Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (32 page)

RUSTIC STEAMED SQUASH WITH SPICY BLACK BEAN SAUCE
XIANG CUN NAN GUA
鄉村南瓜

In rural China, bowls of seasoned ingredients are often steamed over rice in the same pot, to economize on fuel. This is my attempt to recreate one such dish served by my chef friend Lan Guijun in his Village Cook restaurant in Chengdu. He used a pumpkin, but the same method also works very well with butternut squash.

3 tbsp cooking oil

2 tbsp Sichuan chilli bean paste

1 tsp finely chopped ginger

1 tsp finely chopped garlic

1 tbsp fermented black beans, rinsed and drained

½ tsp sugar

1¼ lb (500g) butternut squash or pumpkin

2 spring onions, green parts only, finely sliced

Heat a seasoned wok over a high flame. Add the oil, swirl it around, then add the chilli bean paste. Reduce the heat to medium and stir-fry gently until the oil is red and fragrant. Add the ginger, garlic and black beans and stir-fry until you can smell their fragrances. Stir in the sugar, then put everything into a small dish and set aside.

Peel the squash or pumpkin and discard the pulp and seeds. Cut evenly into slices about ⅛ in (½cm) thick. Lay the slices neatly in a china bowl. Spoon the prepared spicy sauce over the squash or pumpkin, place the uncovered bowl in a steamer and steam at high heat for about 15 minutes, until the vegetable is tender. Scatter with the spring onions and serve in the steaming bowl.

ROOT VEGETABLES

In China, only the desperate consider potatoes, sweet potatoes and other roots to be staple foods. For everyone else, they are made into seasoned dishes to be eaten with rice or noodles. Potatoes have a much lesser role in Chinese cooking than they do in many Western cuisines. They may be added to a meat stew, or cut into slivers or slices and stir-fried, but even mashed potato (on the rare occasions when it is served) is normally accompanied by rice. In many parts of China, the vegetable is still known as “foreign taro” (
yang yu
), because of its relatively recent introduction into the Chinese food system.

Carrots are sometimes eaten, but almost invariably to add a little color to other ingredients rather than as the main event: they too are commonly known as “barbarian radishes” (
hu luo bo
), a reference to their foreign origins. More widely used than either potatoes and carrots are two ancient Chinese crops: daikon and taro. The radish may be eaten raw as a salad, pickled, stir-fried, or added to soups and stews; taro, with its silky, milky texture, is usually boiled, steamed or braised, though it may also be fashioned into deep-fried dumplings.

STIR-FRIED POTATO SLIVERS WITH CHILLI AND SICHUAN PEPPER
QIANG TU DOU SI
熗土豆絲

In Sichuanese cuisine, this is the most common method of cooking potatoes, yet it seems revolutionary to many Westerners because the potatoes remain a little crunchy when they are served. If you’ve never seen the dish before, you may find it hard to believe that it’s actually made from potatoes. In restaurants, the potato slivers are usually rinsed in cold water, which washes away some of their starch, but Chinese friends who cook potatoes this way at home often don’t bother. If you don’t rinse them, they will become a little sticky as you stir-fry them—not so elegant, but delicious.

You can make this with any kind of potato, the taste and texture of the final dish varying according to the type. Don’t worry if your slivers are not as fine or even as those in the photograph, they’ll still taste wonderful.

4–5 dried chillies

14 oz (400g) potatoes

Salt

2 tbsp cooking oil

½ tsp whole Sichuan pepper

½ tsp sesame oil (optional)

Snip the chillies in half and discard their seeds as far as possible.

Peel the potatoes. Take one and cut a thin slice from one side. Lay the rest of the potato on its now-flat side on your board, and cut into slices, as thin and as even as possible. Spread the slices out in an overlapping line, then cut them into very fine slivers. Repeat with the other potatoes. If you are not cooking them immediately, cover them in slightly salted cold water so they don’t discolor and shake them dry in a colander before cooking.

Heat a seasoned wok over a high flame, then add the oil and swirl it around. Swiftly throw in the chillies and Sichuan pepper and stir-fry briefly until the spices smell wonderful and the chillies are darkening but not burned, then add the potatoes. Continue to stir-fry for a few minutes, until the potatoes are hot and no longer taste raw, but retain a little crispness, adding salt to taste. (If you have cut very fine slivers, you can do this over a high flame; if your slivers are not very fine, reduce the heat and stir-fry for a little longer.)

Remove from the heat, stir in the sesame oil, if using, then serve.

VARIATIONS

Stir-fried potato slivers with spring onion

If you prefer not to use chilli and Sichuan pepper, you can stir-fry the potato slivers in unseasoned oil, adding salt to taste and a small handful of finely sliced spring onion greens just before you take the wok off the heat (the spring onions only need to be stir-fried for a few seconds, until you can smell their fragrance). Then add the sesame oil and serve. This is a most delectable variation.

Stir-fried potato slivers with green bell pepper

Omit the chilli and Sichuan pepper and stir-fry the potato slivers with a handful of green pepper slivers in unseasoned oil, adding salt to taste and a small handful of finely sliced spring onion greens just before you take the wok from the heat. Use about one-fifth of the amount of green bell pepper slivers as potato slivers.

