• Click here to jump to Yangtze River Delta-style Veggie Brothy Rice

• Click here to jump to Guizhou Chicken Soup Brothy Rice

• Click here to jump to Chongqing Tomato and Beef Brothy Rice

• Click here to jump to Congqing Tomato and Beef Brothy Rice, Influencer-style

So in the last half year and change, the trend-du-jour for the short-form cooking internet has been “brothy rice”1. For those out of the loop, the dish is a concoction of cooked rice, a flavorful soup, and some sort of protein somewhere in the mix. It’s the sort of easy-to-love, easy-on-the-camera one person meal that’s sure to get traction on these kinds of platforms:

But of course, this is indeed still the internet. And perhaps predictably, the brothy rice food trend has made some people upset. If you’re over the age of 25, you’ve probably seen this story enough by now that you’re more than able to accurately predict the next token. The charge is, of course, none other than Cultural Appropriation of the First Degree: Has Asia not already had brothy rice for millennia? Chinese Congee! Filipino Arroz Caldo! A good ol’ fashioned whitewashing in the manner of Southern Barbecue…

Now, I’m definitely no cultural commentator. Our specific (borderline pathological) obsession is researching food — but it’s here where I could, perhaps, be called on as an expert witness of sorts. Because whether you hate the ‘brothy rice’ trend or find the criticism a bit of late-10s Twitter Déjà vu… at the very least, I think, we can all broach this topic with a bit more culinary specificity.

Brothy Rice: An Overly Detailed Analysis

Brothy rice, from what I can tell, originated from a TikTok channel called Cook with Courtney. There’s variations on the theme, but the general idea is to (1) fry some sort of protein in a pan (2) remove and deglaze (3) make a quick sauce/broth in said pan (4) ladle the sauce/broth around cooked white rice (5) slice and place aforementioned protein over the rice. Often, but not always, a mishmash of various ‘Asian’ ingredients are employed. The original from Courtney Cook is here (you can follow the above link for the full video if you like):

Now let’s compare and contrast this method with, say, a Shunde-style Cantonese congee.

In a Shunde congee, broken rice is (1) briefly marinated with salt and peanut oil (2) added to a large pot of water together with some basic aromatics (3) boiled vigorously for about a half hour (4) mixed at the very end with a protein like pork meatballs or sliced fish. You’re left with a dish with a creamy, porridge-like consistency.

Alternatively, another point of comparison online has been Filipino Arroz Caldo.

In this Carinderia classic, (1) chicken and aromatics are fried in oil (2) rice — Jasmine Rice, Sticky Rice, or a combination — is added and the mixture simmered (3) the rice is colored with safflower or saffron, and (4) topped with a hard boiled egg and fried garlic. While a bit thicker/stickier than Cantonese congee, again you’re left with a dish with a creamy, porridge-like consistency:

In short, influencer brothy rice employs drastically different cooking techniques than either of these two dishes. The final form is different, the ingredients used are different. The evidentiary record provided by brothy rice critics — at least to date — has clearly been insufficient:

Ok, but does China have actual ‘brothy rice’?

I mean, yeah. Of course it does.

China’s got rice. China’s got broth. Obviously this type of concoction exists in China too.

The dishes we talked about above — Shunde-style congee and Filipino Arroz Caldo — in China, these would be categorized at zhou/juk (粥). That is, cereal grains are boiled vigorously with water to break them down and make a thin porridge of sorts (definitionally, it’s actually a gruel, but perhaps the translation of ‘porridge’ (sounds a bit better to our Dickens-trained modern ears).

Instead, you’ll get much closer to influencer brothy rice by looking at a category of dishes called paofan (泡饭), ‘soaked rice’. Alternatively called tangfan (汤饭), literally ‘broth rice’, these — just like the influencer brothy rice — work off of a base of cooked rice. There’s still some nuances here and there, but I think it’d be fair to call this the same category of ‘thing’:

So let’s zero in on the picture to the left: this guy is a Chicken Soup “Brothy Rice”, jitang paofan (鸡汤泡饭) from Guizhou. The above picture is from a restaurant in Guiyang that specializes in the dish: what you’ll do is order a bowl of rice, the soup is ladled over and around, and then you can top it with various stewed chicken cuts and/or bits. The concept itself stems from cultural phenomenon in Guizhou homes, whereby if you made a chicken soup… it’s only natural to mix the stuff with your bowl of white rice.

The end result is definitely not congee — texturally, it’ll be a lot more similar to, well, influencer brothy rice. But there’s still one subtle difference between this and Courtney Cook: unlike the soup-centric Guizhou dish, on TikTok the main protein for influencer brothy rice is generally fried, and the resultant fond forms the base of the soup. In China, the closest dish we could think of that employs a similar-ish idea is the Yangtze River Delta’s “Veggie Brothy Rice”, caipaofan (菜泡饭). It’s a homecooking classic to that region, a ‘clear out your fridge’ meal that tends to be a hit with kids — sort of their cultural equivalent of a toastie or a beefaroni:

This dish will quite often fry a bit of mushroom and/or pork in the beginning of the stir fry. It doesn’t get quite as fond-y as you’d take things in western cooking, but it helps form the base flavor of the soup in much the same way.

But then this dish gives us another distinction: a bit like fried rice, Shanghai’s caipaofan is, at its core, functionally a method to revive tough, dry leftover rice. To this end, the rice is briefly cooked in the soup. It’s not congee — you’re only looking at a quick minute for it to puff and take on the flavor — but it’s undeniably a slightly different approach than what you see on TikTok. Or, for that matter, Guizhou chicken soup rice.

So we’ll cover these two homey approaches for you, so you can judge for yourself. But in addition, we also decided to go for one that’s a bit more of a restaurant style: Chongqing’s Tomato Beef ‘brothy rice’ (番茄牛肉烫饭). It’s a dish that’s nestled into the city’s nightlife scene — traditionally one of those soothing, comforting drinking snack for young people that’ve left the club a bit on the buzzed side. Though these days, I should say that the general form of the thing seems to increasingly be morphing into the realm of spectacle:

…we’re not going to be serving it with a whole tomato, don’t worry. But we did have YouTube thumbails to make, so it obviously needed to be one of the three.

Yangtze-style Veggie Brothy Rice (菜泡饭)

Okay, I’m aware that this one doesn’t look like… much. I promise it’s good.

Again, this dish is very much ‘leftover rice’ food. It’s super super flexible — pretty much the only ‘mandatory’ addition is the baby bok choy.

If you would like to use fresh rice for this instead of leftover rice, that’s okay. Just be very careful to not cook the rice too much — instead of the order we listed below, I would probably add the cooked rice after the bok choy and seasoning.

Serves two.

Slice

• 4 shiitake mushrooms (香菇)

into sheets and set aside.

Slice

• 250g baby boy choy (上海青/小棠菜)

into half inch sections and set aside.

