Kung Pao Lotus Root (Gongbao Oupian, 宫保藕片)

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kung pao lotus root (gongbao oupian) by The Mala Market

Chengdu Challenge #13: The Unbearable Easiness of Real Kung Pao

Everybody knows kung pao chicken—called 宫保鸡丁 (gōngbǎo jīdīng) in China—but did you know that you can kung pao other foods as well? My personal favorite vegetable given the gongbao treatment is lotus root, a mild, crunchy, stunningly beautiful vehicle for the mala-meets-sweet-and-sour sauce adorned with home-fried peanuts.

(Now, admittedly, fresh lotus root is somewhat difficult to find in the U.S. outside Asian markets, so feel free to substitute potatoes for an equally delicious if less photogenic dish using the exact same method.)

Dare I say it? I prefer either of these root vegetables to the famed chicken dish. 

Whether chicken, pork or vegetable, gongbao is quite simple to make and for that reason is a dish I recommend to those new to Sichuan cooking. After you make it a couple times, gongbao doesn’t even require a recipe, because it is an easy equation: a mildly sweet-and-sour sauce + mala (dried red chilies and Sichuan peppercorns) + the Sichuan trinity (ginger/garlic/green onions) + fried peanuts + your main ingredient. Simple.

But, oh, do people try to make it hard. One experiences lots of extraneous ingredients and flavors in kung pao in the U.S., where cooks take great liberty with the name. The best recent example is a comically over-the-top recipe from Los Angeles cult chef Roy Choi’s (excellent and endearing) memoir/cookbook.

His recipe for Kung Pao Chicken Papi Style (he calls himself Papi) has 22 ingredients in the sauce alone, including oyster sauce, sambal oelek, chili oil, fish sauce, Mexican Cholula hot sauce, Korean red pepper paste, Korean red pepper flakes, Sriracha, jalapeño peppers, Thai basil, cilantro and lemongrass—all in addition to the soy sauce, vinegar and sugar you’d expect to find in the sauce. Plus there are 14 more ingredients that the sauce goes on!

Gongbao chicken is thought to be named after a Qing Dynasty governor of Sichuan, who might very well have banished someone who made his favorite dish with all those foreign ingredients. Choi’s version is probably tasty, but I’ll never find out when it’s so much easier to make the real deal.

I based this recipe on those for kung pao chicken after eating an inspiring gongbao lotus root at the wonderful Gu’s Bistro in Atlanta.

ingredients for kung pao dishes
Gongbao = the Sichuan trinity (ginger, garlic, green onion) + mala (Sichuan pepper and chili pepper) + peanuts

Because there are relatively few ingredients, it’s imperative that they all be right. It’s very tempting to use readymade roasted peanuts, but that would shortchange a dish whose distinguishing feature is its peanut flourish. Please do as the Sichuanese do and use raw peanuts that you fry to a golden finish yourself. It makes all the difference in the depth of flavor.

peanuts to fry
Please fry the peanuts yourself!
mixing sweet and sour sauce
Get your daughter to mix the sweet-and-sour sauce
slicing lotus root for kung lao lotus
Get your husband to do the knife work

If you want to use lotus root—and you should because there is not a more beautiful vegetable in all the world—try to get a fresh one, as the kind already sliced and sold in refrigerated bags tastes pretty much like cardboard. A fresh lotus root should be a light beige color with few black blemishes and, while mild in taste, should taste like a vegetable. A bit like jicama in texture and taste, it takes flavor better than it gives it.

I have a soft spot for lotus root and eat it as often as I can find a fresh one. (Try it thinly sliced and deep-fried like a french fry, then topped with salt and ground Sichuan pepper. YUM). I named my Sichuan tour business Lotus Culinary Travel not only because almost every part of the plant is eaten in Chinese cuisines, but because the lotus symbolizes how the most lovely of flowers/people can grow from the murkiest of waters/surroundings.

