Thin-Sliced, Quick-Cooked Okra Stays Fresh and Crunchy

This may sound funny coming from an American, but I never really understood the appeal of okra before I moved to Yunnan. In the U.S., I only ever had this green, pod-like vegetable prepared one of two ways: First, it could be thoroughly cooked, usually in some kind of stewed dish, until it was very tender and exuded a lot of the sticky slime the pods produce when heated. Second, it could be sliced up, battered and deep-fried so that it became little bites of salty crunchiness. I never cared for the first option (like many, I don’t find the slimy version of the vegetable very pleasant to eat, though as a soluble fiber, it is apparently very healthy). And I couldn’t understand the point of the second—it seemed like a way to use up something people found unappealing by camouflaging its actual flavor.

When I first moved to Kunming, I was surprised to see okra in markets and in the cold cases at local eateries. I had always associated this African and South Asian vegetable with places like India, Nigeria and the American South, and I’d certainly never seen it while studying in Beijing or on Chinese-American restaurant menus. But the preparations offered in Kunming looked far more appealing than the dishes I was used to: In small alleyways, I tried okra pods threaded onto skewers for shao kao and was thrilled to find that the grill’s quick, hot cooking scorched them and made them flavorful without cooking them so long that they developed their classically slimy texture. In Dai minority restaurants that served food from Yunnan’s western border (near Myanmar), the pods were blanched and chilled, then topped with a spicy tomato sauce. (These did become slimy when you bit into them, but the texture made more sense cold and in the context of a Chinese meal—where a variety of textures are prized—than in an American meal.) The best preparation, however (to my mind, at least) was the simplest of all: stir-fried okra and pressed tofu (qiūkuí chǎo dòufugān,  秋葵炒豆腐干). 

This stir-fried dish also comes from Dai cooking traditions, and I learned of it at the delightful restaurant across the street from our apartment, Yingjiang Dai Flavor Restaurant (盈江傣味园), where families gathered around low bamboo tables spilled across the sidewalk to enjoy dishes like lime-flavored “ghost chicken,” stir-fried banana flowers and pineapple sticky rice. It may be the least complicated dish on their menu, but it’s perfect in its simplicity: Cutting the okra into thin, star-like pieces and stir-frying them quickly leaves them tender but still almost crisp, without the gooey texture they get when cooked for more than a couple minutes. Moreover, because you’re not biting into a whole pod, any sliminess that the pieces do have doesn’t register. The little pieces of firm pressed flavored tofu (dòufugān, 豆腐干) add a complementary texture and flavor that rounds out the dish.

Okra in China

When I first started to dive into okra’s history in China, I was surprised to learn that the vegetable has a fairly long history in the official records; apparently the Compendium of Materia Medica (《本草纲目》, Běncǎo gāngmù), the famed medical tome published in the Ming Dynasty, includes records of its use. But, as this source indicates, the vegetable—imported via trade routes from Africa and India—was primarily used for medicinal purposes, to protect the stomach from a variety of ailments. When I looked for culinary uses and recipes, they all appeared to be pretty recent, and many online posters describe being just as surprised as I was to find it in the market. 

Most Chinese uses mirror the way many other vegetables are cooked: You can slice it and mix it into an egg pancake, stir-fry it with little cubes of beef, cook it in oyster sauce or blanch it and use it as a liangcai (凉菜, cold dish) topped with a spicy or garlicky sauce. My favorite ways to prepare it are still the ones I first tried in Kunming: stir-fried very simply with pressed tofu or threaded onto thin skewers, grilled with some oil and salt until well-browned (maybe even lightly charred) and doused with shao kao spice.

The Key to Stir-Fried Okra Is All in the Prep

Like many quick stir-fried dishes, stir-fried okra with pressed tofu is all about the knife work. In fact, this dish doesn’t even have a sauce you have to mix together; the flavor all comes from the tofu and the okra themselves (plus some garlic, dried chili and oil). Once the cutting and slicing are done, the whole thing comes together in an instant. And even this part is not complicated: Just cut each pod crosswise into even pieces (about ¼-inch wide), cut the pressed tofu into squares about the same width and thickness as the okra slices and thinly slice the garlic. Depending on the thickness of your pieces of pressed tofu, you may want to start by cutting each large square through its thinnest side (to make two very thin large squares), then cut each of those into ½-inch strips and the strips into ½-inch squares.

For more quick-and-easy vegetable recipes, check out Zoe’s Qianlong Cabbage (Qianlong Baicai, 乾隆白菜), Taylor’s Stir-Fried Yu Choy With Fermented Tofu (Furu Yu Choy) and Kathy’s Spicy Daikon Carrot Salad (Liangban, 凉拌).