Stir-fried potato slivers with vinegar

Rinse the potato slivers in water and shake them dry. Stir-fry them with a few slivers of green pepper, for color. Season with salt and a little light soy sauce and add 1–2 tsp Chinkiang vinegar towards the end of the cooking time.

STIR-FRIED MASHED POTATO WITH PRESERVED MUSTARD GREENS
SUAN CAI CHAO TU DOU NI
酸菜炒土豆泥

Mashed potatoes are eaten as an occasional side dish in China and they are usually served almost soupy, with a lot of added stock and scattered with spring onion. This version comes from the Wolong nature reserve in the mountainous borderlands of Sichuan, where I came across a young chef, Peng Rui, who had studied at the same Chengdu cooking school as me. Peng Rui took me foraging in the hills and we spent some time cooking in the tiny restaurant he ran with his mother. One day he decided to cook up a potato feast, an eccentric idea in China, where potatoes are normally considered to be a peripheral and rather unexciting food. He made dry-fried potato strips with chilli and Sichuan pepper; fine, crisp-fried “pine-needle potatoes” with a sprinkling of white sugar; deep-fried, sweetened potato balls; potato pancake with spring onion; and this fabulous potato mash with salted mustard greens, a sort of Chinese bubble-and-squeak. We ate all this with a rich stew of red-braised beef. And rice, of course.

The mixture of potatoes and preserved vegetables was so good that I’ve often made it since with leftover potatoes. Peng Rui cooked it in a wok, but you can of course make it in a flat-bottomed frying pan if you prefer. I have a feeling these potatoes would go very well with duck. Roast duck and preserved mustard greens, after all, are a classic Chinese combination that tends to show up in fried rice and noodle dishes. Just before serving the dish you may, if you wish, sprinkle the cooked potatoes with a little ground roasted Sichuan pepper.

12 oz (350g) leftover cooked potatoes

2½ oz (60g) Sichuanese
ya cai
or “snow vegetable”

3 tbsp cooking oil or lard

Salt

Ground white pepper

2 tbsp finely sliced spring onion greens

Mash the potatoes if they are not already mashed. Chop the preserved vegetable, if not already chopped.

Heat a seasoned wok over a high flame, then add the oil or lard and swirl it around. Add the preserved vegetable and stir-fry briefly until it smells delicious. Add the potato and fry until hot and fragrant, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. You can either stir-fry constantly, adding some stock or water if you like a more runny consistency, or leave the potato to brown before turning it in the wok.

Add the spring onions, stir-fry for a few moments longer and serve.

PENG RUI’S POTATO SLIVER BING
PENG RUI TU DOU BING
彭鋭土豆餅

Bing
is a word that originally referred to all kinds of foods made from wheat flour; nowadays it is used to describe edible things that are round and flattish, from the mandarin pancakes used to wrap Peking duck, to squidgy deep-fried sweet potato balls, steamed “lotus leaf” buns and flatbreads.

In this recipe, which I learned on that distant afternoon in the Wolong nature reserve with young chef Peng Rui, potato slivers are fried into a golden pancake and scattered with Sichuan pepper to serve.

9 oz (250g) potatoes

3 tbsp finely sliced spring onion greens

Salt

3 tbsp cooking oil

About ¼ tsp ground roasted Sichuan pepper

Peel the potatoes, cut them into thin slices, then fine slivers. Place them in a colander, rinse under the cold tap, then shake dry. Mix in the spring onion greens and salt to taste.

Heat a seasoned wok or frying pan over a high flame. Add the oil and swirl it around, then spread the potatoes out around the hot surface. Reduce the heat and fry gently until the outside is golden and the potato slivers inside are cooked but still a little crunchy. Flip the potato cake over: the easiest way to do this is to loosen it with a spatula, invert a dinner plate over the wok or pan, then quickly turn the wok over so that the potato cake ends up on the plate. Then slide the potato cake back into the wok or frying pan, and continue to cook until the other side is golden.

Serve with a sprinkling of ground Sichuan pepper, to taste.

MUSHROOMS

Many of the less developed regions of China produce magnificent wild mushrooms, which can be a highlight of visits to rural areas. Yunnan Province is particularly famed for its fungi which, dried, are now exported all over the world. But I’ve also had exotic and delicious varieties in other regions, such as the gelatinous, glassy little “ground ear” mushrooms served in a remote roadside restaurant in Guizhou, or the lyrically beautiful “eggs” of the phallic bamboo pith fungus that are gathered in the bamboo forests of southern Sichuan. Some of these more unusual mushrooms can be found, dried, in Chinese groceries abroad, but in fact even the most ordinary kinds taste divine when stir-fried the Chinese way with a little garlic and spring onion.

The most commonly used fresh mushrooms in southern China tend to be the oyster, enoki, shiitake and button mushrooms, which are often wokked with garlic and a little stock to bring out their umami flavors. A little chicken or pork, or a spoonful of lard or chicken fat, is a marvellous addition to mushroom dishes of this sort. Wood or cloud ear mushrooms are also common, although more often cooked as an accompaniment than as a dish in their own right. Tasteless, they are prized for their slippery-crisp texture and dark color, which can be a pretty contrast to green vegetables.