Cooking The Books

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.

Fuchsia Returns

My current most used cook book, and so the one that's appeared on the pages of this blog the most, is Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery.  Never before have I been so blown away by the recipes in a book, they're just so different from anything I've cooked before, so full of flavour, colour and texture.  Well she's written another book too, not recently but until recently I've not had it.  It's called The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook and where the first opened my eyes to the Sichuan cooking I'm hoping this will do the same for Hunanese cuisine.

I don't know a lot, well anything really, about the Hunan region and it's food but if the first recipe I've cooked is anything to go by I looking forward to learning more.  One of the only dishes I'd heard of from Hunan, well heard of in relation to the region anyway, is called Beef with Cumin.  I remember the first time I bought cumin, it must have been as a teenager, and with my first taste it suddenly dawned on me what the unmistakable taste was in so many curries.  Up until now it's not a flavour I've associated with Chinese food though - if that's not the perfect reason to try it I don't know what is.

Mince and Peas

Mince dishes, well specifically mince in sauce, do very little for me.  Recipes that many hold in high regard, old favourites like spag bol, cottage pie or lasagne, send shivers down my spine. This is all down to my mum's cooking.  My mum is by no means a bad cook, pretty much everything was cooked from scratch and there was always lots of veg, and her willingness for foreign foods has played a big part in my broadness of taste now.  She loved cooking with mince though and she would happily serve lasagne, spag bol and chili in the same week, and the week after, and the week after, and so on and so forth.  And so whilst the stir fries, fajitas and kebabs have left me loving all foods foreign I've got no time for mince.

Mince and peas holds fond memories for me though.  I've only had it a couple of times too, at about age 15 when working as a labourer on a Wolverhampton high rise council estate.  I was doing a couple of weeks work for a friend of my dad and every morning I'd leave my house in the Buckinghamshire countryside and make the hour journey up the motorway to the kind of estate I'd never seen before.  I'd spend a morning lifting and cutting blocks for block paving and then at lunch head to the chip shop where, alongside the various battered delicacies, you could pay 70p for a polystyrene plate of chips with a ladle of rich, beefy, salty mince and peas poured on top.  Whether it was the chips or the flavour enhancer laden gravy, something about that mince and peas didn't have the usual effect.

My Most Prized Cookbook

All my cookbooks bar one sit tucked away on a set of shelves in my kitchen where they're instantly accessible.  Tools of the trade to get dog-eared and splattered with food.  One of them is somewhat different to all the others though and so has pride of place on the living room shelves nestled amongst, come to think of it, some pretty random things: a couple of human bones, a nautilus shell, some mementos from The Fat Duck and a pickled shark - to name a few.

My girlfriend is half-Malaysian and a couple of years ago we went over there to visit her family.  As far as food goes it's by far and away the best food I've ever eaten on a holiday, or for any two weeks of my life for that matter.  As this blog shows I'm pretty partial to oriental food and over there, surprisingly, they tend to eat it all the time.  Noodles for breakfast isn't a sign you failed to finish your takeaway the night before, it's just normal everyday fodder.  Over the course of the holiday I many dishes stuck in my mind and I took loads of photos.

Later in that year I received a present from my girlfriend and opened up to find the most amazing handmade cookbook.  Leah had collated all our food related holiday photos and then scoured the web for recipes corresponding to the dishes in them.  It was such an amazing present and so nicely done, yet she still wonders why I don't have it in the kitchen getting greasy with all the others.

Anyway here's a few photos of inside the book, along with some others that are in the book.

One of the dishes that stuck in my mid the most from the trip was kangkong belacan.  Luckily Leah got a recipe for it in the book and so I thought I'd make and blog it for you.

Boiled Water Beef

I’ve been learning Mandarin for a while now.  Because of my love for Chinese food I’ve planned to go there in 2009 so a few months back I started on the language knowing that a lack of knowledge of it will severely impair any time there.  I’m not one for organised holidays so if I want to look after myself I need to be able to speak the lingo.  From a Westerner’s point of view the language is fairly daunting mainly because it’s written in symbols and tone plays such an important part.  Once you get beyond this though the grammar is actually really simple and, lacking the masses of verb conjugation you get with, say, Spanish, you can spend your time learning vocabulary.  As such you find yourself learning loads, even if your pronunciation would leave any Chinese speaker completely unable to understand what you’re saying.

Getting to the reason why I brought my Mandarin learning up and that’s the name of this dish.  In Mandarin (well pinyin anyway) the name of this dish is written shui zhu niu rou – water boiled beef – and it’s the first dish whose name I’ve actually understood in Chinese.  If you’re looking for some plain tasting you couldn’t be further off the track though and so it tends to be translated into English as Boiled Beef Slices in a Fiery Sauce.  This dish is from Sichuan and typically for a lot of the dishes in the region it has lots of heat both from the chili and the Sichuan peppercorn.  It’s from the same book the Mapo Dofu was, Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop, and is perfect if you’ve made that recipe as it utilises the same chili bean paste you use for that.

Shui Zhu Niu Rou - Boiled Beef Slices in a Fiery Sauce, for 2 people.

The Ingredients

1 Head Celery

4 Spring Onions

8-10 Dried Chillies

400gr Rump Steak

1 Tablespoon Rice Wine

2 Teaspoons Sichuan Peppercorns

3  Tablespoons Chili Bean Paste

750ml Chicken Stock

2 Tablespoons Dark Soy Sauce

4 Tablespoons Cornflour Mixed With 4 Tablespoons of Water

The Method

1. Chop the celery into 4cm by 1cm batons and cut the spring onions into similar length pieces.
2. Slice the beef thinly against the grain and marinate in the rice wine, the cornflour and water mixture and a little salt.
3. Heat some oil in a wok and add the chillies and the peppercorns frying until beginning to brown.  When they start to colour remove to a plate.  Once cool chop up into small pieces (see photo).
4. Heat more oil and stir fry the celery and spring onions until starting to go translucent.  Once it’s at this stage remove the vegetables to your serving bowl.
5. Add the chili bean paste to the wok and fry till fragrant and the oil has taken on the red colour.
6. Add the stock and soy and as soon as it’s boiling give the beef mixture a quick stir and pour it all into the wok.  Separate the pieces of beef and as soon as the stocks started to thicken from the cornflour pour it all over the celery and spring onions.
7. Quickly wash the wok then heat up again.  Once hot add some oil, maybe 3 tablespoons, and add the chopped up chillies and peppercorns.  Briefly fry then pour it, oil and all, over the top of your beef, it will spit a bit but that’s part of the fun.

Serve this dish with some boiled rice as there’s loads of liquid and the rice soaks it up beautifully.  This dish is spicy but no over the top and large amount of celery gives it a very earthy quality.