I Love Sichuan Food

A few days back, Ann emailed me a photo of a Chinese fish dish along with a recipe and said she wanted me to make it. Just quickly glancing at it, it was obviously just the classic mapo dofu over fish instead of rice. Easy enough and a dish I haven't cooked in more than 20 years when I was teaching myself Chinese fundamentals.

Here you see my mise en place. Ann accuses me of doing this just for photographic reasons, but after years of seeing me operate in the restaurant kitchen, she ought to know better. I always have and I always will get all my ingredients together ready to cook before lighting any flame (and you should too!) From the top left dish: Shaoxing wine, light soy sauce, fermented black beans and broad bean paste, black mushrooms, cornstarch slurry, and tree ear mushrooms. On the righthand plate: tofu (I prefer mine firm; eat what you like) and green onions. And clockwise from the red chile paste on the other plate: preserved vegetable, ginger, garlic, and bamboo shoots in chile oil. You don't see the ground pork or the catfish, which are still in the fridge at this point.

A word about ingredients. Sichuan cooking is famous for use of preserved ingredients that are often spicy. You will almost always find dried, pickled, or salted ingredients in Sichuan food, and these are huge flavors that appeal to my palate. I am in love with the inelegantly named preserved vegetable, a salted mustard green, more about which on the restaurant blog. This was Ann's first encounter with this spicy, salty bit of goodness, which now comes conveniently packaged in single serving foil packets, and she loves it as well.

So, here's an awful photo of a scrumptious dish. I started by dredging the catfish lightly in cornstarch and then searing it on both sides. This gives the fish a nice crust and then it helps thicken the sauce when the fish goes back in. After removing the fish, I built the sauce by cooking the ground pork with garlic and ginger over very high flame, then added the other flavorings except the tofu and green onions. A couple of ladles of chicken stock went in next and then the fish. Once the fish had cooked through, off to a warm plate it went while I added the tofu and half the green onions, then thickened the sauce with a little cornstarch slurry. The sauce went over the fish and the rest of the green onions on top. Yum!

A typical Sichuan sauce would most likely also contain Sichuan peppercorns, but I couldn't find mine. Bummer. I like their little electric numbing touch that the Chinese call la.