Dry Cooked Green Beans with Sichuan Pepper

Dry Cooked Green Beans with Sichuan Pepper is a dish from my wife's family. It involves a lot of Sichuan peppercorns, soy sauce and green beans. It's a very simple and country vegetable dish, best eaten with chopsticks to pick out the intensely flavorful beans from the whole Sichuan peppercorns.

Method

Heat up a fair amount of oil in a pan and throw in a handful of whole Sichuan peppercorns. Let them heat up to release flavor. Add green beans and stir. Add several splashes of soy sauce and stir. Lower the heat to low-medium and cover with a lid. Let it cook for 8 minutes. Give it a final stir before serving.

Notes

There should be enough liquid from the sizzling oil, bean moisture and soy sauce to allow for the beans to cook without the addition of water. They will soft and moist but not mushy. Adding soy sauce to sizzling oil with caramelize it and create a different (and better) flavor than that out of the bottle. Also, because no water was added, every flavor becomes more intense. Keep that in mind when adding the soy sauce.

This dish feels like a much simpler form of the well-known Sichuan dish, Dry Fried Green Beans (干煸四季豆), which involves quickly shallow frying the beans and uses more ingredients like minced preserved vegetable and/or pork. Nevertheless, the flavor is quite intense.

This cooking method can be used for cooking other green legumes in the pod like broad beans, string beans, and yard long beans. However, the time will probably need to be adjusted depending on the variety of bean used.