I hadn’t necessarily thought this blog needed yet another recipe for red-cooked meat, but that was before I stumbled across a Sichuan version. This is, of course, out of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty, like all our recent Sichuan recipes. It’s a perfect thing to make at this time of year, with the rich beef and ginger scent filling the house while cold rain beats against the windows.

The recipe could be made with any stewing beef, but we have several packages of short ribs from our latest cow in the freezer and I hadn’t done anything with them yet. Following directions like a good girl, I blanched the ribs (apparently this keeps scum from forming in the final dish), then cut them into chunks.

Next I assembled my mise en place: bean paste, scallions, star anise, ginger, Sichuan pepper, a quart of chicken broth, rice wine and soy, and a cardamom pod, which was as close as I could come to cao guo on the spur of the moment (I think this is the same thing as black cardamom, but can’t tell from Dunlop’s description).

The exciting bit came after I had already put my pot to heat with some peanut oil and had gotten a spoon to add the Sichuan bean paste, which I bought a few months ago at Ping’s in Seattle and had just then opened. I stuck the spoon in, took a sniff, and realized that I had foolishly bought the wrong kind of bean paste. Instead of “Chili bean sauce” I had simply gotten “Bean sauce”. It smelled rather like baked beans with extra sugar. Oops. Thinking quickly (and desperately), I dumped three spoonfuls of the Sichuan baked beans into the pot, then added three spoonfuls of a prepared chile-garlic sauce. It smelled good and seemed to do the trick.

Despite my bean sauce mishap, this worked really well. Savory, spicy, a little sweet – the sauce was wonderful with rice and bitter greens, and the beef simply fell off the bone. And adding diced daikon near the end of cooking was remarkable – it soaked up the flavor of the sauce but retained a firm texture. Why do we not eat more daikon?

Red-Braised Beef with Daikon

Adapted from Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 3 pounds short ribs or stewing beef
• 1″ piece of ginger, cut into a few thick slices
• 3 scallions, trimmed and cut into large pieces
• 3 Tbsp peanut oil
• 6 Tbsp Sichuan chile bean paste, or some combination of bean paste and chile-garlic sauce
• 1 quart stock (the recipe calls for beef, I used chicken)
• 4 Tbsp rice wine or sherry
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp whole Sichuan pepper
• 1 star anise
• 1 cao guo or cardamom pod
• 1 large daikon radish, diced

Bring a pot of water to a boil and blanch the beef in it for a minute. Remove the beef and cut it into 1-2″ chunks.

Heat the oil in a large heavy pot and add the bean paste. Stir fry until the oil turns red and it smells great, then add the beef, ginger, scallions, stock, wine, soy and spices. Bring to a boil, then turn down and cover. Simmer for 2 hours or more, until the beef is tender. If a great deal of liquid remains in the pot, take off the lid and turn up the heat to reduce it. Add the daikon a bit before the end – maybe 15 minutes?

You can serve the beef immediately, or refrigerate it, take some of the fat off and reheat the next day.

We’ve been in the mood for Chinese food a lot lately, but were wanting some new ideas. Opening some Chinese cookbooks at random led me to a chicken recipe in Land of Plenty that I’d never noticed before. It’s called Tai Bai, apparently in honor of the poet Li Bai. It’s easy to put together and involves very little chopping, which is a real selling point some nights. It has no garlic or ginger – the primary flavors are chiles, both dried and pickled, plus Sichuan pepper. It’s moderately fiery, so I wouldn’t recommend this one if you don’t have much spice tolerance. We think it’s delicious.

The recipe lets you substitute Thai pickled chiles for the Sichuan variety, which was lucky for us as we happen to have a large jar of Thai peppers that we bought on a whim last year, but it also tells you to add a spoonful of pickled chile paste to support the flavor. I used sambal oelek.

The first time I made this I had some fresh chicken stock on the stove that hadn’t been defatted, so the final dish was good and schmaltzy. The second time it was less oily, but still delicious – the chicken gets really tender and infused with flavor. We also tried steaming broccolini and then stirfrying it with the chicken at the very end so it would absorb some of the chile flavorings. Rice is a must with this – we particularly like it with slightly sticky sushi rice.