Slice

• 100g lean pork (瘦肉), e.g. pork loin

into ~3mm slivers. Then marinate the pork with

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp sugar

• ¼ tsp starch (生粉)

• ¼ tsp soy sauce (生抽)

• ¼ tsp Liaojiu, a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍就)

To cook, to a wok toss in

• 1 tbsp lard, preferably, or oil

and over a medium flame fry the shiitakes until softened and browned, ~3 minutes. Scooch the mushrooms to the side.

Add in pork and spread it out into one even-ish layer. Once it’s started to brown, flip, and fry until the other side has also changed color. Then, add in

• 1L cool water

and bring everything to a boil. Simmer for three minutes, then add in

• 300g of leftover rice2

Break up the rice, then add in the baby bok choy. Cook until the bok choy turns a darker green, ~1 minute.

Season to taste. We added

• ½ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder

and serve.

Guizhou Chicken Soup Brothy Rice (贵州鸡汤泡饭)

Okay. So at its core this soup is really quite simple, really leaning on those chicken legs to flavor the broth.

Unfortunately, I’m really unsure if, say, American supermarket chicken will be high quality enough to get the job done. Will it be flavorful enough? Fatty enough? I’ve had bad experiences in the past. So at the very least, do try to get the highest quality supermarket chicken that’s reasonable for you.

But at the same time, I don’t want to be one of those asshole recipe writers that’s all like “get the heritage breed free-range farm chicken or don’t bother”. So in order to close the gap flavor wise, I think you can optionally toss in about a tablespoon of dried shrimp — it’s more of a Cantonese move than anything, but hey, there’s also a dried-squid-chicken soup that’s popular a province over in Kunming. Nothing too out of distribution, in my opinion.

Fat wise, if your chicken’s a little on the lean side and you have some schmalz on hand, I think finishing with a bit of that could also help close the gap.

Or alternatively, maybe you love the chicken you buy and I’m overthinking all of this.

Serves two.

To a pot of

• 2L cool water

add in

• two large chicken legs

• 1 tbsp dried shrimp (虾米), optional

• ~2 inches ginger, smashed

• ~1 scallion, tied in a knot

and bring to a boil. Skim if you need, then swap the flame to low and simmer.

After 1-2 hours (timing will depend on your chicken), the leg should be tender enough so as to easily poke through with a chopstick.

At this point, evaluate your oil. In Guizhou, the soup will usually have a nice sheen of yellow rendered fat on top. If you like, if your chicken has not rendered out this fat you could add in

• ~½ tbsp schmaltz, optional

and the chicken soup is done.

Per serving bowl, scoop in

• ~150g3 fresh rice

together with a seasoning of

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

• ⅛ tsp white pepper powder

To serve, ladle in about one cup of broth per bowl. Lay one big leg over the rice, and optionally garnish with some chopped scallions. This dish is often paired with fermented Guizhou picked vegetables.

Chongqing Tomato Beef Brothy Rice (番茄牛肉烫饭)

Alright, I gotta be straight about the process of testing this one. There’s a few different styles of this dish, some of which are thicker/more blended/more tomato-y than others (some styles also stew their beef).

I wanted something a bit more blended, so we started out by using the Chengdu Tomato and Egg soup from earlier in the year as a base and… didn’t end up straying too far away from that recipe. It really just got me to exactly the consistency that I wanted.

So do know that there are a number of variations on this theme, and definitely don’t take this recipe as a definitive version of the dish. If you’re from around there, I’d love to hear alternative opinions, but… I also strongly believe that this version wouldn’t be out of place in Chongqing.

Like that recipe, we start things out be rendering a bit of lard (which I think really works well here).

Serves two.

To Render the Lard

Slice

• 300g fatty pork belly

into roughly 4mm sheets, then cut those sheets in thirds to get strips. Mix with

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ½ tsp soy sauce

and then coat everything with

• ~3 tbsp oil

Add to a cool wok or pot. Over a medium flame, slowly fry the pork to render out as much fat as possible, 15-20 minutes. Transfer the crispy pork belly to a paper-towel lined plate, and reserve the lard.

You can optionally use the crispy pork belly as a topping for this dish, if you like.

To Make the Soup

Prepare the aromatics. Separate the white part and the green part from

• 4 scallions

Slicing the green part to reserve as a topping. Finely mince the whites together with

• 4 cloves garlic

• 1 inch ginger

and set aside.

Take

• 650g fresh tomato

and cut a little ‘x’ into them. Place in boiling water for ~1 minute, or until the peel begins to come off. Remove the peel, and cut into rough chunks. Add to a blender together with

• ½ cup water

• ¼ tsp salt

• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine

and blend on the ‘smoothie’ setting to a smoothie-like consistency.

We can now make the soup. To a pot, add

• 4 tbsp rendered lard, from above

and the minced garlic, ginger, and scallion whites. Fry over a medium flame for 1-2 minutes, or until fragrant. Add

• 1.5 tbsp tomato paste

• 2 tsp red, mild chili powder (e.g. Gochugaru, Kashmiri, or Xinjiang chili powder)

and fry until the oil is stained, ~1 minute.

Add the blended tomato mixture. If still frothy, allow it to bubble on medium-high for a few minutes to let the foam subside. Add

• 2 cups water -or- stock -or- a combination

• 2 tsp sugar

• 1 tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ½ tsp MSG

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp white pepper powder

Mix well, and simmer for at least 30 minutes.

During that time, prepare the beef. Slice

• 200g beef loin

into ~3mm sheets. Marinate with:

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp Sichuan pepper powder

• ¼ tsp soy sauce (生抽)

• ¼ tsp liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍就)

• ¼ cup water

and massage until all the liquid has been absorbed. Then coat with

• 1 tbsp oil

Once the 30 minute cooking time for the soup is done, add in:

• 300g of leftover rice

and break up the large clumps. Then add the beef slices bit by bit (also in order to avoid clumping). Once the beef has changed color, shut off the heat and transfer to a serving bowl.

Garnish with some sliced scallion greens, and optionally the crispy pork belly reserved from before.

General Tips for Better Influencer Brothy Rice

So… frankly speaking, I do think influencer brothy rice does contain some good ideas.

Paofan? Who doesn’t like it. Deglazing and making a quick soup? Why not. Technique wise, I think Courtney Cook did as good of a job as any.

If you pushed me for a criticism, I think many of these creators could be a bit more purposeful in the specific combination of flavors that they’re employing. In this sort of space, it really does feel like the creators just raided the international aisle of their local supermarket and smooshed everything together. Courtney did a follow up that feels a touch better (the coconut-lime combo feels a lot more coherent), but I’m still a touch skeptical of how it all would actually come together.

Generally speaking, I think if you want to get creative while you’re still new to a cuisine, it’s helpful to be inspired by specific dishes. And by far the most obvious move here would be to simply take the above ‘Chinese brothy rice’ dishes and simply serve them… ‘influencer brothy rice’ style. For example, you could easily begin the tomato soup from above by stir-frying the beef, setting it aside, and beginning the aromatics in the fond. Or if you wanted to get really frisky, you could swap the sliced beef with a steak and prepare it western style.

