Red braised tofu (zhang gu ying you dou fu)

So. I'm still eating Szechuan and Hunanese food a lot. Maybe twice a week. As well as the recipes (generally from Fuschia Dunlop, but with some diversions into two or three other books I have) which I faithfully document on SDON I just do a general stir-fry with whatever is to hand. It's a great standby dish for week nights - take the vegetables you have in the fridge and chop. Fry some fermented bean paste with some chopped garlic and ginger for a minute, add the vegetables and cook briefly and you're done. Put a splash of soy sauce and sesame oil and eat with a pitta from the freezer (always have pitta to hand in the freezer - essential!) instead of rice and it only takes five minutes.

action shot of me chopping garlics

But it is nice to try 'proper' recipes. This one if from FD's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

• garlic, ginger, red chilli, soy sauce, stock, thickener
• tofu (book suggests deep-fried puffs)
• some veg (+ shittake mushrooms (optional))
• spring onions (obviously)
• red chilli

Fry the garlic and ginger in some oil and when fragrant add some stock. Add the tofu and cook for five minutes. Then add your soy sauce (a decent amount), chopped red chilli, veg and shittakes. Add the spring onions and thicken. Simple eh.

For a side side we had fried cucumber. The photo in the book (below) pairs them with purple perilla flowers but I just fried them in discs with a little dried chilli and a drop of vinegar at the end. Very nice. I included courgette too as it was lying around.

OK I admit I'm constantly jonesing for fermented bean paste, but to me this just wasn't as tasty as mapo tofu and the like. It was decent, and nothing a little chilli oil couldn't improve but not quite scaling the hights of some of the other classics. The cucumber thing is a keeper though.

Szechuan feast

peanuts on the boil

You need to eat with lots of other people to get the best of Szechuan food. All this food fed ten or eleven people.

Aromatic peanuts (lu hua sheng) are just raw peanuts boiled with fennel seeds, star anise, Szechuan pepper, cloves and cinnamon for forty minutes. A good thing to have on the table before the meal starts. There's a moments confusion when you bite into them and find they're starchy and glutinous and not crunchy but they are very nice and dead easy to do. You can taste the anise quite clearly.

Spring rolls were crafted by my expert co-cook from cabbage, carrot, spring onions, shiitake mushrooms, bean-sprouts and pickled bamboo shoots. Delicious, the mushrooms added a welcome chewiness and the bamboo crunch.

Steamed aubergine (hong you qie zi) is again, super easy. Slice the aubergine (I omit the salting stage often specified by cooks/books including FD and have never had any problems) and put in a steamer with any flavourings you like. We went for fermented black beans, pickled chopped chilli and dried chilli flakes (just Turkish ones) but you could of course go for ginger, garlic, chopped spring onions, pickled vegetables or anything you fancy.

before

The wonder of the steamed aubergine is its texture: nearly as satisfying as a vigorously fried version, but thirstily drunk on water vapour rather than oil. An unexpectedly sweet smell emanated from this. They exuded lots of liquid which took on a sugary, malty taste that combined well with the spice of the chillies.

after

Cucumber salad (qiang huang gua) was just cucumber with the middle scooped out dressed with toasted dried chilli, Szechuan pepper and sesame oil. I forgot to smack these!

Mopo tofu - we had Hunan style with shiitake but sans meat to accommodate vegetarian brethren/sistren.

these are about 70p from Chinese supermarket - get involved!

The recipe in FD's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province specifies no less that four different preparations of chilli - chilli-bean paste, dried chilli, fresh chilli and salted chilli. Amazing. Check a full recipe for mapo tofu.

all the flavourings ready for adding to the tofu

the finished article

Twice-cooked pork (hui guo rou) is normally done with pork belly I think. I had some fatty chops  described as Chinese chops or something similar (they were streaked with fat and not your classic bacon shape one) and used those. You gently poach the pork until it's just cooked, then cool. It's then sliced thinly and fried till the fat runs. Chilli bean paste, black beans, sweet wheaten paste (I used Hoisin which a guy in a Vietnamese supermarket in Dalston suggested) are added and then spring onions chucked in at the end. I also went for some red pepper too, which gives the dish a bit of colour. They'll need a few extra minutes to start to soften.

