I’m afraid this blog post isn’t strictly a food pictorial like this one (the inspiration for which I explain here), because I didn’t document every single step. I only decided to make the dish at the last minute, I didn’t have all the ingredients, and I was hungry! But since Helen has asked for other things to try, and I need to respond to this while she still has the wok on the hob, this will just have to suffice!

This recipe is from my Chinese Regional Cooking book by Deh-Ta Hsiung which I talked about more here. This dish actually comes from the Hunan province which borders Sichuan to the south-east, but their cuisine is closely affiliated, since they share a passion for hot chilli. The photo above is of the illustration for the recipe from Deh-Ta’s book.

You can see right away, it is one of those seventies cookbooks. Sexy food photography had not yet been born. But it is also one of those recipes that doesn’t match the illustration. Green pepper isn’t mentioned in the recipe (though I’m pretty sure it’s in that photo unless he had access to mega sized chillis!) but I think it looks better like that and tastes right too. In fact it is usually having got a green pepper-or a leek-in my veg bag that inspires me to make this recipe.

Ingredients

• 300g pork fillet (you don’t really get pork labelled ‘fillet’ in the shops here so I tend to use pork chops)
• 3-4 chinese dried mushrooms, soaked
• 1 tbsp chinese pickled cabbage (look for a little packet, may be labelled ‘preserved vegetables’)
• 2 tbsp bamboo shoots (you can freeze the rest of the tin for next time)
• 50g hot green chillis (no idea how many that is, I use 2 long thin green ones which-coupled with the HOT chilli paste-seems enough heat for us)
• 1 leek
• 1 green pepper (this wasn’t in the recipe, but is in the photo, and I think goes very nicely!)

• 1 tbsp cornstarch
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 egg

For the sauce:

• 2 tbsp chilli paste (see notes, below)
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp sesame seed oil

One detail of this recipe I haven’t quite got yet – though it doesn’t seem to hurt, is that Deh-Ta says you should “cut the pork into thick slices [and] score the surface with a criss-cross pattern” before cutting it into small squares and marinating in salt, egg and cornflour.  The idea here being, that when you deep fry the pork “each piece opens up like a flower”. This never happens for me. However, I still score the meat each time like a good student. I guess I feel that at least it gives more surface for the egg to cling onto, and more places for the sauce to get a grip. I suppose I should try not doing this one time to see what the difference is.  (I’ll add the results to the comments if/when I do this!)

The other tricky thing here I suppose is the chilli paste. You may find it difficult to locate. I was lucky the first time and found this squat little jar in my local Chinese supermarket that seemed perfect. Then they stopped selling that and the next best thing I’ve found is a much taller jar, whose English language label is titled with “Black beans” but the first ingredient is actually chilli (then soybeans).  This stuff I find I need to chop or grind by hand (it appears to be predominantly black beans) to make it into a paste – the other jar was more a paste to start with. See how you do, and good luck!

Oh one more thing: can I just emphasize that the leek and preserved vegetables are crucial. Okay, so you can probably get away with out the latter-incase you struggle to find them too-but I just tried this with onion instead of leek and it was definitely missing something. So please use leek if you can.

Method

You know what to do with the pork already (as decribed above: score/chop – add to egg, salt and cornflour). The vegetables: chop them all up finely; I find the green pepper should be roughly 1.5cm cubed, same with leek; the other can be chopped smaller, in proportion to their size. Grind the chilli paste if what you’ve found isn’t much of a paste. Get a colander/plate-with-paper-towels on it ready. Put some rice on.

Then heat a couple inches of oil up in your wok (a wooden skewer or chopstick left in the oil will indicate the appropriate temperature when it starts to fizz) and drop the pork cubes in, possibly in 2 batches so you don’t overcrowd it or cool down the oil too much.  You’ll need to give it all a good poke to stop it sticking together. I have an enormous holey spoon that helps with both this task and the fishing out of the pieces later. It doesn’t take long. If the pork pieces open up like flowers please tell me how you did it. If not just take them out before they start to brown. Drain them in a colander and/or on some paper towel. Tip the oil into a saucepan to cool (I then put in a jar for reuse another time).

Add 1-2 tbsp of the aforementioned oil to stir fry the vegetables. They only need a few minutes on a hot heat, stirring ALL THE TIME. Then add the chilli paste and pork, stir well. Then add the soy. Take off the heat, stir in the sesame oil, and serve with rice.

Enjoy.

P.S. Deh-Ta’s recipe suggests you add some cornflour slurry at the end to ‘thicken the sauce’. I don’t find I have much of a sauce when I make this dish – just all the flavours which are clinging to the ingredients. There is no liquid left in the pan for the cornflour to thicken. However, if you would like to try making this more saucy, I guess you want to add more water (or maybe chicken stock) and then the cornflour slurry (cornflour/cornstarch mixed with equal parts water) will have something to thicken and you will have a wet sauce.  But I am pretty convinced you don’t need this.

This is a variation on a popular dish called Ma Po Tofu, where aubergine replaces the tofu. When making the Ma Po Tofu dish a couple times before, I found it was much better if you use homemade minced pork instead of shop bought ground pork.  This is a time consuming adjustment that you’ll probably choose to ignore, but I include instructions on how to mince your own pork in the hope of persuading you!