I hope that inspires you to try lotus root as you go forth and gongbao.

frying sliced lotus root in wok
Shallow- or deep-fry the lotus root
wok stir-frying the aromatics and chilies
Wok aromatics and spice before returning lotus root to the wok with sauce.
kung pao lotus root (gongbao oupian) on white plate
Enjoy the classic gongbao treatment on lotus root, potato, chicken or pork

More on lotus root and amazing Chinese food TV

Lotus root is a culinary powerhouse, from the seeds that are ground into pastes for sweets to the leaves that are used to wrap food for cooking to the “roots” (actually underground stems, or rhizomes) that get stir-fried, boiled, braised and fried. And some people even consume the flowers. I thought I knew lotus root, but what I didn’t know is just how hard the artie veggie is to harvest, and therefore how valued it is for that reason as well.

The revelation came in A Bite of China, a seven-part documentary series made by Chinese CCTV in 2012, and the most ambitious food documentary I’ve ever seen. Big money and big production values went into telling the story of China’s natural food bounty and regional cuisines. Fortunately, some kind soul took it upon himself to translate and subtitle the series into English for the rest of us and put it on Youtube.

The film shows the lotus diggers boating out to desolate-looking fields of browning lotus plants—what is left after the water recedes from the lakes in early fall and leaves only the dense terrain of dying plants. Wading thigh-deep in gray mud, they hack away the plant and dig out the long links of lotus root, being careful not to bruise or break them as they load the massive rhizomes onto carts to be hauled away for washing and selling.

It’s heavy-lifting, dirty work, which may explain why we Americans don’t harvest our own lotus plants as food, even though the Native Americans made good use of this plentiful foodstuff. It turns out the American lotus, with its lovely white-yellow blooms, is the only first cousin to the Asian version, with its gorgeous pink blooms—and therefore would taste quite similar. Other than hard work, I can’t think of any other reason why we didn’t cultivate a taste for lotus root.

lotus root for sale
Fresh lotus root at Great Wall Supermarket in Atlanta

Lotus plants grew all around my daughter Fongchong’s home on the rural outskirts of Guangzhou in southern China, though lotus is one of the few ingredients her foster family didn’t grow or forage themselves. Though her foster family was Buddhist, lotus stem was of much more comfort to FC culinarily than spiritually.

Like most Chinese, Fongchong remembers lotus root fondly as an ingredient in soup, a crunchy complement to a meaty pork rib. I’ve seen them most often in Sichuan as one of the marinated cold dishes that start a meal. An especially memorable preparation—which I had once at Beijing’s Black Sesame Kitchen cooking school—is a lotus “sandwich,” two slices stuffed with a minced pork filling, coated with batter and deep fried. Such an unusual treat, experienced in the old hutongs of Beijing, was spiritually filling as well.

For more lotus root preparations, try Michelle’s Crunchy Lotus Root Salad (凉拌脆藕)!

Kung Pao Lotus Root (Gongbao Oupian, 宫保藕片)

By: Taylor Holliday | The Mala Market | Cooking Sichuan in America

Ingredients 

  • 1 pound fresh lotus root or potato, peeled and cut in ¼-inch slices 400 grams
  • 3 green onions, coarsely chopped
  • 1 tablespoon thinly sliced ginger
  • 1 tablespoon thinly sliced garlic
  • 12 medium-hot dried red chili peppers (preferably from Sichuan), cut in half
  • 1 teaspoon whole Sichuan peppercorns
  • 2 tablespoons Zhenjiang black rice vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons chicken stock
  • 1 tablespoon Chinese light soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 2 teaspoons Shaoxing rice wine
  • 1 tablespoon cornstarch
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¼ cup raw peanuts (preferably skinless)

