I am definitely guilty of taking on more projects than I actually have the time to complete. You may have noticed I am constantly coming up with new ideas for a food series, which is my way of holding myself accountable when I want to learn something new. Hence, the Atlanta Pizza Days, the Bon Appétit series, and the Land of Plenty series.

These obviously take a lot of time, and the projects loom over me, and I end up with long delays between posts. With the arrival of some new cookbooks last week, I think it’s time to put a couple of these to bed. I will continue to eat pizza, and post my findings, but it’s not going to be a series where you can expect a certain frequency of posts. The Land of Plenty series will also be discontinued. This cookbook has taught me more than any other. I’ve learned so much about Sichuan cooking concepts, methods, and ingredients…they have been added to my cooking repertoire on almost a daily basis. I won’t claim I’m an expert, and I am far from putting this cookbook away to collect cobwebs, but I have a large laundry list of cuisines and dishes that I want to tackle. If you do want to keep up with Sichuan cooking in the future, I’ll be posting them as Land of Plenty tagged photos on my Flickr page.

Here’s a summary of the individual Land of Plenty posts:

• Land of Plenty – Announcement post
• Sichuan 101 & Ingredients
• Xie Laoban’s Dan Dan Noodles
• Zhong Crescent Dumplings
• Fried Peanuts, Cucumber Salad, Bean Curd Noodles
• Boiled Beef & Cookbook Challenge Announcement
• Dry Fried Greenbeans
• Gong Bao (Kung Pao) Chicken
• Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers
• Dry Fried Chicken
• Red Cooked Pork (Hongshao Rou)
• Challenger #1 – Spicy Cold Noodles/Dry Fried Greenbeans
• Challenger #2 – Dry Fried Chicken/Stir Fried Vegetables w Lotus Root
• Red Braised Beef
• Cold Sichuan Chicken, Hot and Numbing Beef, Fried Lotus Root with Tomato Sauce
• Steamed Pork Buns (today)

With that, here is my last entry in the Land of Plenty series.

I started by stir-frying pork and bean sprouts in spicy fermented Sichuan bean paste, with a splash of soy sauce, and rice wine at the finish.

The dough for the dumplings was similar to many pizza dough recipes. I waited for it to rise for an hour or two.

Then punched it down and waited another 1/2 hour for it to rise again.

I prepared my steaming basket with a layer of cabbage so the dumplings wouldn’t stick to the wood while cooking.

I cut the dough into thirds and floured heavily; the dough was quite sticky.

This was the first attempt, which was a small dumpling. I ended up making them a bit larger than this – maybe a 2” portion of each dough log per dumpling.

Poor form on the first few…

Aaron made a lot of the dumplings, and I think he got very good at it. All the pretty looking dumplings below were his creations.

Three to five dumplings per layer. The hole is purposely left in the top to let the steam escape.

Here’s what they look like 10 minutes later.

Close-up of a nice one.

And the guts…

For a first attempt, this worked out well. Aaron and I probably each ate 10 of them, with each batch getting better than the last. While not nearly as well-formed as any steamed bun I’ve had at a restaurant, the texture and flavor was on point. I liked the larger dumplings as they had more filling to bread. I served these with a dipping sauce comprised of aromatic soy sauce (made with ginger, Sichuan peppercorn, cinnamon stick, and star anise) and red pepper oil.

Hopefully this post will hold you over for a few days; I’ve been catching flack for not posting frequently enough.

The three new recipes I cooked for this meal are officially titled Chicken Slices in Sichuan Pepper and Sesame Oil Sauce, Hot-and-Numbing Dried Beef, and Lotus Root in Sweet-and-Sour Sauce.

I started with the chicken dish as that’s a cold appetizer that can easily be prepared ahead of time. To create the sauce, you start by violently chopping scallions, salt, and Sichuan peppercorn with a cleaver until it goes from this…

…to this. You can puree it in a blender/food processor, but the cleaver is the traditional method and it’s quite effective.

Then I grilled some chicken, which I purchased as already-thin filets. It’s a time saver, and we’re going to grill and shred it, so I don’t think there’s much flavor lost compared to using full breasts of chicken. You may recall a quick tip from the Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers post – if you’re going to shred the chicken, firmly smack the chicken with the flat side of your cleaver (or a mallet), and the chicken fibers will loosen up and it becomes easier to shred with a fork.

I assembled the rest of the sauce for the chicken, which consists of 3T of chicken stock, 2T of soy sauce, and 1.5T of sesame oil, and set it aside. Then I scrubbed and sliced my lotus root and placed the slices in water.