Besides that, the next obvious move, I think, would be to just go with flavor combinations that are (1) popular and (2) you know you adore. For example, suppose you particularly love Kung Pao chicken: you could try to make your quick broth with that classic Kung Pao flavor of scorched chilis, peanuts, sugar, and dark vinegar. The flavors might not necessarily ‘soup’ as well as you’d like; they might not necessarily go with soaked rice as well as you’d like… but you’re a lot more likely to strike gold than piling random Asian sauces in a big pot. Leaning on the collective wisdom of a pre-existing cuisine lets you, to invoke a cliché, stand on the shoulders of the giants that’re already there.

If you’re looking for specific Chinese dishes to be inspired by, I personally think heavily flavored soups would be an obvious route to go. Stuff like these Leshan-style claypot dishes (below, left), or perhaps something Kaeng-like like the Dai people’s chicken and fermented bamboo shoot soup (center), or maybe various noodle soups like Yunnan’s little pot rice noodles (right):

At the same time though, I’m a big believer that it’s sort of a dick move to criticize without also throwing your own hat in the ring as well. So in accordance to my own advice, below is my hand at an ‘influencer-brothy-rice-ified’ variant of the above tomato and beef dish.

Tomato Beef Brothy Rice, like the Influencers

Alright, to be a proper influencer brothy rice, we’re gunna need a ‘hunk of protein’ in the western manner. In this recipe, I chose steak as my beef substitute.

So right. Definitely note that this recipe was based off of the previous recipe… which in turn was, again, a slight adaptation of a very specific version of Chengdu Tomato and Egg noodles.

We’re now reaching the very limits of what could reasonably be considered ‘Chinese cooking’. In fact, we might’ve just gone over.

Still tasty.

Serves one.

To

• ~200g steak, e.g. NY Strip, Filet Mignon

season by sprinkling over

• salt

• white pepper

• Sichuan pepper

in the western manner. Set aside.

To a large bowl, mix

• 85g canned tomato

• 1 cup water, stock, or a combination

and set aside.

Separate the white from the greens from

• 2 scallions

Slicing the greens and setting them aside. Finely mince the whites together with

• ~1cm ginger

• 2 cloves garlic

And reserve.

To your vessel of choice — I used a cast iron dutch oven — fry your steak in the western manner, to the doneness of your liking (I went to about medium). Set the steak aside to rest as you cook everything else.

The pot will be very hot. Deglaze with

• ~1.5 tbsp Shaoxing wine

And scrape up the fond. Swap the flame to medium low and add

• 1.5 tbsp lard

And the minced scallion whites, ginger, and garlic. Fry until fragrant, ~1 minute, then add

• ½ tbsp tomato paste

• ½ tbsp red fragrant chili powder, e.g. Kashmiri, Gochugaru

And fry until those two things have stained the oil red, 30-60 seconds.

Add in the tomato/stock/water mixture, together with a seasoning of

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp white pepper

• ½ tsp soy sauce

• 1 tsp sugar

Bring to a boil and down to a simmer. Simmer on medium-low for ~10 minutes to allow everything to come together.

At this point, you can slice your steak and plate your rice (and wash some dishes).

Come back to the soup. Add more salt if need be, or sugar if too sour. Thicken with a slurry of

• ¾ tsp starch

• ~½ tbsp water

and mix in half of your scallion greens. Serve next to/around your white rice, and garnish with the remainder of the scallions.

• Click to jump to the recipe

• Click to jump to the recipe, structured for lunch at an office

As regulars to this Substack know, the Dai people are a Tai-Kadai speaking minority group that inhabit some China’s southernmost borderlands — the tropical regions that neighbor Laos and Myanmar. As the name implies, there is, indeed, a relationship with the Thai people of the Chao Phraya — they’re Theravada Buddhists, they traditionally build their homes on stilts, and every April1 they’ll gather to splash water to celebrate the coming of the new year. Their traditional clothing is laced with vibrant colors, their traditional banquets are served on large banana leaves.

So now I’d like you to take a moment. Using the above cultural descriptors, really try to imagine a Dai person in your head. Take a second, close your eyes, and really visualize how these people might be living their day-to-day.

I think if you’re like most people, you’re probably imagining them working out in the rice fields. Or perhaps bringing an offering to their local temple. What you’re likely not imagining is someone driving to work, clocking in, and going about their day trudging through lookup tables in Microsoft Excel.

But of course, plenty do. Perhaps even a majority! To the average western traveler in China, a Dai person would likely be indistinguishable, for the most part, from the remainder of the population… unless you happened to catch them at the park square dancing, or if you went over to their house for dinner.

And to be totally honest with you? That right there is why I really loved the idea of covering their “business noodles”. I mean, the dish itself is incredibly delicious — featuring the Dehong Dai ‘holy trinity’ of tomato, chili, garlic, and peanut — but a lot of Dai noodles are delicious, and a lot of those dishes feature said holy trinity.

A dish explicitly named ‘business noodles’, I thought, was just a brilliant subversion of our tendency (in both China and elsewhere) to exoticize these groups. It’s a dish that can remind us that they too are just normal people living their day-to-day in a modern society — and that everybody everywhere needs some delicious noodles for their lunch-break.

But as we researched the video, we learned that these ‘business noodles’ actually have… nothing to do with business. The real story behind the name of the dish subverted the expectations of our expected expectations-subversion — and in a lot of ways, is almost exactly what you might expect from a stereotypically fun-loving group like the Dai.

Why Dai Business Noodles are Called “Business Noodles”

Ok. So the long and short of it is that the name is actually a big joke. This joke going to take a bit of explaining (as all great jokes do), but you could think of it as having roughly the same energy as this — “The Guangxi Briefcase”, from a totally different corner of the country:

“The Guangxi Briefcase”, as you might be able to gather, is a large plastic bucket of high proof baijiu liquor. It’s called a ‘briefcase’ because it, well, you carry it kind of like you would a briefcase when you’re lugging it down the street. These years, the thing’s basically become a local meme.

Pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, for our dish today — ‘banshichu’ mixian — there’s four linguistic/cultural references you need to know in order to ‘get’ the joke.

First, relating to ‘banshichu’ — we translated the name as ‘business’, but probably a more direct translation would be ‘office’. But ‘banshichu’ doesn’t refer to a physical office, it’s more like… the metaphorical idea of an office. For example, perhaps your company might have a Representative Office in Hong Kong, or scattered across China are various governmental ‘regional offices’ .

Because literally, if we go character-by-character… banshichu literally just means ‘the place your shit gets done’. I.e., an office:

Second bit, and basically unrelated to the first. In Dai communities — but also elsewhere – if you’re doing big personal events like a wedding or a funeral, it’s often referred to as having to banshi (办事) in Chinese. Literally, get your shit done:

Third thing — in Dai areas, those sorts of major personal events (much like their cousins down in Thailand) are renowned for quickly morphing into a big party. Infamously, they can sometimes get… a little sloppy.

And that’s where these noodles come in. It’s the type of thing that the host can supply, and the guest can just sort of mix themselves: whether it’s in a banquet setting, or simply by the door when people get in. Pressure off the cook and all that.