Tai Bai Chicken

From Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 1 lb chicken thigh meat, boneless or bone-in, cut into 1½-2 inch chunks
• 1/2 cup peanut oil
• small handful dried red chiles, cut in half and seeds shaken out
• 4 Sichuan pickled chiles, or 6 Thai pickled chiles + 1 tsp pickled chile paste
• 5 scallions, white and green parts separated and cut into 2 inch pieces
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1 Tbsp rice wine or sherry
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp Sichuan pepper (recipe calls for whole, but we used ground as I find biting into a whole Sichuan pepper a bit daunting)
• 1 tsp sugar
• pinch of salt
• 2 pinches white pepper
• 1 tsp sesame oil

Heat the oil in a wok over a high flame. Watching out for spattering, add the chicken in batches and stir fry about a minute, until it turns white but not cooked through or browned. Remove and set aside.

Remove all but 3 Tbsp of oil from the wok. Set over medium heat and add the dried chiles. Cook until fragrant but not too dark, then add the pickled chiles and paste. Stir fry briefly, then add the scallion whites and fry a bit longer. You don’t want any of the ingredients to burn, so go easy on the heat.

Add the stock, chicken, rice wine, soy, Sichuan pepper, sugar, salt and white pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer gently about 20 minutes, so the chicken cooks through and the sauce evaporates. Ideally you want just spiced oil coating the chicken by the end of cooking. You can remove the dried chiles at this point and discard them.

Just before serving, toss in the scallion greens (and steamed broccoli or other green vegetables if you want a one-pot dinner) and stir it all together. Drizzle in the sesame oil and serve with rice.

After a long hiatus, we just made it back to our current favorite Chinese restaurant, Peaceful in Vancouver B.C. After a mighty emotional struggle, we decided not to get noodles this time. Instead we got Jon’s favorite beef rolls (rich fried bread rolled around thin slices of beef, raw scallion and hoisin sauce, OMG theyaresogood), an order of Sichuan greens and ma po tofu. I burned my mouth and ate way too much and have no regrets whatsoever. The ma po was really good – remarkably like the version we make at home, but with pork instead of beef, loads of Sichuan pepper, and very fresh wobbly tofu – but it inexplicably arrived in a Pyrex pie pan, which made me feel like a complete hog. Not that that’s a bad thing.

It’s always a bit odd to make a new recipe, taste it, then realize that you don’t know whether it turned out or not, since you have no idea of what it’s supposed to taste like. When we made dan dan noodles for the first time, it may or may not have been a success.

What I do know is that the noodles were flavorful, the sauce had an interesting sweet/spicy/salty tang, and the Sichuan pepper gave it so much ma that I couldn’t feel my mouth for half an hour afterwards. So perhaps it was a success. We decided to try it again another time.

That was our first time using Tianjin preserved vegetable, a fermented cabbage product that we had just recently found at a little Chinese market in Seattle’s International District. According to Fuchsia Dunlop, mistress of all things Sichuan, it’s not quite a perfect stand-in for traditional Sichuanese fermented vegetable, but it comes close. The flavor of it was sweet, a little funky and really, really, really salty. We keep trying to decide if we want to replace it when we use up the jar, or just use cabbage and lots of salt instead.

It was also our first use of Chinkiang vinegar, which we found at the same market. It’s made from glutinous rice, and has a surprisingly sweet, almost plummy aroma. The combination of the vinegar with the salty cabbage produced a really interesting flavor for the noodles.

Here is the recipe for the version we made the first time. It was pretty good, but seemed to be lacking something.

Dan Dan Mian (version one)

loosely adapted from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop

8 oz dried or fresh wheat noodles (preferably not egg noodles)

The sauce:

• 1 Tbsp oil
• 4 Tbsp preserved veg
• 1 1/2 tsp Chinkiang vinegar
• 1 tsp ground Sichuan pepper

The meat:

• oil
• 4 dried red chiles
• 4 oz ground beef
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• pinch of salt

Put on a pot of water for the noodles.

In a wok over high heat, add a tablespoon of oil, then add the preserved vegetable and stirfry it for 30 seconds or so. Scrape out into a large bowl. Add the vinegar and Sichuan pepper.