While the lotus was soaking, I blanched the moderately thin slices of ribeye. I’ve mentioned this before, but blanching meats is very common in Sichuan cooking. It is the attempt to remove the yi wei, or “peculiar smells” of the meat.

I cut the beef with the grain into strips, then across the grain into bite size pieces, which then went into a marinade of ginger, scallions, and Shaoxing rice wine.

Next up, frying the lotus root. I didn’t cut them into uniform slices, so some cooked better than others. In general, I should have fried them longer.

The beef gets dry fried in the wok for 4-5 minutes, until each piece gets a crispy exterior. I then removed the beef from the wok, added some oil, ginger, scallions, sugar, salt, soy sauce, and my reserved stock and brought it all to a boil. Then the beef is added back to the liquid and I simmered for about 30 minutes until the liquid had totally reduced and I was ready to serve.

While the beef sauce reduced I prepared the rest of the dishes. The chicken and sauce was assembled.

Then I prepared the sweet and sour sauce for the lotus. I stir fried some ginger and ginger, then added a combination of chicken stock, salt, sugar, rice vinegar, and corn starch, and brought it to a boil. Then I added the tomatoes, cooked for just a minute or so, added the scallions, and plated the dish.

And finally I plated the beef with some sesame seeds and cilantro.

I highly recommend the cold chicken dish. It had such a clean, simple chicken flavor, with the light scallion element, and a generous kick of Sichuan pepper that made it quite distinct. The lotus was good, not great. If I had fried it better that would have helped, but the sweet and sour tomato sauce wasn’t really doing it for me. But it’s a very unique dish and worth a try if you want to cook with lotus. There haven’t been many dishes so far in this cookbook that involve tomatoes either.

Everyone was giving the chicken high accolades until the beef dish came along. The hot and numbing beef was fantastic – it had the great fried dry fried beef exterior, but with loads of additional flavor and textural complexity from the reduced sauce. Just typing this sentence is difficult, because now I can’t stop thinking about how I wish I had some right now.

Is there anyone out there who isn’t convinced yet that you need to take up cooking Sichuan at home? What are you waiting for?

This recipe is simple, braising short ribs couldn’t be easier.

First we blanche the short ribs. You may recall this step is consistent with the Szechuan cultural dislike of blood and juices in meat.

The resulting grey beef isn’t appealing to me, but the short ribs are close to getting a two hour bath that will impart flavor.

The base of the braise is some oil and Sichuan red bean paste. This will add a bit of heat and I love the deep red color.

In goes some stock, scallions, star anise, Sichuan pepper corns, and a few large chunks of ginger.

Near the end of cooking I added some carrots and red radish. Daikon radish is called for but I didn’t have that in stock. The red radish worked just fine, it wasn’t too harsh.

I was in a rush so my plating is poor here, but I just served the beef over rice, garnished with cilantro.

Pretty much a Sichuan beef stew, this dish was tasty, but the flavors weren’t as intense as I would have liked, and there was very little heat. But with the level of ease and the convenience that comes with braising, this isn’t a bad option for a lazy afternoon of cooking.

Congratulations to Ted and Sarah – they both did a great job. Their meals looked very tasty, and their pictures and write-ups were detailed and thoughtfully done. I hope others will follow their lead. Go trek around some of the best parts of Atlanta, get yourself in the kitchen, and fire up something new!

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Being a Chinese food cooking novice, I was really excited to have the opportunity to participate in the Land of Plenty Challenge. Given that my heat tolerance is a lot higher than Alison’s (my wife), I elected to go with dishes that were described as on the milder side. For dinner tonight, we had the Dry-Fried Chicken (gan bian ji) accompanied by Stir-Fried Mixed Vegetables (si zhong shu cai). Like the first participant, I did all my prep work in advance so as to be able to cook more quickly.

First up, I cut the veggies for the stir fry. Here are all of the ingredients: snow peas, lotus root, cucumber, tomato, and julienned ginger.

After getting these in order, I put together the components for the chicken dish. This next shot shows all of the ingredients lined up, which include: cubed chicken, sliced celery and scallions, dark soy sauce, chili bean paste, Shaoxing rice wine, sesame oil, dried chiles, and whole Sichuan peppercorns.

Here is a close up of the peppers, as well as the liquid ingredients:

Time to cook. The chicken takes longer, so I started with it. First, ¼ cup of peanut oil into the wok and stir-fry until the chicken was brown and most of the liquid had cooked off.

