Sichuan Feast

Finally getting around to posting on my Sichuan feast from Mother's Day. After J and Little let me sleep in and presented me with flowers and breakfast treats, my only request was that we do a fun cooking project from a pretty cool cookbook that I checked out from the library (which is now almost overdue and I must renew, crap), Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking. Two things that I liked about this cookbook: it has a rather nice index in the front of cooking techniques, ingredients, and equipment to ensure success, and the recipes are all wonderfully simple (aside from the occasional hard to find ingredient).

One of our favorite Sichuan dishes is Dan Dan noodles (and the reason I checked out this book in the first place. We have a recipe from Cooks Illustrated that is good, but I always felt the recipe was pretty Americanized (like many of CI's Asian recipes). I read through Land of Plenty, educated myself on the staples of a Sichuan pantry, and made a rather detailed shopping list. We drove out to 82nd Avenue to Fubonn market to pick up the necessary ingredients. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, the "facing-heaven" dried chiles that are a staple in Sichuan dishes were nowhere to be found (a post-market internet search revealed that some import issues make them all but scarce in the US). We subbed dried chiles that we could find at the store and I think it turned out alright. Among the other staples that we purchased, rice vinegar, dark soy sauce, black vinegar, Shaohshing rice cooking wine, Sichuan peppercorns, preserved vegetables (mustard tubers), and sesame paste. Oh and I shouldn't forget the fresh noodles. Yum!

The first step was to make a chile oil with the crushed, dried chiles by getting the oil hot in a wok, letting it cool to a certain temperature, and pouring it over the dried chiles. It made a ton of oil, but apparently it keeps for a very long time in a cool dark place. The next step was to toast and grind the Sichuan peppercorns. The pepper has a wild smell and lends a distinct taste to the dish -- sort of citrus and spice. After the peppercorns started smoking, we put them in the coffee grinder and then sifted to weed out any large pieces of debris. Much of the flavor doesn't actually come from the peppercorn, but from the husk, so when you look at it closely there's a lot of little sticks and flakes that would make for an unappealing texture in the dish. 

Finally, we got down to cooking. We fried about 1tsp. of the Sichuan pepper in 1T of peanut oil until hot and added the 2T preserved veggies until fragrant. We then added about 1/4lb of beef, some soy sauce until the beef turned brown and crispy. Then stirred up a sauce of Sichuan pepper, sesame paste, soy, chili oil, vinegar and cooking wine. We put the fresh noodles and the sauce in the hot wok and tossed it around until warm. The finished noodle dish was pretty amazing, unlike anything I've ever tasted, and really quite easy. Garnished with some scallions, it was perfect. And my new camera captured the details perfectly -- I'm super excited about that too.

As a side dish, we stir fried veggies -- peas, bell pepper, carrots, tomato and cucumber. Next time we'll use significantly less oil than the recipe calls for on the veggies. They were swimming in it at the end. We added a little homemade chile oil on the noodles for some kick and washed it down with ice cold Sapporo. Couldn't have asked for better results with our first stab at authentic Sichuan cooking. I think next time, we'll tinker with the sauce just a bit, but otherwise, I wouldn't change a thing!