Putting the wok back on the heat, add a bit more oil, then throw in the dried chiles. Stirfry briefly until they begin to brown a little, then add the meat and stirfry until it is cooked through and partially dried out. Add soy sauce and salt. Transfer the meat to the bowl with the sauce ingredients and stir.

Cook the noodles according to directions, drain them and add them directly to the bowl. Toss everything together and serve.

Just last week we made dan dan noodles again. This time we had thought ahead and made fresh chili oil, and we followed a different version of the recipe that called for fresh ground pork. The difference was astonishing.

The previous batch had been a little dry, and both spicy and numbing without actually being very savory. This batch was oily, salty, savory, slithery, and completely addictive. We didn’t have to ask ourselves whether it had come out right – we just inhaled it.

Dan Dan Mian (version two)

Also adapted (not as loosely) from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop

10 oz somen or other wheat noodles

The sauce:

• 1 Tbsp peanut oil
• 4 Tbsp preserved vegetable
• 3 scallions, thinly sliced on the diagonal
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• 3 Tbsp chili oil
• 1 1/2 tsp Chinkiang vinegar
• 1/2 tsp ground Sichuan pepper

The meat topping:

• peanut oil
• 6 oz ground pork
• 1 tsp sherry
• 2 tsp soy sauce

Heat a spoonful of peanut oil in a wok, toss in the preserved vegetable and stir-fry for thirty seconds. Scrape into a mixing bowl. Add the rest of the sauce ingredients to the bowl.

Put the wok back on the heat, add another spoonful of oil, and add the pork. Break up with a spatula, and add the sherry and soy. Cook until done but still wet, and add to the bowl of sauce.

Cook the noodles according to directions (somen take almost no time at all), drain, and add them to the bowl. Toss well and serve.

We had been doing so well on our self-imposed mission to eat tofu once a week. Not that I really think soy is particularly beneficial (the jury still seems to be out on that one), but we do eat a fair amount of meat, and I try to work in other sources of protein when convenient. Besides, tofu is cheap. We recently discovered silken tofu in boxes that keeps on the shelf for several weeks, so now we can stock up and have it ready to hand. Lately, though, we’ve slacked off on our tofu consumption.

After a few weeks of somewhat disorganized menu planning, I remembered that there was a box of silken tofu in the cupboard getting past its sell-by date, and a recipe for Ma Po Tofu in our Sichuan cookbook that hadn’t yet been tried, so that’s what we had for dinner one night after work. It was incredibly quick and easy, so I suspect we’ll have it again before too long.

Ma po tofu, or Pockmarked Mother Chen’s Bean Curd, is a famous Sichuanese recipe, and is usually just tofu in a spicy and numbing chile sauce, topped with a sprinkle of ground meat. I’ve never ordered it in a restaurant (we have a real dearth of Chinese restaurants around here, and my favorite Sichuan place in Seattle just burned down, darn it), but it’s a classic and very cheap to make, as long as you have a few key ingredients on hand. And the advantage of making it at home is that you can make it as spicy or mild as you want.

I made a few changes to the original recipe, mostly due to laziness. I added more beef than the dish called for, because I didn’t feel like breaking up a pound (we also wanted plenty of leftovers). I also cooked the leeks with the beef instead of adding them at the end as instructed, because I don’t think uncooked leeks are a good thing (if I had used scallions, they would have been the last thing to go in). I also completely forgot to add Sichuan pepper at the end, so it was spicy, but not numbing. Whoops.

Ma Po Tofu
adapted from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 1 package silken tofu
• peanut oil (she calls for 1/2 cup, I used a bit less)
• 1 pound ground beef
• 2 leeks, thinly sliced
• 2 heaping Tbsp Sichuan chile-bean paste (there’s really no substitute for this – look for it in Chinese groceries)
• 1 Tbsp fermented black beans (ditto)
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1 tsp sugar
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1/2 tsp ground Sichuan pepper

Put on a pot of rice to cook.

Cube the tofu and pour very hot water over it. Leave it to steep while you do other things.

Slice the leeks into very thin rings, working at an angle.

Heat peanut oil in a large skillet or wok and add the beef. Stirfry until cooked through and beginning to get crispy. Add the leeks and continue to stirfry until they are softened. Add the chile bean paste and stir it up well with the beef and leeks, then add the fermented black beans (you can add a teaspoon or two of ground chile at this point if you want it hotter). Cook for another 30 seconds.