Next step was to add the chiles and peppercorns, stir-fry until fragrant, and then add the paste. The paste imparted a great red orange color to the chicken, which deepened considerably as it cooked.

Next, I added the wine and dark soy, and cooked over medium heat until the sauce thickened and nearly cooked off (about 10 minutes) at which point the celery and scallions went in for a couple of minutes, until crisp-tender.

Towards the last few minutes of cooking the chicken, I made the vegetable stir-fry in a separate pan. First, I heated the peanut oil until smoking, then quick-fried the snow peas. I then pulled these out of the pan, added the ginger until fragrant, and then the lotus root. Next came the cucumber, and then the tomatoes with the snow peas added back to warm through. Very simply seasoned, the dish called only for some salt in addition to the ginger.

Finally, it was time for plating, and, of course, eating! I served the chicken over some steamed basmati rice, and the vegetables on a separate plate.

Of the two, we definitely preferred the chicken. It was very flavorful. The sauce was complex, with a nice numbing feeling from the peppercorns, and a slow, mild heat. Actually, I thought the heat was a bit too tame, and I would add more chiles next time. The textures were similarly complex, with the celery added a nice crunch to off-set the soft chicken. Of note, the recipe suggested adding salt to taste, but I found that the combination of the soy and chili paste provided ample saltiness. The vegetables were a bit disappointing. I found the lotus to be starchy and a bit bland, perhaps because I couldn’t find fresh and had to settle for pre-sliced and refrigerated. I think jicama would actually work better in this dish, imparting a bit more sweetness. While the dish was designed to be simple and refreshing, I thought it was a bit too tame in the flavor department.

Overall, the dinner was a success, and I am looking forward to trying more dishes from Land of Plenty. I really enjoy dabbling in new cuisines, especially when the results are as tasty as the chicken dish.

Sourcing

I was able to find the vast majority of the ingredients at the DeKalb Farmer’s Market and at the near-by First Oriental Market on Ponce. The only thing I couldn’t find there was the lotus, which I located at the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market. This was my first trip there since the re-model, and I wish I had had the time to explore it in greater detail. By far the most interesting and varied collection of international foods I have seen in Atlanta. It also has a terrific produce section, including a surprisingly large amount of organics. I will definitely have to pay it another visit soon.

Thanks to Jimmy for putting this contest together, and for helping me expand my culinary horizons!

A guest post where someone cooks something different, using unique ingredients, is very much in the spirit of this site – hopefully it will inspire you to get out there and cook up something you’ve never tried before. Thanks Sarah!

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For my Land of Plenty challenge, I chose to make Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers (p. 95) and Dry-Fried Green Beans 2 – Vegetarian Version (p. 290). The first thing I did was get all of the ingredients ready.  From reading Jimmy’s posts, I assumed the actual cooking would go quickly and I would want to be ready. I boiled the chicken breasts and then Ben made them into nice slivers by first mashing the breasts with the meat pounder, then slicing them along the grain.

Here is everything for the noodles ready to go, except the noodles themselves.

I cooked the noodles and, following the recipe, spread them out, sprinkled some peanut oil over them, and tossed to coat.  This prevents them from getting sticky while they cool.

While the noodles and chicken were cooling, we made the sauce by mixing all of the ingredients together.  Said ingredients include tahini, soy sauce, Chinkiang (black Chinese vinegar), sugar, garlic, ground Sichuan pepper, chili oil with chile flakes (ours had peanuts in it too), and sesame oil.  The rest of the noodles dish is simply layering everything.  First, I placed the bean sprouts at the bottom of the bowl (as seen in the first picture), then placed a layer of noodles over those.  Here is everything mid-way through the layering process.

I spooned a generous amount of sauce over the noodles.  Lastly, I placed the chicken and some chopped chives on top.  Here is a close-up of the noodles ready to eat.

For the beans, first I cut the ends off the beans, then I sliced the scallions, ginger, and garlic, and cut the chilies in half.

To cook the beans, I heated the peanut oil in a skillet (a wok would be ideal here) and cooked the beans over medium heat for about eight minutes.

I set the beans aside, wiped out the pan, and heated some fresh oil.  Then I added the scallions, ginger, garlic, chilies, and Sichuan pepper.  I stir-fried those briefly then added the beans back in.  After adding some salt, they were ready.

The finished products were very yummy looking.