So the noodles are named after the banshichu — ostensibly, a very serious government office. You’re banshi-ing – ostensibly, doing something serious like a funeral. And in the meantime, you’re slugging your nth cup of locally-distilled corn moonshine and… downing these noodles.

…but you can still eat them at your office

All that said? I’m not interested in pulling your rug or baiting your click. You clicked on this article, presumably, because you were interested in making noodles that you could consume at the office. And I feel led to keep that promise.

Because the real essence of this noodle dish — the tomato-chili meat sauce smothering the whole affair — is eminently batch-prep-able, freeze-able, and nuke-able. Another core component — deep fried garlic oil — is also batch-prep-able, and can keep about a month in the fridge. The other toppings are rather straightforward, and could be sorted in less than ten minutes the day before, and kept in baggies overnight in the fridge:

The only thing that’s somewhat tricky are the rice noodles. Rice noodles famously do not keep very well — I mean, leftover Chow Mei Fun straight from the fridge makes cold midnight pizza feel gourmet. It gets dry, brittle, and just… not very good.

Luckily, there is a Chinese technique that can revive fridged rice noodles: mao-ing (冒/泖) them in hot water. What you’ll do is dump your rice noodles in together with hot, boiled water from the kettle (even the hot water from a water cooler would do the job), give it a quick 15-30 second jiggle with a pair of chopsticks, and dump the hot water out. It works phenomenally with Yunnan-style rice noodles — which we’ll be substituting in with dried Vietnamese rice noodles for ease of international replication — leaving them soft and bouncy. The only downside might be a touch of shredding if you’re not careful.

With that said though, this would require cooking up/cooling down some rice noodles the night before. And while that’s not categorically much more than boiling up a bit of pasta, it’s still something that you’d have to do (and I’m already asking you to chop up a bit of herbs and garlic). So if you’d like, also know that this is all totally delicious over instant noodles too:

So, this is the way we’ll cover this. The first recipe below will show you how you’d make these noodles straight up, to feed four servings the day-of. The second ‘recipe’ is the same exact thing, but restructured assuming that you’re storing it to eat for lunch at your office.

Dai Business Noodles, at home

This recipe serves four bowls of noodles. We are using Vietnamese rice noodles to substitute for the Yunnan variety — if you have access to Yunnan-style rice noodles, you can obviously use those too (though note that rice noodles in Yunnan come in different shapes and thicknesses, you’re looking for the thin round sort). We’ll be using this kind of bag for the following recipe:

Secondly, traditionally this sauce relies on a Dai-style chili sauce — simply called in Dehong ‘xianglajiang’ (香辣酱). There are many hot sauces that go by this name in China… but their’s is a rich fermented mix of soybeans, split peas, rice, and chilis. It’s difficult to find even in Central Yunnan (where we live), so we’ll be substituting it with a mix of Sichuan Chili Bean Paste, Tomato Paste, and Hunanese Duojiao Chopped Fermented Chilis.

Soak

• 480g Vietnamese-style dried rice vermicelli

in cool water for about 1 hour. It is okay if the noodles soak for longer. We will cook the rest of our toppings and come back to the noodles near the end.

Next, make the garlic oil.

Slice

• ⅛ of an onion, ~30g

and set aside.

Smash

• ~2” ginger (姜), ~15g

and set aside.

Mince

• 4 large cloves of garlic

and set aside.

To a wok, heat on medium, add in

• ½ cup oil

• cilantro root, 2-3 pcs (optional, if you happen to have some on hand)

together with the sliced onion. Fry until the onion is golden brown, ~10 minutes. Shut off the heat, remove the onion and cilantro root — keeping the flavored oil inside. Then add in

• 1 star anise (八角)

• 1 tsaoko, Chinese black cardamom2 (草果)

together with the smashed ginger and the minced garlic. Fry over a medium to medium-low flame until the garlic is just barely starting to get golden, then shut off the heat. Continue to fry the garlic with the heat off for one more minute.

Take out the ginger and spices, reserve them to continue to use when simmering the sauce. Pour the garlic oil (together with all the deep fried garlic) into a bowl and reserve.

Next, we will make our sauce.

Take

• Tomato, 450g

Cut a little x on the skin, blanch for about 1 minute, or until the peel begins to come off. Rinse cool and peel. Chop into ~1cm dice, set aside.

Back to the wok, with the flame on medium strain in

• ¼ cup (4 tbsp) of the garlic oil from above

and then add in:

• 250g ground pork3, ~20% fat

Stir fry the ground pork. First the pork will begin to dry and loosen up. Continue until the oil begins to clear again and the pork is just barely beginning to brown, ~5 minutes.

Push the pork up the side of the wok, let a touch of the oil drain off… then with the flame on low, add in

• 1 tbsp Sichuan chili bean paste, Pixian Doubanjiang (郫县豆瓣酱)

• 1 tbsp Hunan chopped fermented chilis, Duojiao (剁椒) -or- Sambal Oelek4

• Tomato paste, 1 tbsp

and slowly fry until the oil is stained nice and red, ~2 minutes.

Then add in the chopped tomato and the reserved star anise, tsaoko black cardamom, and ginger from the garlic oil.

Fry over a medium to medium-high flame, mixing periodically, for ~10 minutes. You’ll be looking for the liquid to mostly evaporated away and the tomato to begin to break down, and ‘frying’ in the oil once again.

In the meantime, prepare a seasoned slurry of:

• 1 tbsp potato starch5 (土豆淀粉)

• 1.25 cups water

• 2 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• ½ tsp dark soy sauce (老抽)

• ½ tbsp oyster sauce (蚝油)

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

Mix this very well.

Slowly add the slurry while stirring the sauce. Mix well with the tomato base and bring to a light simmer. Cook until thickened to your liking, ~3 minutes.

Remove the sauce and set aside.

Next, we will prepare the toppings.

Mince

• 4 cloves garlic

• 4 spicy red chilis

and roughly chop

• 40g cilantro

• 40g culantro, preferably, but you can swap for more cilantro if you need

• 2 tbsp roasted or toasted peanuts

and reserve.

Finally, we will cook our rice noodles and serve.

To do so, bring a pot of water to a boil, and toss in the soaked and now-softened rice noodles. Cook for ~30-45 seconds, or until al dente.

Strain immediately, then rinse very well under cool water. Once the rice noodles are okay to touch without burning yourself, start lifting and jiggling the noodles under running water to completely cool them down. Once totally cool, ~3 minutes, set aside to drain.

Once no longer obviously ‘wet’, divide the drained rice noodles among four bowls. To each bowl, add in a base seasoning of

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp Sichuan peppercorn powder (花椒面)

• 1 tsp chili flakes, preferably a toasted or smoked sort (e.g. Northern Thai chili flakes, Chipotle flakes)

Then top each bowl with ~⅓ cup of the tomato sauce and ~1 tbsp of the garlic oil. Divide the remaining toppings — the peanuts, the fresh minced garlic, the spicy chili, the cilantro and/or culantro — evenly among the bowls.

Dai Business Noodles, Lunchtime Integration Initiative

We will assume the same four servings, albeit spread over four days.

