so I’m not replacing my previous recipe, which I created in 2015 based on memories of Chongqing chicken I had eaten in Chengdu, where it is known as laziji (chicken with chilies). I still like that version, but I want...

Restaurants, Travel & Interviews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Paocai to the People: At Chengdu Restaurants, Free Homemade Pickles Are the Standard | Jordan Porter

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...

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

Mala Dry Pot With Cauliflower, Snap Peas and Bacon (Ganguo Caihua)

Weeknight Dry Pot I’m not sure y’all believed me the first time I shared a recipe for dry pot (ganguo or mala xiangguo), back in September 2015. Perhaps I did not convey how delicious it truly is. Or perhaps it seemed like too much effort. Or perhaps you’d just never heard of it—which is highly possible if you live outside China, where it’s been trendy for years. But dry pot is making its play in the U.S., moving out of the San Gabriel Valley to other places on the trending...

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...

Chengdu zajiang mian

How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / How to Cook With Tianmianjiang / Noodles / Pork / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Introducing Zajiang Noodles (Zajiangmian, 杂酱面), Chengdu’s Favorite Noodle

Just Don’t Call It Zhajiangmian As we learned in a guest post from Chengdu Food Tours’s Jordan Porter, zajiangmian is one of Chengdu’s most popular noodles. It is a heartier big brother to the diminutive dandan noodles, which is generally served in a small snack size, making the meal-size zajiangmian the more-common and more-loved noodle in modern Chengdu. But first, I want to share my closer-to-home inspiration: the zajiangmian at Mian, a real-deal Sichuan/Chongqing noodle shop in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley. Opened by Tony Xu, chef-owner of the incomparable Chengdu Taste, it has...

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...