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 the delightful phrase 马马虎虎 (mǎmǎhǔhǔ), meaning so-so, is literally horse horse tiger tiger.)

By the time the chilies are marked with stripes, they are the perfect degree of done, being soft enough to eat but still a little bit crisp. Then you douse them with some Baoning black vinegar and sugar—and if you’re like me, spike them with some soy-sauce-soaked preserved black beans, or douchi, which I guess then makes them look more like leopard skin peppers.

When I first published this recipe in early 2016, I was reminiscing about one of my earliest China trips, circa 2007, and one of my most memorable meals ever in Chengdu. The restaurant was an outdoor space  with a Cultural Revolution theme. There was a trend of Cultural Revolution restaurants in China—and even in the San Gabriel Valley in the U.S.—at that time, and though many were pure kitsch, this one was rooted in real memories. The owner had been sent to the countryside of Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution, where, like other urban youth, he was to be re-educated and reformed by working with the peasants. This restaurant was his homage to the country cooking he ate there, with dishes including a big plate of tiger skin peppers, another plate of boiled new potatoes with a pile of dipping chilies,  and a quintessential gongbao (kung pao) chicken.

All the restaurant workers were dressed as Red Guards, wearing army green military uniforms, and the walls were papered with posters of Mao and Lenin. I was dining with my Sichuanese business partner at the time, Rose, and her husband, Weili, who himself had been sent to the country to do hard labor as a young man in the late 1960s. They tried to explain to me how the restaurant could be at once ironic and sentimental. How it was recalling a tragic time that nobody wanted to remember and nobody wanted to forget. It was a little unclear to me where the irony stopped and the love began, but I think it was with the food, which was the real deal.

Once home, I was all over that hupi qingjiao, both because I love chilies of all kind and because it is so easy. The dish is just a simple side or starter, but it’s always been one of my favorite dishes to eat in Chengdu. In Sichuan, tiger skin peppers are usually made with green erjingtiao chilies or sweet bell peppers like these, but sometimes the dish shows up at the table made from hot chilies. I kind of like the Russian roulette aspect of ordering them at a restaurant.

The traditional recipe does not include fermented black beans in the vinegary sauce. But I had them one time like that in Chengdu and totally dug the extra saltiness and umami of the douchi alongside the sweetness of the peppers and sourness of the vinegar. Plus, Fongchong loves douchi, and, as always, the more flavor I heap upon a vegetable the more of said vegetable that will get eaten.

I rarely see tiger skin peppers on Sichuan menus in the U.S., so eating them always takes me back to Chengdu. But since my blog is all about cooking Sichuan in America and feeding a homesick Chinese girl, below is a photo of Fongchong’s school lunch back in 2016, where I improvised with the red bell peppers I had on hand. Then and now, tiger skin peppers are much much better than just mamahuhu.

For more easy vegetarian stir-fry recipes, try this stir-fried hand-torn cabbage and fermented tofu yuchoy or my catch-all technique for stir-frying any green.