Fedizens who enjoy Sichuan food:

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

Which restaurant is your favorite? Which dish do you order most often? What makes it special?

If your favorite restaurant has a website, post a link to the menu so I can decide what to cook!

I'm learning new dishes by perusing menus from around the world, "ordering" something that looks interesting and then trying to figure out how to make it.

Most of the Chinese food I've eaten has been Cantonese, so help me out.

#cooking #Chinese #Sichuan

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

Status: pondering the meaning of

"fry doubanjiang and hot pot seasoning if you are using with slow fire until the red turns red"

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle look into fuschia Dunlop’s work for Sichuan food

Sichuan food to me is unique among Chinese cuisines for having ‘salads’. Potato shred salads, beancurd shred salads, cold chicken with chillies

Famous dishes like twice cooked pork, and ‘saliva chicken’ (horrible name but in Chinese means so good you salivate)

All have Sichuan techniques and ingredients (they use rapeseed oil, which is a distinct flavor), and of course more chillies and peppercorns

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle there’s a technique of tempering spices in oil across many major Asian cuisines that does exactly this. You’re roasting the spices over low heat in an oil.

When you smell a stronger fragrance or you see a visible layer separation or color change, that usually means you’re ready to move on to the next step

Not doing stuff like this will mean your food won’t have the same depth as at restaurants

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle I’ll have to see the whole recipe to see if it’s the same (tho it is odd they recommend a hotpot seasoning, possibly a shortcut)

This is the best English resource I can find on what I’m describing

It exists in India and some middle eastern cooking as well

How to Cook Dried Chilli Paste | “Pecah Minyak” or ‘Oil Splitting’ - Nomadette

How to master the art of "pecah minyak" or "oil splitting" and properly cook dried chilli paste in Malay cooking.

Nomadette (nomadette.com)

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@skinnylatte Thanks. There's a similar idea in Indian cuisine called tarka or tadka. It looks like this is common in Sichuan cuisine also.

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle yep!

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@skinnylatte I'm just at the stage of looking at a lot of random recipes to get a general sense of the whole thing and the techniques. I haven't settled on a specific recipe to try yet.

I started cooking Cantonese dishes in August, and was surprised at how easy it was to make something of restaurant quality (compared to, say, Indian which took me years to get the hang of).

Sichuan, however, is something I've rarely even eaten and appears to be very different from Cantonese.

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle oh they’re all so extremely different. Just like different types of Indian are also different (my fave Indian cuisine is Kongunadu from south India. Check out Kannamma Cooks blog)

I’m from a part of canton that is not Cantonese, and the food is completely different (flavorful origins documentary one Netflix features it, in season 1..)

Sichuan is functionally a whole other thing

And the ‘8 imperial cuisines of China’ (and the thousands of other)

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@skinnylatte Thanks for the link - this looks super useful. I managed to get my hands on some doubanjiang but have never cooked with it before.

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle most Chinese restaurants abroad are Cantonese, they migrated first

In places with recent Chinese migration you can find more Sichuan and other foods

Depends on where you are! Where I am in SF, I barely get non-Cantonese food (a few here and there) but suburbs like Fremont, San Jose have tons more

If you have a location I can make some recs. New York’s flushing Chinatown is massive

So is Monterey park in Southern California. For regional non Cantonese Chinese foods

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle chinese cooking demystified, made with lau and woks of life and red cook should set you up for a lot of Chinese cooking

It leans Cantonese but those are my faves

Spices N Pans on YouTube for Singaporean / Malaysian Chinese cooking (southern style)

Lucas Sin

Kenji’s The wok is a good cookbook that will give you a lot of info on techniques. Not exclusively Sichuan but he has a lot of the classics

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@skinnylatte I haven't been to a restaurant since March 2020 and I'm not likely to get to one soon, which is why I started re-creating meals from home. We're in rural France.

Oddly enough, one of the last places I ate out was in SF just before lockdown (we were re-routed via there as flights were starting to cancelled) and ate at a Sichuan place in one of the asian parts of town. No idea what it was called.

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@skinnylatte Of the Four Great Traditions, I'd never heard of two until a few weeks ago Looking forward to trying Lu and Huaiyang when I'm ready to move on from Sichuan.

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@skinnylatte Thanks for all the tips. Bookmarked and will follow up!

Kate Nyhan

@dentangle
I think you would like this book
http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/books/the-food-of-sichuan/

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@kdnyhan Thanks! Have added it to my list.

Adrianna Tan

@dentangle ah ok!

well paris has a bunch of interesting chinese places these days. it has homemade tofu (best tofu, you can buy takeout), many many sichuan restaurants as well you could buy back to a hotel if yo'ure ever there

dusseldorf has a HUGE sichuan restaurant scene

How China’s hottest social media app turned Düsseldorf into a foodie destination

Düsseldorf restaurants have seen a surge in Chinese tourists after “weekend trip to Düsseldorf” became a noticeable trend.

Rest of World (restofworld.org)

possibly the most exciting one in all of europe except london

paris also interestingly has incredible hotpot and ramen (kodawari)

all the best!

Delib

@dentangle

This week, I refilled my pepper grinder with a mixture of 1/4 Sichuan pepper kernals, and 3/4 black pepper; two different plant species I believe. The Sichuan numb or tingle the mouth, so I find it a bit bothersome, but mixing a bit in seems good. I am not eating nightshades (like cayenne) any more, so am stepping up other sorts of spices.

Brett Sheffield (he/him)

@Delib Aye. Sichuan "peppercorns" are apparently not from the pepper bush at all, whereas white, black and red pepper are all the same thing processed differently.