Pour in the stock, stir, and add the drained tofu. Stir carefully (silken tofu breaks up easily). Add sugar, soy sauce, and salt if needed. Simmer five minutes or so. Add the Sichuan pepper and serve with rice. Stir-fried cabbage or other greens make a nice side dish.

Although the snow has melted here, the weather continues to be cold and clammy. In Sichuan province in China, the answer to this is plenty of bold spicy food, such as Kung Pao chicken. It’s hot, a little sour, and has the tingle of Sichuan pepper. It helps pep up a wet gray day.

We hadn’t bought chicken breast meat for a really long time until we made this dish. We usually use chicken thighs for everything, being cheaper and less prone to become tough, but it was actually kind of fun to use white meat for a change. The marinade and the quick stirfry keep the meat tender.

Kung Pao Chicken

adapted from Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 1 pound boneless skinless chicken breast
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 knob fresh ginger
• 5 scallions, white parts only
• 2 Tbsp oil
• handful dried red chiles
• 1 tsp Sichuan pepper (she calls for whole, but I prefer it ground)
• 2/3 cup roasted peanuts

Marinade:

• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp sherry
• 2 1/4 tsp cornstarch
• 1 Tbsp water

Sauce:

• 3 tsp sugar
• 1 1/8 tsp cornstarch
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 3 tsp vinegar
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 Tbsp chicken stock or water

Cut the chicken into small cubes and combine with the marinade ingredients. Let it sit while you get everything else ready.

Thinly slice the garlic and ginger, cut the scallions into chunks, and cut the dried chiles in half with scissors and empty the seeds out.

Combine the sauce ingredients in a bowl and set aside.

Add the oil to a hot wok. Add the chiles and Sichuan pepper and stirfry until fragrant. Add the chicken. As the cubes begin to cook and separate, add the ginger, garlic and scallions. Fry until the chicken is just cooked through. Stir in the sauce and toss until it thickens and gives the dish a glossy look. Add the peanuts, mix and serve.

I like this sort of spicy meat dish with white rice and a big pile of stirfried greens, like bok choi. And lots of jasmine tea.

Posts have been a bit irregular of late, I’m afraid, due to a houseful of head colds. More time has been spent on the couch under a layer of cats than on the computer. However, here’s a recipe that I happen to have ready to go: a stirfry of beef and celery from a Sichuanese cookbook which will really knock your socks off. Chile-bean paste is a very delightful thing. Good for the sinuses.

Part of the key to this recipe is cutting all the ingredients into similar long, fine slivers. Allow plenty of time for prep (especially cutting up the beef), but the cooking won’t take very long at all. Make plenty of white rice to go with it, and perhaps a side of greens – the flavor is very strong and savory.

Dry Fried Beef

from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop

• 1 pound lean beef, cut into fine slivers
• 4 celery stalks
• salt
• 1 1/2 inches fresh ginger
• 2 scallions, white parts only
• 1/3 cup oil
• 1 Tbsp sherry
• 2 heaping spoonfuls chile bean paste
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• 1/2 tsp sesame oil
• 1/2 tsp ground toasted Sichuan pepper

Remove the outer strings from the celery and cut it into thin julienne about 3 inches long, and mix it with a little salt. Set aside. Peel the ginger and cut it and the scallions into fine slivers.

Heat the oil in a wok until smoking, add the beef and stirfry constantly for about ten minutes. The beef will release its liquid and the oil will be cloudy, but as the water evaporates the oil will clear and the beef will begin to get crispy. Splash the sherry around the edges of the beef.

Turn the heat to medium, push the beef up onto one side of the wok, and add the chile bean paste to the oil in the bottom of the wok. Fry for 30 seconds, then add the ginger and scallions and mix everything up with the beef. Add the celery, soy sauce and salt to taste, and continue cooking until the celery is just done. Mix in the sesame oil, sprinkle over the Sichuan pepper, and serve with plenty of white rice.