There was definitely a lot of heat in both dishes.  Once we got past the heat…or more correctly, before the heat set in, the noodles were quite fantastic.  We both said that we taste the many different flavors in the sauce, and that it was a great combination.  The description in the cookbook calls this dish distinctively Sichuanese, so I was glad that we both enjoyed it so much.  We ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

For me, the green beans were a small disappointment.  They tasted like exactly the ingredients – the beans, the peppers, the garlic and the ginger.  I wonder if I did not "dry fry" them enough, because they didn’t look wrinkly like in the cookbook.  I did cook them longer than the recipe called for, but perhaps I should have kept going.

Overall I was pleased with the results and we were both satisfied after our delicious dinner.  Just to mimic Jimmy’s great style, I should mention that we paired our meal with Sweetwater 420.  And lastly, here is Holden, the most amenable food critic around…

Sourcing

I found all of the ingredients either at Publix or the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market. This was my first trip the Farmer’s Market and it was a great experience.  While it may appear slightly sketchy, it is very well organized, and most of the Chinese products have translations.  The prices are good, and I loved their enormous tea selection.  I felt that Ben and I had to be the preppiest suburbanites in the store, given that we were dressed for dinner at Watershed afterwards.  On our way home, after eating our gourmet southern meal, I kept talking about how I love that Atlanta represents so many different cultures but still retains the best of the south.

Today’s post, Red-Cooked Pork, is from a different Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook (Revolutionary Chinese), but there is a red pork belly recipe in the Land of Plenty cookbook that looks to be the same thing. I found this recipe on the Appetite for China website, which has fantastic Chinese recipes and amazing photos.

I had a nice slab of bacon that was given to me (shout out to Liz!) which you are instructed to boil for a few minutes to partially cook the pork – the photo below is post plunge.

While that was boiling I got the spices together – star anise, sliced ginger, cassia bark (cinnamon bark), and red chiles.

Slice up the bacon – the recipe calls for cubes but I went with more of a rectangle shape.

First you heat sugar and oil over low heat to let the sugar melt, then add the pork and the Shaoxing rice wine.

Then add enough water to cover all the pork and add all your spices, bring to a boil, then simmer.

Below is after ~ 30 minutes.

This is after almost an hour. Turn up the heat and the sauce will start to quickly thicken. As soon as it’s very thick, splash in your soy sauce, stir, and you are ready to plate.

My plating/photos doesn’t even compare to the Appetite for China photos, but the taste was surely as good, because this tasted incredible. The salty/savory/sweet/heat combo was in full effect. It wasn’t overly spicy, but the star anise and chiles did add enough to counteract the rest of the flavors. There is of course large amounts of fat, but I couldn’t resist eating it all, sometimes savoring the fat for a few moments on my tongue before chewing.

One out of one terra cotta soldiers agree.

Luckily, I have a few posts queued up for this week so you won’t get withdrawals, or what I call the “Sichuan shakes”.

Today’s post is a dish that I was quite excited about – Dry-Fried Chicken. I’ve already taken on Dry-Fried Green Beans, but texturally it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting and I was more looking forward to dry-frying meats and seeing how that turned out.

To refresh your memory, dry-frying (gan bian) is a distinctively Sichuan cooking method, where food is generally cut into small or thin slivers, then stirred constantly in a wok with just a small amount of oil, until it’s slightly dried out or “fried”.

A vegetable, such as celery, leeks, or bell peppers is added near the end of the cooking, so they are slightly cooked, to add a wonderful crunchy contrast (and color) to the dish. Remember, textures are very important in Sichuan cooking.

I didn’t have celery on-hand, but I did purchase some Chinese cabbage from Love is Love Farms via The Local Farmstand. Yes, I mention these places all the time, and yes, I will continue to do so until it’s beaten into you – you should visit these people!

On to the pictures:

This recipe is fairly simple in appearance, though it does take some time. Of course, you need to get all your gear out and your food prepared before you start applying heat. I attempted to cut the stems of the cabbage into the “horse-ear” shape, which is where you cut the vegetable at an extreme angle. Only a few of them turned out as planned.

Don’t worry, I didn’t throw the cabbage leaves away, they were stored for later use.

Again, get your ingredients right next to your wok/heat source.

The cookbook instructs us to cut the chicken into one inch chunks. I wasn’t exactly sure if that meant cubes, so I attempted to cut them into strips of moderate thickness. The size/shape of cuts of meat are important in Sichuan, so maybe I need to try this again, following the guidelines more closely.