Veg-wise we had cabbage, kale and bean-sprouts stir-fried with garlic and dressed with toasted sesame oil and Chinkiang vinegar.

in a pretty pink bowl

All in all a lovely meal to have with friends.

Braised fish and tofu (dou fu shao yu)

This dish of braised fish and beancurd is fairly similar to the mapo tofu I made a week or two ago. It doesn’t have any minced meat in, rather some lumps of fish that are made extra tasty by being first fried. As Szechuan is an inland area the fish eaten there seem to be freshwater carp and catfish. FD recommends various substitutes (mullet here) but I had some odds and sods in the freezer which needed eating up so I used some snapper pieces that had been maturing in a drawer since their impromptu and purposeless purchase in Dalston over a year ago. They worked fine!

This one is of course another winner and tastes as might be expected. You get to enjoy the lovely soft beancurd, the hot and numbing spice combo and then the fried crust of the fish, now soaked in the delicious braising liquid.

Ingredient used fairly often in Szechuan recipes are the preserved vegetable ya cai (similar to the Tidjan ones available in shops) and preserved salted chillies. The Tianjin vegetables are pretty cheap and come in a pretty earthenware pot (visuals below). They have a real strong, salty taste and should be used almost as a seasoning I feel, chopped up small and mixed in with meat or veg. I don't have any Szechuan salted chillies yet so I substituted some pickled Turkish ones chopped up small. These two ingredients were tossed in with some stir-fried Chinese cabbage type thing (sorry, have no idea of real name - like a pale yellow/green long lettuce shape with a watery stem) and dressed with a minor sprinkling of sesame oil, which made a nice vegetable side dish. Like the mapo tofu this sauce was composed of stock and thickened. Scatter with spring onions greens and eat with rice. Super hearty.

Szechuan season - pock-marked mother Chen's beancurd (mapo tofu)

Why oh why have I only just got around to getting the ingredients needed for cooking Szechuan food at home? What a fool. I got the ubiquitous (and excellent) book by Fuscia Dunlop a while ago but a quick read on a work-bound bus gave me the impression that a large amount of obscure or hard to obtain ingredients were needed for even the most basic of recipes. When I browsed it more thoroughly one lazy weekend morning I realised this wasn’t true at all. What you really, really, need is not much – fermented broad-bean and chilli paste (dou ban jiang), Szechuan peppercorn and dried chillis pop up in most things, with Shaoxing wine, preserved vegetables and Chinkiang vinegar forming a second rank of importance.

I’ve been eating in the amazing Szechuan restaurants London has to offer and evangelising to friends and family about them but finally I can do it at home! And bonus of bonuses – it’s dead quick and very easy.

tofu - most misunderstood of ingredients

Straight into a classic – Mapo tofu. My, what wondrous interplay of ingredients! Feel the heat, feel the soft tofu, taste the salt and savour of the bean paste (best ingredient ever) and then feel the heat again. Lips kissed by the spices for seconds afterwards. Bliss.

• 500g tofu
• bunch of spring onions
• chilli bean paste
• Szechuan peppercorns + dried chillis (I used Vietnamese medium ones and they were grand)
• fermented black beans (not essential I found)
• thickener (potato flour recommend by FD but I used corn flour very happily)
• light soy

Soak the tofu in chunks in boiling water. Toast SPs and chilli and grind down to a powder. Fry the bean paste in oil, add chillis and fermented black beans. I did a vegetarian version but traditionally here you would add minced beef and fry it (or pork and shiitake mushrooms for a Hunanese version apparently).

Add the tofu, and stock (veg bouillon is fine) and simmer for five minutes. Add the spring onions, soy sauce and the thickening agent. 'Break the rawness' of the spring onions for a few minutes then dish it out. Suggested serving: cover with massive amounts of ground chilli and SP.

Delicious with some greens on the side - cucumber and kale in this case softened in the pan and dressed with sesame oil.