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.

Mapo Tofu

Mapo Tofu (麻婆豆腐) is a tingling and spicy dish from Sichuan, a region known for fiery hot chili peppers and tingling Szechuan peppers. Normally made with minced pork, my variation today is made without meat.

Method

Make a simple red oil. Heat up 1 to 2 cups or two of oil. When hot, remove from heat and add a lot of dried chili flakes and whole Szechuan peppercorns. Toss in some other aromatics like scallions. Let it sizzle for 10 minutes or so. Strain out the bright red hot oil. You can grind the solids into a spice mix paste for future use.

Cut tofu into small cubes. Mince garlic and ginger (optional). Heat up oil in a pot and toss in these aromatics. When they are fragrant, add some bean sauce and stir. Then add soy sauces and a good amount of the red oil. Add tofu and stir. Pour in rice wine to cover the tofu two-thirds the way and stir.

Lower the heat to medium and let it simmer until the liquid reduces down in ten minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. Add scallions and more soy sauce toward the end if desired.

Notes

Sichuan cuisine uses a lot of red oil, which has a very complex flavor. The soul of the oil is the dried red chili pepper and Szechuan pepper, also called "prickly ash". The enormous amount of chilies makes the oil (and everything it touches) both chokingly hot and red. The Szechuan pepper numbs the tongue a little bit, so you get a tingling sensation. It also has its own subtle fragrance.

Making a true Sichuan red oil involves stir frying a lot of dried chili peppers and a lot more aromatics than Szechuan pepper and scallion. These include ginger slices, star anise, cloves, cardamom and cinnamon peel. This alone is worth its own discussion.

Mapo tofu is normally made with minced pork and soft tofu, which is a great combination. Here, I made it with firm tofu because I didn't have any minced pork in the fridge. It also holds itself really well in a little pot.

You'll notice that this dish looks greasy from the red oil. If it freaks you out, you can add some cornstarch mixed with cold water to thicken the sauce. 

One final note, Szechuan is an alternate spelling for Sichuan, from the old days. It's still widely used in America.