The chicken cooks for 4-5 minutes by itself to release moisture, then the chiles and the Sichuan pepper is added.

Here comes the fun part – now we turn down the heat, add red chili bean paste, splash in the Shaoxing rice wine and soy sauce, and dry-fry for 10-15 minutes. That seemed excessively long to me, but we have our orders…

In that 15 minutes, a few things happened. First, the bottom of my wok became covered by a thin layer of a dense, sticky, paste-like mixture of oil and chili bean paste that somewhat burned. Also, the Sichuan peppercorns appeared to pretty much totally char, which is not appealing. Even though the heat is medium, cooking those tiny peppercorns for 15 minutes, I don’t understand how any other outcome is possible. Finally, the chicken turned leathery in appearance, looking more like chicken jerky than what I was expecting.

After my 15 minutes was up, I added the vegetables for 1-2 minutes, removed it from the heat, then seasoned with salt and sesame oil and served.

With some consternation I sat down to eat. It definitely wasn’t what I was expecting in appearance, however, it did look decent. The taste? The crunch and color of the cabbage and the scallions was enjoyable, but the chicken, while tactilely interesting, was indeed somewhat leathery and tough on the outside. The flavor/depth from the red chili paste, with slight sweetness and more than moderate heat was appealing, and the chicken below the tough exterior was still surprisingly succulent. I still don’t think I was on target though.

I tried to search for other photos of this recipe and all I could find is here.

I intend on playing with this recipe a bit more. I think I will add some of the Sichuan pepper and chili paste later in the process. I also have been told by a friend that cooking larger pieces of chicken will result in a much juicier and more enjoyable dish, and that in general these cooking times are often odd. It’s tough to gauge how close my results are to the intent when there aren’t many resources online, and with such few restaurants to which I can compare.

I slowly ate each bite, scratching my head, challenging the authenticity, then I realized…well, I just ate and enjoyed the whole damn thing.

The whole point of this series (for me) is to gain understanding of Sichuan cooking methods and ingredients, so that I can add them to my repertoire and into my regular cooking routine. Lately I’ll stir fry whatever vegetables I have on hand, maybe add some ground beef or pork, put together a quick sauce, follow the Sichuan method of sauce/flavor layering, then toss everything with some Chinese noodles, and the end results have been quite satisfying, and better yet, quick and easy.

However, this doesn’t mean I’m moving on from the cookbook. There’s plenty to learn and too many dishes that I can’t wait to eat, such as today’s post – Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers.

Cold Asian noodles is a personal favorite of mine, and this recipe is quite similar to many recipes such as this one, but the sauce is distinctively Sichuanese. You can substitute many ingredients (rice vinegar instead of Chinkiang Chinese vinegar and peanut sauce or tahini for the sesame paste), but I would definitely recommend you seek out Chinese noodles, whose primary ingredient is wheat flour. Fuchsia calls for fresh pasta in this recipe, but the dried pasta will work just fine. Just remember that fresh noodles weigh much more when converting quantities for dry noodles.

First I took more of my butterflied chicken breast and sautéed it in a grill pan in a small amount of olive oil. Then I let it cool and gently shredded it with a fork. Fuchsia recommends smacking the cooked chicken with a rolling pin (a mallet or you bare fist will work too!) to loosen the chicken fibers, making it easier to shred. This little trick worked extremely well!

While the chicken was cooking I prepared my noodles, mixed in a small amount of oil, and set them out to cool as well. Unlike Italian food, Sichuan noodles are always cooked “well done” instead of to al dente.

The recipe called for blanched bean sprouts, but I discovered mine had gone bad. Those suckers don’t last as long as I wish they would. However, I just picked up some lovely radish from The Local Farmstand, and thought they would be a great replacement for the “crunch factor” of the bean sprouts and they always add fantastic complementing color.

Next up I whipped up the awesome sauce of light and dark soy sauce, black Chinese vinegar, sesame paste, sesame oil, sugar, garlic, ground/roasted Sichuan pepper, and chili oil.

I mixed up the noodles with the sauce, transferred to my serving bowl, then topped it with the shredded chicken, sliced radish, and scallions. Besides looking fairly fantastic, it happened to taste delicious. The sesame paste gave it a rich peanut-like flavor and the dish of course had the common Sichuan sweet/spicy/savory flavor combo going. Watch out for the large chunks of garlic. My breath was kickin’ later that day.

