Finger-Licking Flavor

Have you ever had the famed toothpick lamb at L.A.’s Chengdu Taste or Sichuan Impression? Or perhaps at another of the ever-growing list of stellar Sichuan restaurants in our land? If you have, you probably wish you could make these crispy lamb nuggets adorned with a cumin–chili–huajiao spice mix at home. If you haven’t, believe me, you want to make them at home.

We’ve been chomping on these on every visit to Los Angeles for years, but I’ve never actually had them in Chengdu and never seen them in a Sichuan cookbook, which made me wonder if Sichuan chefs in America were innovating with toothpicks. I mean, clearly the dish is a take on yangrou chuan, the grilled lamb skewers that are street food all over China, but I’d never seen it miniaturized and made in a wok there.  But then one of our longtime readers and customers gifted us a cookbook by a Sichuan master chef that has a recipe for toothpick lamb, proving that it is indeed eaten in the motherland. In fact, the book was published in 2012, so they’ve been eating it for years.

We have the best customers. I’ve always said that. The fact that Alexander Kaufman of Atlanta gifted us a cookbook by Zhu Jianzhong of Sichuan—entirely in Chinese—only underscores how many Americans have the same obsessive love for Sichuan food that we do. Alexander does not read Chinese, nor do I. But the book is well written enough that the Google Translate app does a pretty accurate job on it, and any mistranslations on my end can be cleared up by Fongchong. Fully translating recipes is hard work that she’s not inclined to do, but she’s good about providing answers or corrections when I’m stuck. (Eleven years in America, and Chinese is still her first language—a skill that was supremely important to her and that her dad and I supported and enabled.)

When I asked Alexander where he got this cookbook, called Classic Sichuan Cuisine, he pointed me toward Amazon, where it is listed on the U.S. site and ships from a bookstore in China! So if you read Chinese or are up for a bit of translating, I can highly recommend this far-ranging book of Sichuan favorites, both classic and modern, homey and trendy, distilled from Zhu’s 20 years as a chef, educator and writer in Chengdu.

However, one caveat: As with most all cookbooks written by chefs, be it Chinese or American, you may find some of the recipes a bit of work. This toothpick lamb, for example, was pretty elaborate as written, including a two-step prep when raw, a deep-fry, a long braise and a stir-fry. I made it this way several times before I started cutting out some steps to see if we could get away with less work. Turns out we can.

I wanted this recipe to be something you’d actually make, so I’ve trimmed the steps, totally omitting both the braising and stir-frying steps, which we found did not deliver enough extra taste for the extra invested time. Unless you’re a chef! Then by all means go the extra steps.

But the rest of us will appreciate that the spices used to infuse the meat during the braise work just as well added to the other dry spices in the final toss of the meat. So simply marinate, fry and toss and you’re done! The perfect appetizer, casual meal or bar snack, since it tastes (almost) as good room temp as it does hot.

Chef Zhu’s extra step that I would never dispense with is coating the fried lamb cubes in your favorite chili oil or chili crisp (preferably homemade) before tossing them in the dry spice mix. That doubles the finger-licking flavor. In fact, Fongchong has always refused to eat lamb at all, due to its gamey and unfamiliar taste to her southern Chinese palate. The headnote on this recipe said that Sichuan folks don’t eat much lamb either, unless it’s prepared in very specific ways to dispel the gaminess. And it worked! FC ate a whole dinner of this, then a leftover lunch, without even realizing it was lamb. (She didn’t ask, we didn’t tell!)

This recipe is appetizer size, but you can easily double it to full dinner size by frying the lamb in batches. I made this with both lamb shank/leg as is the norm in Sichuan and with cheaper lamb shoulder, and we didn’t really prefer one over the other. But you do want to use relatively small—about 1-inch cubes—of lamb and relatively high heat so that you can quickly crisp them up on the outside while still cooking all the way through.

While toothpick lamb has a similar taste profile to the stir-fry simply known as cumin lamb, the preparation, presentation and finished dish are quite different!