We made our periodic pilgrimage to Uwajimaya last weekend, partly to shop for tacky Christmas presents but mostly to restock our supply of noodles, tea and chile-garlic sauce. We went to Samurai Noodle for lunch (the new Extra Pork Fat option is astonishing), then spent the next two hours battling our way through all the other people milling around trying to figure out which small red jar might hold the correct form of soybean paste or pickled turnip, or stampeding through the narrow aisles between the Hello Kitty stickers and the Daruma keychains.

The funny thing is, we came home with all this new stuff, all jazzed up about doing some new Chinese dishes or something Indonesian, and the dinner we ended up making didn’t use any of it. How silly. We were going to make a side of stirfried ong choy (water spinach), which we haven’t found anywhere else, but it started to compost itself before we could cook it (drat). We had to have plain spinach instead. And for dinner I made bao, one of my favorite things to eat in the world, with a new filling out of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty, which turned out to be the easiest bun filling I’ve ever made and used ingredients we already had around. Go figure. But never fear, we’ll get around to the soybean paste and pickled mustard greens later this week. Stay tuned!

Concerning bao: I love pretty much any kind of bread or dumpling with a savory filling, and bao are even more wonderful made fresh at home than they are off a street vendor’s cart. I’ve made bao with the classic char siu (Chinese roasted pork) filling, cabbage and mushrooms, curried gluten, spiced ground chicken, and whatever else – but this Sichuan filling is not only one of the tastiest I’ve made, it’s also the simplest. You just need a jar of chile-bean paste on hand, and I promise it’s worth hunting down. The dough is the recipe my mother has always used – I don’t remember where it’s from, but it’s the perfect bao dough, lightly sweet and addictively spongy, and I’ve never made any other.

Bao with pork-bean sprout filling

Dough:

• 4 cups unbleached white flour
• 1 Tbsp dry yeast
• 1 ½ cups warm water
• ¼ cup sugar
• 2 Tbsp oil
• 1 tsp salt

Filling:

• 1 pound ground pork
• 4 Tbsp oil
• 2 Tbsp chile bean paste
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp sherry
• 1 tsp salt
• 8 oz bean sprouts, roughly chopped
• 8-10 good grinds from a pepper mill

A couple hours before dinner, start the dough: combine the water, yeast, and sugar in a bowl or measuring cup and let it start to foam. Put the flour and salt into a large mixing bowl. Add the oil to the yeast mixture, then dump it all into the flour and stir well. Knead 10 minutes or until smooth and resilient. Wash and oil the mixing bowl, put the dough back in, cover with a damp towel and let rise 1 ½ hours or until doubled.

While it rises, make the filling: heat a wok over very high heat and add the oil. Put in the pork and stirfry, breaking it up well, until the meat is cooked and the fat has separated out. Stir in the chile-bean paste, then add the soy, salt and sherry. Add the bean sprouts and stirfry briefly, grind in the pepper, then remove from the heat.

Cut sixteen squares of parchment or wax paper and set out a couple of baking sheets. Divide the bun dough into sixteen pieces. Take a piece and roll it out into a disk about 6 inches across, leaving a slightly thicker area in the center (Barbara Tropp called this the ”belly button”). Place a spoonful of filling into the center, then gather up the edges of the circle and pleat them together. I like to give them a twist, then place the bun gathered-side-down on the sheet, but you might like to leave the twist pointing up. Set each bun on a parchment square. When the sheet is full, lay a towel carefully over the buns and let them rise twenty minutes.

You can steam or bake the buns – I usually do a mix of both, since I don’t have enough room in my steamers for sixteen buns at once. If using a bamboo steamer, find a pot that the steamer fits on snugly. Put in a few inches of water and bring to a boil. Lay the risen buns into the steamer, making sure to give them a little elbow room (otherwise they’ll rise into each other and stick). Cover and place over the boiling water, let steam 12-15 minutes. I don’t recommend checking on them, since sometimes removing the lid too soon makes them collapse.

To bake, just preheat the oven to 350° and stick in the sheet with the risen buns on it. You can use a glaze or egg wash but I don’t care for the effect, myself. Bake until just golden, 12-15 minutes.

Peel off the paper and eat, preferably with a bit of stirfried spinach or cabbage alongside. These make great leftovers – the steamed ones microwave really well, and the baked ones can be wrapped in foil and reheated in the oven. You can never have too much leftover bao – at least, it hasn’t happened to us yet.