Kung Pao is great because it has significant heat, a touch of sweetness, stark flavor/texture contrast from the roasted peanuts, and an altogether pleasing aesthetic. But I’ve never made it at home, and I’ve never seen it on an “authentic” Sichuan menu. I’ve pretty much been relegated to ordering the fast-food Chinese delivery version. I was interested to see how this compared – the ingredients appeared to be the same as the mass-produced version, though this dish of course utilizes the Sichuan peppercorn, and the preparation method could result in something very different than the dish to which I’m accustomed. Let’s find out.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cooking Sichuan, and cooking with a wok in general, is that you need to get your shit mise en place put together before you start cooking. I threw about 1/2 cup of raw peanuts (from Super H Mart in Duluth) in the oven at 350 and amassed all my other ingredients: soy sauces, vinegar, rice wine, sesame oil, potato starch, dried chiles, Sichuan pepper, ginger, garlic, the bottom part of the scallions, and some butterflied chicken breast from the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market. BHFM had a great price on this chicken, and the butterflied version is perfect because your Sichuan recipes are always going to have you cutting thin, small strips of meat. This saves you some time, money, and I don’t see any degradation in quality over a full breast.

I roasted the peanuts for 15 minutes, and they came out a little overcooked. I don’t mind them this way, but I should have taken them out after 10 minutes, or perhaps only cooked them at 300 instead of 350 degrees.

Aaron (my roommate/saucier for those that don’t know me personally) was kind enough to create the marinade for the chicken, as well as the sauce, while I prepared the vegetables and the chicken. I could improve at cutting more uniform slices of chicken so that everything cooks evenly.

I started by cooking the Sichuan pepper and the cut chiles in peanut oil over a high flame. They will cook/burn quickly, so I recommend having your wok very hot and only cooking them for 10-15 seconds before you add the chicken. Be sure to stir rapidly throughout this process.

After the chicken cooked for 30 seconds or so, I added the garlic/ginger/scallions and let that cook until the chicken was almost cooked through, again, stirring very rapidly over as high of heat as possible.

Above – now I’m ready to add the sauce.

The sauce has now been added, and I let it cook for about 20-30 seconds so that it would thicken up. The potato starch is what is causing it to thicken into a great sauce. At this point, I removed the wok from the heat, stirred in the peanuts, and plated.

Here it is plated, ready to be devoured. I thought it was very good, and I think Aaron agreed, but be forewarned that this meal brought some serious heat. I love spicy food, but this was getting close to the “hiccup threshold”.

The potato starch marinade on the chicken resulted in a fantastic texture, and the chicken was still tender and moist, I thought it was cooked very well. The sauce was a little different than what I’m used to in a Kung Pao, having a slightly thicker texture, and a bit sweeter than I’m accustomed. The ginger was a nice touch, though sometimes it can overpower a bite if you get a large slice. The addition of the Sichuan pepper is amazing – the smoky/wood flavor and aromatics that it adds is incomparable. I enjoyed this version much more than any other I’ve had at a restaurant. That could be the home-cooking talking though. :-)

If you like Kung Pao, I definitely recommend trying Fuchsia’s recipe.

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We’re all familiar with deep frying, where you totally submerge food in hot oil, but dry frying is more similar to stir frying. When dry frying, the food is continually stirred in the wok with a small amount of oil until it appears almost dried out. More details on dry frying are available here (and of course in Fuchsia’s cookbook).

Getting started – I’ve got some green beans from Ranch 99, some ground beef (the recipe calls for pork, but no big deal), some Tianjin preserved vegetables, soy sauce, Shaoxing rice wine, sesame oil, peanut oil (for frying), salt, and crushed & toasted Sichuan pepper.

Rinse, trim, and pat dry. Why dry them? Because we’re about to fry the hell out of them and the oil will splatter you otherwise.

Extreme close-up of the Tianjin preserved vegetable. It’s quite pungent. I’ve seen some people say that you should rinse it due to how salty it is, but I am starting to think it’s good just the way it is. Just keep this salt content in mind when it comes time to season your dish with salt. You may not need to add much salt, if any.

First we dry fry the beans over medium-high heat. I cooked mine for about 7 minutes, stirring constantly, waiting for them to get slightly browned and shriveled.

You can see the texture we’re going for, especially on a few of them. I probably took mine off a bit too early; they could have used another minute or two I think. When you’re satisfied, remove them from the heat.

Add your meat/rice wine/soy sauce and cook for just a minute, then add the Tianjin. Another minute after that (stirring all the while), add back the green beans, and just give it another minute or so.

Plate, season with Sichuan pepper and salt, and get down on it.