I also recommend marinading the pork as Ah Leung does here (but which I forgot to do in this pictorial) because “white pepper gives it great flavour and authentic chinese taste”. In a mixing bowl, add to the 1/2 or 3/4 lb of ground pork: 1/2 to 1 tsp of ground white pepper, 1 tsp of sesame oil, 1 tsp of corn starch, 1 tsp of light soy sauce, and 1 tsp of ShaoHsing cooking wine. (I’ve included his photo of this process in the gallery).

I only discovered after making my pictorial that you can watch a video of Ching-He Huang making the dish on the BBC website too.  I do recommend watching this for the explanations she gives about adding water to the aubergines when you fry them (you don’t need so much oil) and adding cooking wine to the meat (it gets rid of the ‘rawness’ or odour of meat/fish).

Ingredients for Chicken with Cashew Nuts in Bean/Hoisin Sauce posted by hzrt8w on EGullet

I was initially inspired by a user of the EGullet forums known as hzrt8w (aka Ah Leung) who posted a series of Chinese food pictorials. Ah Leung is a Chinese American (born in Hong Kong) living in California and as well as being a computer geek he writes these fantastic step by step guides on how to cook his favourite Chinese dishes, illustrated with photos. The photos are obviously just taken on the fly as he makes his dinner, totally anti-food-porn, but they still make me think YUM! I want to make that! So I have gradually been learning to make a handful of his dishes. Admittedly I haven’t been so adventurous as to try the more obscure (to the Western eye) dishes like Stir-Fried Lotus Roots with Dry Conpoy and Hairy Moss Fungi but I’ve tried a lot of the chicken based stir-fries. What is particularly useful about Ah Leung’s pictorials, is the photo he takes at the start of all the ingredients. Sometimes it is hard to find the ingredients you need in the Chinese shop because you don’t know what you are looking for – these photos show you what the containers look like.

Cover of Chinese Regional Cooking by Deh-Ta Hsiung

I have 2 other sources for recipes, one I already mentioned on this blog, is a book published in 1979 by Deh-Ta Hsiung called Chinese Regional Cooking.  I’m guessing this book was one of the earlier books to try to present Chinese cooking to a western audience. One thing it didn’t get quite right was that it translated the names of dishes into English, so intead of a recipe for Ma Po Tofu (funky!) that recipe is called ‘Pock marked woman’ bean-curd (yuck!). Still, I went ahead and tried making that recipe anyway (it’s one of the easier ones) and it is OK, but I prefer Ah Leung’s version.  The other shortfall of this book – not surprising for its time – is that the recipes tend to use a lot of oil – but once you learn this, it is easy to adjust.  The photography in this book is classic seventies food photography: not that appetising, but it gives you the idea!  What I like about this recipe book is that it includes an introduction to Chinese cuisine: the fundamentals (history and the elements of taste), techniques and how Chinese meals are served.  Then there is also an introductory background to each region that the book covers. A random fun fact for you which I just learnt from his website: Deh-Ta went to the Slade School of Fine Art here in London (in 1960)!

Photo of Zesty Chilli Tiger Prawns from Chinese Food Made Easy website

The other Chinese cook I’ve been learning a little more from is the star of the recent BBC TV series Chinese Food Made Easy, called Ching-He Huang. As Deh-Ta’s book was a reflection of his time, so Ching-He’s program is a reflection of the current fashion in cooking – beautiful looking food made by an attractive presenter that doesn’t take long to make.  Ching-He Huang’s main aim in this series was to show us, a nation consuming vast quantities of take-away Chinese every day, that you can easily make the same food at home and it will taste better and be much healthier.   I watched her series out of curiosity: comparing my experience following Ah Leung’s pictorials and Deh-Ta Hsiung recipes, to her methods.  She didn’t marinate her meat, whereas the others would always marinate for at least 20 mins  (I find this fits in while I’m preparing the other bits and it makes the meat noticeably more tender), but Ching-He Huang is much lighter in the use of oil, and finds a good way of including vegetables in her dishes.  She also demonstrated various preparation techniques – you can still watch the videos on the BBC website.

Chinese shop called Great Wall in Lower Clapton taken by Dave Hill

Finally, I was also inspired by the fact that a Chinese shop called Great Wall opened at the end of my road – this was perfectly timed with my discovery of EGullet and my new recipe book.  I find Chinese grocery shops fascinating (well to be honest I find most grocery stores fascinating, especially those selling ‘ethnic’ ingredients) and I can never go in to pick up some noodles/tofu/dried mushrooms without spending some time browsing the peculiar cans, jars, packets, vegetables and live animals they stock their shelves with.  It was also just super handy to have this shop so close (107 Lower Clapton Road, Hackney), and open ’til late (10pm) – so I could not even think about dinner until 7pm and still end up making something new and exciting!  I say this in the past tense because I’ve now moved 1 mile away (towards Upper Clapton) so I have to get on my bike to go to this shop, but its still better than having to go all the way down to Mare Street or worse still, to Chinatown in central London!