A Sichuan Dish That’s a Cinch

I first published this post in September 2015, when dry pot was just hitting American shores after a total takeover of China. Ten years later, it’s much easier to make a dry pot in the U.S. that tastes like one you’d eat in Chengdu (especially with The Mala Market’s new dry pot sauce!), so I’ve taken another run at this recipe, updating it significantly.

I was completely enamored with dry pot when I first met it. I mean, here was a dish that you could make from basically anything you wanted or had on hand, that was pretty hard to mess up because it required no serious wok skills, and that tasted like Sichuan itself—all that meat and veg and seafood and tofu bathed in an exhilirating hot-and-numbing mala sauce.

Dry pot (干锅, gānguō or 麻辣香锅, málà xiāngguō) is exactly what it sounds like—the dry version of hot pot. It takes the flavorings and ingredients of Sichuan mala hot pot and subtracts the oily broth, so all that’s left is your meats, your vegetables, your spices and just enough sauce to moisten it all. It’s almost always served in a wok of some type, and sometimes the wok sits over a flame, which is visually fun but not at all necessary. (I serve mine in the handmade shallow wok I bought on the street in Istanbul, but a shallow pot or bowl will work as well.)

Dry pot is not quite as communal as hot pot, because you’re not cooking the food yourself at table, but it almost is, because everyone is dipping into the communal wok to pluck  out their tasty bites from an array of surprises. Or at least they are if you eat it the Chinese way.

I’ve had mala xiangguo in Chengdu many times over the years, as well as in various restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles and in New York at Mala Project, the first restaurant outside a Chinese enclave to introduce dry pot to Americans. So before I get started on this version featuring shrimp, fried tofu, pork belly, yu choy, flowering cauliflower, green beans, potato, wood ear and dried er jing tiao chilies, here are a few of the dry pots I’ve known over the past decade:

Choosing and Prepping Ingredients for Dry Pot

I hope you get the idea from the photos above that dry pot can be comprised of whatever you want it to be. If you’re only feeding a couple people, you only need 4-5 main ingredients, plus some aromatics like garlic, ginger and scallion/onion if you like. If you’re feeding a group of four people, you might add anywhere from 8-10 items for a full feast. This many ingredients may total up to 3 or 4 pounds of food, and the reason you can make this in a wok is because it is not a true stir-fry. Instead, all of the main ingredients of a dry pot are precooked—either deep-fried, shallow-fried or blanched in boiling water—and then briefly tossed together in the dry pot sauce at the end. If the wok is crowded—a big no-no for stir-frying—so be it! Everything is already properly cooked before it finishes in the wok.

As mentioned, Mala Project in NYC’s East Village has introduced many folks to dry pot. Here are some snaps of the choices they give you for inclusion in your pot, which may give you some ideas for your home dry pot.

In this recipe for a 3-pound dry pot, I chose some of our favorite dry pot ingredients. For proteins, shrimp is an easy-to-prep, perennial star of dry pot. And pork belly is always welcome in our house, especially by husband/dad Craig. Fongchong loves tofu above all else, and while we usually use rehydrated tofu skin, this time we used fried tofu puffs. Boy, do they absorb sauce nicely!

We’ve also got our favorite vegetables, yu choy and flowering cauliflower (though we also love celtuce and lotus root), and the ever-popular potato. While most people blanche potato slices, we once had divine dry pot with fried potatoes, so we sometimes go to that extra trouble. You could add fresh or dried shiitake or wood ear mushrooms, and fresh chilies, but I use our dried er jing tiao chilies, because they are so soft and fruity and moderately hot that I think of them as a vegetable to be eaten along with the other veg. Oh, and we had some green beans, so I threw some of those in too.

After you’ve chosen your ingredients, it’s time to pre-cook them. Restaurants will dispatch with this by deep-frying most of the meat, but most meats and seafood can simply be shallow-fried or stir-fried at home. Shrimp is ideal because it is so quickly fried in a small amount of oil, and pork belly can easily be stir-fried. Simply think of how you would normally cook the ingredient to reach its ideal texture and taste. Marinating meats before cooking is a pro move that’s worth the effort. We also sometimes shallow-fry the potatoes (because, again, fried potatoes!), but all the other vegetables are blanched quickly in boiling water until they are just slightly underdone. But let’s be honest: Almost everything tastes better fried than boiled, so decide on your decadence level—calories and time—and go from there.

The Sauce for Mala Dry Pot

Most recipes by Western cooks for home dry pot cobble together a sauce from a homemade spice oil, spicy chili bean paste (doubanjiang) and a bit of readymade hotpot soup base. This is meant to approximate the sometimes outrageously complicated restaurant recipe—Mala Project, for example, has 24 spices in its oil as well as various other forms of chilies and fermented ingredients. Our previous recipe here streamlined this considerably by simply using doubanjiang and adding spices directly in the mix. It was, perhaps, too dumbed down.

Since I wrote that recipe, however, we have almost always made dry pot the way most Chinese people make dry pot at home—by using a readymade dry pot sauce. The only hard thing about that is finding one you like. And so…drumroll, please…10 years after we first published a recipe for dry pot, The Mala Market has introduced its own Sichuan Mala Sauce for Stir-Fry and Dry Pot!

It took us that long to find one we deemed delicious enough to eat over and over without getting tired of it. And, just as challengingly, to find one that wasn’t full of additives and preservatives. We wanted a sauce without those things that still had the full, robust, authentic taste of Sichuan dry pot. Ours features Pixian doubanjiang, fermented soybeans and pickled er jing tiao chilies, along with aromatics, Sichuan pepper and a bevy of secret spices in a base of premium roasted rapeseed oil. It’s made to order for us in Chongqing, the (probable) home of dry pot. And it’s fire! Though not literally burning hot.

As a guide, FC and I both have a pretty high spice tolerance and we find it medium hot; Craig has low spice tolerance, and he finds it quite hot, but still edible and enjoyable. Adjust spiciness for your diners by using more or less sauce. And if you are a true heat seeker, add additional Sichuan pepper and dried chilies to the pot.

If you’re in a hurry, you can use the sauce on its own. If you want to pump up the volume—or just want it spicier—stir-fry some garlic and ginger slices, add some dried chilies, Sichuan peppercorns and cumin seed, and then add the sauce to the wok. To make it taste like the real deal, you’ll use a generous amount of oil. You can also splash in some water if it’s too dry as you finish the dish.

After that, you just add in all your pre-cooked ingredients, toss them in the sauce until fully covered in sauce and fully warmed, sprinkle with sesame seed, and serve in the pot you made it in, which will keep it nice and warm, or in a large serving bowl, in the center of the table.

I’d also like to direct you to another recipe on our blog, Xueci Cheng’s Dry Pot With Chicken Wings and Shrimp. Xueci grew up eating ganguo in Sichuan, and particularly in Mianyang, a northern Sichuan city that also lays claim to inventing dry pot, along with Chongqing (and probably other cities!). Read her piece for more background on the history of this modern Sichuan classic.