The garlic oil and tomato-chili meat sauce can be easily scaled up if you’d like to have more. These two things are the elements that can easily be kept in the fridge/freezer. They’re also the most intense, so sort them sometime over the weekend over a beer.

The Garlic Oil

Note that half of the garlic oil that you make will be strained and used at the base of the tomato-chili meat sauce.

Slice

• ⅛ of an onion, ~30g

and set aside.

Smash

• ~2” ginger (姜), ~15g

and set aside.

Mince

• 4 large cloves of garlic

and set aside.

To a wok, heat on medium, add in

• ½ cup oil

• cilantro root, 2-3 pcs (optional, if you happen to have some on hand)

together with the sliced onion. Fry until the onion is golden brown, ~10 minutes. Shut off the heat, remove the onion and cilantro root — keeping the flavored oil inside. Then add in

• 1 star anise (八角)

• 1 tsaoko, Chinese black cardamom (草果)

together with the smashed ginger and the minced garlic. Fry over a medium to medium-low flame until the garlic is just barely starting to get golden, then shut off the heat. Continue to fry the garlic with the heat off for one more minute.

Take out the ginger and spices, reserve them to continue to use when simmering the sauce. Pour the garlic oil (together with all the deep fried garlic) into a bowl and reserve.

Next, we will make our sauce.

The Tomato-Chili Meat Sauce

Take

• Tomato, 450g

Cut a little x on the skin, blanch for about 1 minute, or until the peel begins to come off. Rinse cool and peel. Chop into ~1cm dice, set aside.

Back to the wok, with the flame on medium strain in

• ¼ cup (4 tbsp) of the garlic oil from above

and then add in:

• 250g ground pork, ~20% fat

Stir fry the ground pork. First the pork will begin to dry and loosen up. Continue until the oil begins to clear again and the pork is just barely beginning to brown, ~5 minutes.

Push the pork up the side of the wok, let a touch of the oil drain off… then with the flame on low, add in

• 1 tbsp Sichuan chili bean paste, Pixian Doubanjiang (郫县豆瓣酱)

• 1 tbsp Hunan chopped fermented chilis, Duojiao (剁椒) -or- Sambal Oelek

• Tomato paste, 1 tbsp

and slowly fry until the oil is stained nice and red, ~2 minutes.

Then add in the chopped tomato and the reserved star anise, tsaoko, and ginger from the garlic oil.

Fry over a medium to medium-high flame, mixing periodically, for ~10 minutes. You’ll be looking for the liquid to mostly evaporated away and the tomato to begin to break down, and ‘frying’ in the oil once again.

In the meantime, prepare a seasoned slurry of:

• 1 tbsp potato starch (土豆淀粉)

• 1.25 cups water

• 2 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• ½ tsp dark soy sauce (老抽)

• ½ tbsp oyster sauce (蚝油)

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

Mix this very well.

Slowly add the slurry while stirring the sauce. Mix well with the tomato base and bring to a light simmer. Cook until thickened to your liking, ~3 minutes.

Storing the Garlic Oil and Tomato-Chili Meat Sauce

The garlic oil will be able to keep roughly one month in the fridge, the tomato-chili meat sauce about a half a week.

Our recommendation would be to portion out ⅓ of a cup of the tomato-chili meat sauce into a little baggie, and pour a tablespoon of the garlic oil into said baggie (or your container of choice). This baggie will be one portion — toss this portion into the freezer.

Then, the night before work, remove the bag from the freezer and put it in the fridge. At that time we’ll also prepare the rest of the toppings.

Prepping the Toppings

Mince

• 1 large clove garlic

• 1 spicy red chili

and roughly chop

• 10g cilantro

• 10g culantro, preferably, but you can swap for more cilantro if you need

place these four things in one little baggie. This will be your ‘aromatics/herb’ bag. Place in the fridge.

Roughly chop

• ½ tbsp roasted or toasted peanuts

and then place in a little baggie together with

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp Sichuan peppercorn powder (花椒面)

• 1 tsp chili flakes, preferably a toasted or smoked sort (e.g. Northern Thai chili flakes, Chipotle flakes)

and this will be your ‘peanuts/herb’ bag. Toss in the fridge with everything else, or wherever.

Prepping the Rice Noodles

Again, whether you even go the rice noodle route is up to you — instant noodles will also be delicious. I understand that mincing the above on a weeknight might already be an ask.

But if you are… also the night before work, soak

• 120g Vietnamese-style dried rice vermicelli

in cool water for about 1 hour. It is okay if the noodles soak for a little longer.

Once softened, bring a pot of water to a boil, and toss in the soaked and now-soft rice noodles. Cook for ~30-45 seconds, or until al dente.

Strain immediately, then rinse very well under cool water. Once the rice noodles are okay to touch without burning yourself, start lifting and jiggling the noodles under running water to completely cool them down. Once totally cool, ~3 minutes, set aside to drain.

Once no longer obviously ‘wet’, place your rice noodles in a little baggie and into the fridge with everything else.

Eating for Lunch

Bring your rice noodles, the sauce bag, the aromatics/herb bag, the peanut/seasoning bag. You will also need some sort of bowl/container to eat the rice noodles out of, as well as some sort of container to microwave the sauce. Keep everything in your work fridge.

At lunch, microwave the sauce to your desired temperature. I like roughly room temperature.

If using rice noodles, ‘mao’ the rice noodles by adding enough hot, boiled water from the kettle to submerge (or even the hot water from a water cooler). Jiggle the rice noodles in the hot water for 15-30 seconds, then drain well.

If using instant noodles, submerge well with hot, boiled water from the kettle and submerge for three minutes. Drain well.

Add on all the toppings and mix well.

• Click here to jump to the recipe

What’s harder, Chinese cooking or Western cooking?

I think it’s fair to say that on the English language internet, Chinese food has a reputation for being ‘difficult’. There’s more knife-work than you might be used to, you’ve got all those little prep bowls, and you’ve gotta be brisk and with-it when stir frying.

But something that I’ve heard time and time again in China is the view that Western food is quite really difficult. You need to invest in an oven, it tends to take a lot of tools, the cooking itself takes a lot of time, etc etc.

So, which is it?

Now, the obvious answer is that the ‘harder’ cuisines are simply the ones that (1) you’re not used and (2) there’s less of a supply chain for where you live. I mean, it should be pretty self obvious that it’s easier to cook your own culture’s food. If I try to cook, say, a Mexican meal here in Yunnan takes a more than modicum of planning: I’ve got to scour for things on Taobao, I’ve got to think through substitutions, I’ve got to religiously binge-watch some De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina.

But suppose we strip out the variables of familiarity and availability. Gun to my head, I might actually agree that Chinese cooking can be slightly harder — especially when cooking for a larger group. And that’s because the meal structure in most Chinese cuisines are dish-based.

Let’s take Cantonese food as an example. Along with the mandatory white rice, the rule of thumb in Canto cooking is to make “n-1” dishes (with each ‘dish’ having about 300-500 grams of ingredients). So if you’ve got three people, you make two dishes; if you’ve got nine people, you make eight dishes.

