Ma La

The food of Sichuan is often referred to as having ma la, numbing heat - the heat coming from chilies and the numbing from Sichuan pepper.  From what I've read in my new Hunanese book they tend to stick just to the heat though.  There's one dish in the book that has both though and even takes its name from the combination - hot and numbing chicken.  I'd been wanting to cook something with chicken thighs for a while and so this, along with the chili and Sichuan pepper, caught my eye and I decided to give it a bash.  The dish starts with the chicken being deep fried and after my recent efforts with beef with cumin I made sure that I followed the recipe to the letter this time.  As much as I like cornflour thickened sauces the idea of the glossy, oily chicken appealed more.

Hot and Numbing Chicken, serves 2 with rice and vegetables

Ingredients

360gr boneless chicken thighs, with skin

2 spring onions

1 red pepper

1 red chili

1 ts Sichuan pepper, I like the whole seeds but you may want to crush it up.

Marinade

1 tb water

1 tb cornflour

1 tb rice wine

1 tb dark soy sauce

Sauce

3 tb water

1 tb wine/rice vinegar

1 tb light soy sauce

1/2 tb cornflour

Method

First off cut the chicken into bite-sized cubes, maybe 2cm across, and mix with the marinade.  I left mine for about an hour.

Heat a couple of inches of oil in wok (about 300ml) and heat till hot.  Add the chicken and stir till the pieces separate, once they have remove to a plate.  Let the oil get back up to temperature and then add the chicken back in frying for 3 minutes, till starting to brown and cooked through, then remove to a plate.

Drain the wok leaving just the coating of oil to stir fry the dish in.

Cut the peppers and spring onions into similar sized pieces to the chicken - 2cm cubes and 2cm lengths - and slice the chilies into thin, diagonal slices.  Add the veg, chilies and Sichuan pepper to the wok and story fry for a minute.

Add the chicken, stir briefly and then add the sauce.  Fry enough just for the sauce to thicken and coat then add a splash of sesame oil and serve.

For a side dish I adapted another recipe from the book.  I stir fried a red chili, a sliced clove of garlic and maybe a teaspoon or two of salted black beans for 30 seconds and then added half a pack of water spinach/kang kong and fried until starting to wilt.  This was finished with a splash of white wine vinegar and a little salt.

So how was it?  The chilies I'm currently getting from Sainsbury seems to have zero heat though and so it wasn't very hot.  On top of that I didn't notice a lot of numbing from the Sichuan pepper either. It was still a really tasty dish though, the deep fried cubes of thigh had such a fantastic texture and flavour.  So much more juicy than the same thing would have been with breast meat.  The vinegar also added a nice tart compliment to the sweetness of the meat, pepper and onion. 

The stir fried greens were very nice too, black adds a salty, earthy taste to the already earthy water spinach and the vinegar in this dish worked well with he hot and numbing chicken.

All in all a fine meal.

Comments

[ros]

Recently Goon has been trying cooking from a book of Chinese dishes. He seems to think it's a reativey easy cuisine to master. Sadly I think the book was a bit of a duff purchase and the food is disappointingly bland. I'm going to get him to try this. The method looks simple enough and if you liked it, it has got to be better than the recipes from our book.

[Joshua Armstrong]

I'd really recommend the Fuchsia Dunlop books for Chinese recipes. I'm yet to cook anything from them that hasn't truned out great. Actually, that's a lie, I found the crescent dumplings a bit bland but I've been told they're meant to be that way and so I blame my palate rather than the books.