Instructions 

  • Slice the lotus root, green onions, ginger and garlic. Cut the chili peppers in half, retaining the seeds. Keep lotus root slices in a bowl of cool water until time to cook them.
  • In a small bowl or measuring cup, mix the sauce: vinegar, chicken stock, soy sauce, sugar, rice wine, cornstarch and salt.
  • Heat wok until starting to smoke, add 2 tablespoons peanut or canola oil and heat until hot. Add peanuts, tossing and turning them in the wok until they are golden brown. If they brown too quickly turn down the heat. Remove and set aside.
  • Drain the lotus root and pat it dry with a towel. Wipe out the wok and heat until wisps of smoke appear. Add enough oil to deep-fry the lotus root, or use less oil to shallow-fry them in two batches. Fry until just starting to brown on the edges. Remove and drain on paper towels.
  • Pour out the oil, clean the wok and return to the heat until hot. Add one tablespoon oil, heat briefly, and add the chili peppers and Sichuan pepper. Stir-fry until fragrant, but do not brown or burn. Add green onions, ginger and garlic and stir-fry until just starting to soften.
  • Return lotus root to wok, add the sauce and stir-fry briefly, until the flavors meld. Add the peanuts and mix them through the dish to warm them. When sauce has thickened and everything is hot, remove to a plate and serve.

Tried this recipe?

 

About Taylor Holliday

The Mala Market all began when Taylor, a former journalist, created this blog as a place to document her adventures learning to cook Sichuan food for Fongchong, her recently adopted 11-year-old daughter. They discovered through the years that the secret to making food that tastes like it would in China is using the same ingredients that are used in China. The mother-daughter team eventually began visiting Sichuan’s factories and farms together and, in 2016, opened The Mala Market, America’s source for heritage Sichuan ingredients and Chinese pantry essentials.

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8 Comments

  1. Hi Taylor, I was sent here by a reader, saying that our mutual interest in sichuan cuisines may spark cyber-friendship, and she was right. I was born in Taiwan, grew up in Vancouver, spent my 20’s in New York and moved to HK then Beijing because of my husband’s work. We’ve been in Beijing for 5 years, and this is the most authentic looking sichuan dishes I’ve seen on a non-Chinese website. My own blog is http://www.ladyandpups.com, and I often feature sichuan cuisines as it’s the one pleasure that sustains my life here. If you happen to hop over for a peak, I hope you enjoy it 🙂

    1. Hi Mandy. Thanks for the kind—and flattering—words! I’m already a fan of and subscriber to your beautiful blog, which I discovered a while back via Food52. Hopefully I’ll pick up some photography tips there.:) We definitely share some of the same loves (Sichuan, NY, etc.), so let’s do stay in touch. I’m pretty new to this blogging gig, and could use any and all support to get the word out. I’ll look you up next time I’m in Beijing!

  2. Wow! Really good! I’m pretty much a “gringo” tongue so it was quite hot for me but I enjoyed it. The lotus root is such a good vehicle for the sauce and all. I’ll make it again, will just have to turn down some of the heat.

    1. So glad to know someone tried the lotus root! This dish shouldn’t be super spicy, so you must have gotten some hot peppers. It’s all about tweaking it to your own liking though. Thanks for writing!

  3. This was amazing! In 2014 I was living in near Chengdu with a tiny restaurant downstairs which made the best gong bao (pork) I’ve ever tasted. It was better than anywhere else I tried in Sichuan, and we used to have it almost every day. Now we’re living in Hunan and I can’t find any decent Sichuan food anywhere in town, so I have to learn to cook it myself. This was the closest I’ve had anywhere to that little spot that used to be downstairs from us, and the lotus root was delicious in it. Thank you!

    1. Hi Audrey! I get a particular thrill from imagining people in China cooking my recipes.:) Especially when they satisfy a craving and measure up to what you remembered. Thanks so much for letting me know.

      P.S. I can’t believe you can’t find good Sichuan food next door in Hunan!

  4. So glad I found this recipe, I’m from Malaysia, had some leftover lotus root after making wintermelon lotus root soup and was googling for stir fried lotus root and came across ur blog. This was so yummy & authentic Chinese in flavour, will be cooking up ur others recipes 🙂