That’s… a lot of discrete dishes. It’s really quite awesome as an eater — you’re functionally are getting a self-service tasting menu — but for the cook it can undeniably take a bit of sweat.

The meal structure for most Western cuisines, by contrast, is mains-based. You make one central dish, with, perhaps, 1-3 sides. Feeding nine people? No problem. You’ll still make one central dish with 1-3 sides, albeit each scaled up in quantity to feed nine people1.

Now, there’s little tricks of the trade in Chinese cooking to take pressure off of the cook. To feed a group, hotpot would probably be the most obvious answer. If eight of you randomly showed up at my door, frankly speaking I am not going to cook you a multi-dish banquet. What I’d do is slice some shit up, dump a packet of Qiaotou Sichuan hotpot base2 in a big claypot, and crack open a decent baijiu.

But there’s another meal structure that can be found throughout the Chinese southwest and into Southeast Asia. It’s an alternative that’s neither dish-based nor mains-based, and might actually be easier than either:

Dipping Sauce Meals

In Mandarin, they’re called Zhanshui. In Dai, Nanmi. In Thai, Namphrik. Stretching from Chengdu down to Bangkok, you can see this form of eating again and again:

The idea is this. You make one flavorful dip, really focus your efforts on that. Maybe it’s based around roasted chilis, maybe it’s circling around soy sauce and a sizzling chili oil. But either way, once you’ve got a larger, delicious dip in your back pocket, your main ingredients — meat, vegetable, etc — can all be cooked pretty simply and plainly (if cooked at all).

There’s two general approaches to it I think, which I’ll label pounded and soupy. Dai people’s Tomato-Chili Nammi, which we covered here, would be a good example of the former. The basic idea is to grill some chilis, tomatoes, and garlic, and pound it together with a bit of seasoning. You’ll then serve this alongside things like blanched cabbage and okra, raw sliced cucumber, and crispy pork rinds. It might not be the only thing that you make, but it can do much of the heavy lifting. Northern Thailand’s Nam Phrik Num or Central Thailand’s famed Nam Phrik Kapi would be two more good examples of this approach:

Soupy dip dishes are a bit more common, I think, on the China side of the border. For example, in the Guizhou province, a classic is a dish called Suguadou — literally, ‘veggies melons and beans’ — that we covered in our “Vegetables in Water” video (a recipe that’s quickly become a favorite). What you’ll do is boil up some vegetables, but then keep the vegetables inside and serve it together with the boiling liquid. The boiling liquid can function as a light broth to go along with the meal, and a couple ladles can help form the base of your dipping sauce.

Today’s dish is part of this second larger category.

Xinping’s Dipping Sauce Tilapia (蘸水罗非鱼)

The town of Xinping sits nestled inside the Ailao mountains, a few hour drive from the provincial capital of Kunming. Administratively, it technically belongs to our current home of Yuxi (of cigarette fame), but there’s still at least an hour in between the respective urban centers. The place got on our map, so to speak, because Xinping restaurants seem to be one common category of restaurant here in Yuxi. The flavors on offer are, generally speaking, pretty Central Yunnan — albeit with a touch of Dai people influence, and (often) seasoned aggressively with their local pickles.

Economically, the city is very much the Yunnan usual suspects — they’ve got a military base, a couple mines, and, of course, agriculture. It’s known for its tobacco and sugarcane3, as well as being the very best spot in Yuxi to forage for wild mushrooms when the season comes. But in addition, the city is also a big producer of Tilapia, with fish farms scattered around the surrounding mountains.

So, no wonder they turned it into a dipping sauce dish.

Now, I can already see some of you yelling at your screen — among food circles, Tilapia has a pretty bad reputation. It’s cheap and meaty, sure, but flavor-wise it’s renowned for being muddy. And while I do think sometimes people can be a bit overly dramatic on the topic, I’d grant that it’s certainly no sea bass.

But here in Yunnan? I have no idea what sort of black magic is happening at the fish farms here, but there’s somehow been a breakthrough in Tilapia technology. I’ve been told it’s due to the ‘mountain water’ (not sure if that completely explains it), but… the Tilapia here isn’t muddy, it’s great. And it’s fantastic for this sort of soup.

Making the Dipping Sauce Tilapia

Still, I understand that not everyone lives in the mountains of Yunnan. So given that we are going to be making a quick soup out of this fish, if you feel strongly on the tilapia subject… definitely swap it for your white flaky fish of choice. Bass, Trout, Carp, whatever.

Second variable for international replication — the way that this is done in Xinping is by using a whole fresh tilapia, cut into sections and boiled together with the bone.

Which… I know can sometimes be a bit difficult to find in the west at times. At least where I’m from in suburban Pennsylvania, whole fish is very much an Asian-Supermarket-Only thing — our local Acme only would sell fillets. Which unfortunately is sort of a variable for this kind of quick-and-dirty soup: sans head and bones, you’d basically just be having fish slices in water.

So we decided to go with two recipes for this one: we will show you how to sort a whole fish in the Yunnan style, because it really is the easiest way to go about this. But we’ll also show you a simple western supermarket version with some pork ribs in the mix as well, to sort of ‘add back in’ that missing flavor.

Dipping Sauce Fish Soup, Yunnan Style

Have a fishmonger prepare

• one whole tilapia (罗非鱼), ~750g

and chop into ~1.5 inch sections.

Thinly slice

• 40g carrot

into sheets and set aside.

Prepare a spice mix of

• ~1.5 inch ginger, smashed

• 1 Tsaoko (草果), Chinese Black Cardamom, peeled (keeping just the peel)

• 1 tsp Sichuan Peppercorn (花椒)

and set aside.

To cook the soup, to a pot or wok add in

• 1.5 tbsp oil, really preferably lard

and over a medium low flame fry the ginger, tsaoko, and Sichuan peppercorn until fragrant, ~1 minute. Add

• 1 liter cool water

and fish and carrot.

Bring up to a boil, and then boil for ~2 minutes.

Season with

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

and add in an optional

• 6 psc romaine lettuce

Once the lettuce has just barely wilted, remove everything to a big bowl to serve.

Dipping Sauce Fish Soup, Western Supermarket Style

Note that this is almost “western supermarket club” as written, with the exception of the spice mix. I understand that Tsaoko will not be available at most supermarkets, and whole Sichuan peppercorn is likely a question mark too. If that situation describes you, try swapping in one of these three substitutions for the mix below:

If not already prepared, cleave

• 200g pork ribs

into ~1 inch sections and set aside.

Thinly slice

• 350g fish fillet

at an angle into thin ~3mm sheets. Set aside.

Thinly slice

• 40g carrot

into sheets and set aside.

Prepare a spice mix of

• ~1.5 inch ginger, smashed

• 1 Tsaoko (草果), Chinese Black Cardamom, peeled (keeping just the peel)

• 1 tsp Sichuan Peppercorn (花椒)

and set aside.

To cook the soup, to a pot or wok add in

• 1.5 tbsp oil, really preferably lard

and over a medium low flame fry the ginger, tsaoko, and Sichuan peppercorn until fragrant, ~1 minute. Add

• 1 liter cool water

and ribs and carrot.

