The Two Faces of Green Beans

What would happen if you crossed dry-fried green beans (ganbian sijidou) and pickled long bean and pork stir-fry (roumo jiangdou)? I wondered this when I saw a recent Instagram photo of such a dish and remembered eating it in Chengdu. The answer? You’d have the fresh-fried snap of the green bean and the tart pickle of the long bean but with less effort than the first dish and less pork than the second. Win-win!

It’s amazing how well the fresh and pickled forms of the green beans complement each other; two faces of the same bean, one bright and crisp, the other dark and sour. I now make this in great quantities for Fongchong, who likes it as much as either of those two more-famous dishes.

The only way in which you need to think ahead is being sure you’ve got some long beans in your paocai pickle jar (or that you’ve purchased some readymade paojiangdou). In our version, I used Chinese yardlong beans for the pickles and thin  American green beans for the fresh beans, but you could use either bean for both treatments. Here’s where I admit that a long bean is not really a green bean—it’s a cowpea and more closely related to black-eyed peas—but it tastes very similar to a green bean and they are pretty much interchangeable. They are easier to pickle than short green beans, because you can (carefully) tie one of them around a bunch of the others and add the bundle to the pickle jar, making them easier to retrieve when pickled.

The pickled erjingtiao chilies also come from the home pickle jar (or, once again, readymade paolajiao can be bought). Just throw a few freshly dried erjingtiao chilies into your jar, and in two to three days you’ve got pickled chilies. You could also sub dried chilies, but we treat the soft pickled chilies like a veg and eat them.

I cut these beans in 1/2-inch to 1-inch pieces. In Sichuan, they’d probably be more like 1 cm, but we like slightly bigger bite-size pieces. This dish is very much about the vegetables, so you can reduce or omit the pork, though it does add a delicious fatty counterpoint that we’d miss if it were completely absent.

The sauce is simply uber-umami Zhongba light soy sauce and sugar.

As with most stir-fries, the prep is the majority of the work. Once the beans are cut, the stir-fry takes no time:

1. Stir-fry the pork mince  and remove
2. Fry the fresh green beans and garlic in caiziyou until the green bean skins are puckering and the garlic is toasty
3. Add the pickled green beans and chilies and heat through
4. Add back the meat and the sauce and stir-fry briefly to meld

Eat with rice and you’ve got a meal!