Bring up to a boil, and then boil for ~15 minutes.

Season with

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

and add in an optional

• 6 psc romaine lettuce

Once the lettuce has just barely wilted, remove all the solids to a large bowl — leaving just the soup inside.

Then, mix the reserved fish slices with

• ⅛ tsp salt

and coat them with

• 1 tsp oil, preferably peanut oil

Get the soup up to a heavy simmer. Gently lay the fish slices in. These will cook in just a flash: 30-40 seconds will be long enough. Stop the very moment the slices appear ‘cooked’.

Gently lay the fish slices over the ribs and vegetable, then pour the soup in the bowl.

Dipping Sauces

In Xinping itself, the dish there seemed to usually be served with a sizzling chili oil based dip (i.e. the thumbnail of the attached YouTube video). But in what is administratively still Xinping… if you just drive not even an hour down the mountains, you arrive at the town of Gasa.

And Gasa? It’s is a completely different microclimate — they’re specifically who’s famous for their sugar — it’s a basically-tropical valley along the Red River, and it’s here that you especially see the aforementioned Dai people influence. When we had this dish there, the restaurant there served it up with a nutty herbaceous dip, which was personally our favorite variant.

So, two choices here. We’ll start with the chili oil dip, and finish with the herbaceous one.

Sizzling Chili Oil Dip

To a bowl, toss in

• 6g chopped mint

• 6g chopped cilantro

• 6g chopped culantro (大芫荽), if possible — if you can’t find culantro, just use 12g cilantro in all

• 2 spicy fresh chilis, minced

• 1 large clove garlic, minced

• ¼ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ½ tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

Then, heat up

• 2 tbsp oil

until smoking, or about ~220C. Shut off the heat and allow to come down in temperature a touch, or ~180C. Toss into the oil

• ½ tbsp chili flakes, preferably a roasted or smoked one (e.g. Chinese 煳辣椒, Thai Prik Bon, or Chipotle flakes)

• ½ tbsp red, fragrant chili powder (e.g. Chinese 秦椒, Korean Gochugaru, or Kashmiri chili powder)

and quickly stir.

Pour the chili oil onto the dip for a satisfying sizzle, and mix well. Add in

• ~2 ladles, or ~¼ cup of the fish soup from above

If you feel the dip is too salty, add more soup. Not salty enough, add more salt.

Nutty, Herbaceous Dip from Gasa

To a bowl, toss in

• 15g chopped scallion

• 20g chopped cilantro

• 20g chopped culantro (大芫荽), if possible — if you can’t find culantro, just use 40g cilantro in all

• 3 spicy fresh chilis, minced

• 2 large cloves garlic, minced

• 2 tbsp chili flakes, preferably a roasted or smoked one (e.g. Chinese 煳辣椒, Thai Prik Bon, or Chipotle flakes)

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp MSG

• ¼ tsp Sichuan pepper powder (花椒面)

• 1 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• ½ tbsp toasted sesame seeds

Then, to serve, add in

• ~4 ladles, or ~½ cup of the fish soup from above

If you feel the dip is too salty, add more soup. Not salty enough, add more salt.

• Click to jump to recipe for Chili Fried Chili

• Click to jump to recipe for Hunan Chili-Simmered tofu

This — “poor man’s eating” — is a (maybe ongoing?) series shamelessly ‘inspired by’1 the eminent Townsends. Topical, admittedly, but at the same time it’s fun to step away from the Cantonese Jaulau (酒楼) and look at how a majority of China’s 1.6 billion people actually eat. The first recipe was Ghost Fire Green, and in this post we’ll show you some traditional Hunan-style spicy simmered tofu… together with the headline dish, “Chili Fried Chili”.

Feel free to jump to the various recipes, but astute observers might be noticing a pattern. We've got:

1. Chili pepper as the vegetable: Ghost Fire Green (鬼火绿)

2. Chili pepper as the seasoning: Chili Simmered Tofu (辣椒水豆腐)

3. Chili pepper as the seasoning and the vegetable: Chili Fried Chili (辣椒炒辣椒)

And that’s certainly no coincidence. If you spend a lot of time in China, you quickly start to internalize that this whole swath of food — i.e., humble village fare — is (often) practically synonymous with the chili pepper.

But if I asked you — or, at least, the average westerner — to scribble down a word cloud for “spicy”, I kind of doubt stuff like humble or rustic would make the list. Instead, people might get visions of their favorite celebrity on Hot Ones, the hipster gastropub down the street, or the artisanal hot sauce vendors at their local farmer’s market.

So why the difference?

“Poor People Food” in China, but “Rich People Food” in America?

About a year or so back, over at The Atlantic Ellen Cushing asked a question that, I think, has been on a lot of people’s minds: “Why is everything spicy now?”

After all, in the space of only about three decades, the United States went from a country that thought Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were ‘spicy’, to, well, having artisanal hot sauce makers at the farmer’s markets. I won’t make you fire up your archival service of choice — the TL;DR of her answer is “social media”: viral food challenges, the smash hit of Hot Ones, and so forth.

Rozin calls the phenomenon “benign masochism”: a little bit of pain, as a treat. “It’s bungee jumping and roller coasters and swimming in cold water,” he said, and it is a uniquely human impulse. (Imagine what would happen if you put a dog on a roller coaster.) “We somehow get a pleasure out of our body telling us not to do something, but we know it’s okay.” In the 1970s, when he was studying spice in Oaxaca, Rozin found that even children had learned to tolerate spice. When he offered the local pigs and dogs a choice, they picked bland food every time.

The dogs might be onto something. Then again, they don’t know about viral food challenges, or about the idea that your food choices reflect your identity, or how powerful it can feel to confront agony and swallow it whole. Mao Zedong is said to have suggested that anyone who couldn’t tolerate chiles couldn’t be a revolutionary; all over the world, and for centuries, spiciness has been something to conquer, and chiles have symbolized strength, bravery, national pride, and virility. America, it seems, is finally catching up. Self-taught superhot cultivators have spent the past decade trying to outdo themselves, crossbreeding progressively more infernal peppers with progressively more ridiculous names, ones like Death Spiral and Dragon’s Breath. (The Reaper isn’t even the world’s hottest anymore: That would be Pepper X, which has an average Scoville rating of above 2.6 million.) Rich and famous people with much, much better things to do are willingly humiliating themselves on Hot Ones, a web show that invites celebrities to eat hot wings while answering interview questions and that sold last year for $82.5 million. Internet-facilitated food challenges have become both more common and more extreme.

It’s a nice article, but I don’t buy it.

Because is the average chili crisp enjoyer actually motivated by ‘benign masochism’, or ‘how powerful it can feel to confront agony’? This, to me, reads like someone that never actually enjoyed spicy food trying to analyze the phenomenon from the outside. After all, black pepper (piperine) and ginger (gingerol) also interact with the same receptors on the tongue, and nobody’s calling anyone a ‘masochist’ for ordering the Steak au poivre.

So then what turned me onto spicy food, if it wasn’t viral food challenges of ever-escalating masculine bravado? Well, I’m not sure about you, but for my generation of American millennials, growing up in the Northeast… I always felt there was something vaguely uncouth about not being able to eat spicy. Like, insisting on capsicum-free eating was roughly akin to putting up posters of van Gogh on your dorm wall, or fantasizing about Pachelbel’s Canon in D playing at your wedding. White, boring, basic.

Here’s my best guess as to what happened.

Back in the ‘80s, perhaps, you might have been ‘cool’ if you were the dude that knew the Maître d' at Le Cirque, dropping your credit card for the tasting menu and ordering couple bottles of a 1979 Château Coutet for the table. But over the years, there began to be a sort of base vulgarity associated with that kind of culinary ostentation, and the clout moved instead towards discovery. After all, in the decades prior there was a massive influx of immigrants into coastal urban America. And with a panoply of global cuisines on your doorstep, to borrow a line from Anthony Bourdain:

“… for a young man with indie aspirations and a modest disposable income, there [was] now a certain cachet in hunting down a shoebox-sized Uighur noodle shop in the cellar of a Chinese mall in Flushing”.

If we’re honest with ourselves as food lovers, there was a lot of exclusivity all the same (Americans do love their clubs). But it was cultural capital doing the work in place of the ol’ Amex Platinum.

And for our young urbanite with indie aspirations, what were the restaurants on offer? Well, the influx on the American coasts tended to come from places like Vietnam, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Chinese interior, West Africa… geographies, it should be said, that definitely aren’t afraid of the chili.

So for our generation, I feel the ability to handle those flavors began to be equated with a sort of ‘worldliness’. If you were the type of dude that prided yourself on the culturally-correct way to slurp Japanese Ramen — of course you were going to want your Pad Kaprao “Thai Spicy”:

And while that millennial hipster food culture faded away like all youth trends tend to do, the penchant for spice didn’t end up going the way of the “Stomp, Clap, Hey”. Instead, in much the same way blue jeans went from ‘the iconic attire of James Dean’ to ‘just what people wear’, nowadays there’s chili crisp in the aisles of WalMart, and Sriracha right next to the ketchup at the diners.

In short, it was the sort of top-down class phenomenon that would make Bourdieu proud. The college educated, the internationalized, the media-savvy urban elite developed a taste for the stuff… and the rest of the country followed.

But the chili pepper in China had a very different story.

Encircling the Cities from the Countryside

You might have heard about the “anti-microbial hypothesis” of chili pepper diffusion. Basically, the idea is that the chili pepper functions as a natural preservative of sorts, which is why you tend to see chilis pop up more in hotter climates. And so, the thinking goes, it’s a simple process of Darwinian gastronomy that results in, say, West African food being hotter than Italy… and Scandinavia being left out from the show entirely.

Simply put: north equals bland, south equals spicy.

But now let’s try to graft this theory onto China. The following is a map of various cuisines of China, with my personal (very rough) estimates of how spicy their food is. Blue is not spicy, orange is mild to medium spicy, and red is ‘definitely spicy’:

Huh. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the theory.

Of course, the world is complicated. And tracking how exactly the chili pepper spread through China is one of those murky research areas that is, let’s just call it… “hotly contested”. People tend to agree that it first hit Chinese shores sometime in the late 16th century, together with the rest of that spate of new, new world plants and vegetables (peanuts, potatoes, etc). But it appears like the chili was first used for ornamental and medicinal purposes—perhaps for centuries!—before we finally get our first written recipe using chili peppers in 1790:

But that’s just a recipe, and recipes are intrinsically kind of lagging indicators. When did people first start eating chili for food? Well, this is a matter of great debate. The afore-cited Brian Dott argues that it’s quite possible that people on the coasts used chili for cooking and simply didn’t write about it2. But a little less speculatively, the first written record of using chilis in food is from the rugged Guizhou province in 16903:

“When it [salt] is scarce, dog pepper [i.e. chilis] is used in its place.”

当其（盐）匮也。代之以狗椒。

The subject here is the Miao ethnic minority group in the mountainous reaches of the Guizhou province. As you might be able to gather from the name ‘dog pepper’, the Han chroniclers of the Imperial Qing maybe could have used a little Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives in their civil service examination curriculum. The next follow-up was Sizhou Prefecture Gazetteer in 17214:

“Chili peppers, commonly called ‘spicy fire’, are used by the local Miao people as a substitute for salt.”

海椒，俗称辣火，土苗用以代盐

But that’s a little weird, right? You could imagine, perhaps, someone using chili pepper as a substitute for black pepper, white pepper… or even something like mustard or Sichuan peppercorns. Chili pepper is a seasoning. But salt? Salt’s an electrolyte, something that pretty much every living thing needs to survive. Salt’s also an osmolyte, used by humans for food preservation for millennia.

So maybe the ol’ “anti-microbial hypothesis” isn’t completely dead in the water? Because that purpose, an ostensible ‘salt substitute’, is a pattern that you end up seeing again and again across Southwest China. Cao Yu (曹雨), one of the preeminent scholars of the chili pepper in China, explains:

“Due to a scarcity of salt, it was not uncommon in the southwestern regions to use other methods of seasoning as a ‘salt substitute’... that is, substituting plant ash for salt, sourness for salt, chili peppers for salt, and nitre [potassium nitrate] for salt.”

由于食盐的缺乏，西南地区以别的调味方式“代盐”的情况并不鲜见……即以草木灰代盐、以酸代盐、以辣椒代盐、以硝代盐 (中国食辣史, 2019: p. 50)

But then if that’s the case, how can we explain a place like Guangdong — a region that has probably some of the most uncomfortably muggy weather on the planet, but prides itself on going easy on the chilis?

This is where our story gets interesting. Because salt was a commodity that was monopolized by the various governments of imperial China. Supply was heavily regulated, distribution was controlled, and transportation was taxed (sometimes onerously). The end result of the system was that the major urban areas usually had a reasonably steady supply of salt, but the logistics could get quite dicey the further out you got. Urban denizens got their sodium chloride, rural farmers had to get creative. This resulted in an interesting culinary split, as Cao Yu explains:

“Even within the affluent classes of large cities located in chili-eating regions (such as Chengdu, Changsha, Wuhan, Xi’an), few actually ate spicy food. Chili-based cuisine was still regarded as a dietary habit of the impoverished classes and was thus resisted”5

即使是吃辣地区中的大型城市（如成都、长沙、武汉、西安）的富裕阶层中，吃辣的也并不多，辣味饮食仍被视为是一种贫穷阶层的饮食习惯而被抗拒；但是在乡村中，即使是富农和地主，也往往有吃辣的习惯 (中国食辣史, 2019: p 56).

And there’s the crux of our story in China. Especially historically—but even today!—there is unmistakably a class element to the capsicum. If you see a Cantonese person proudly proclaiming how their cuisine keeps ‘the original flavor’, the implicit second half of that sentence is ‘…not like those classless chili-eating farmers in bumblefuck Hunan’. If you hear a Sichuan person insisting that ‘traditionally their cuisine is not that spicy’, what you’re hearing is a faint echo of the Mandarin elite of Qing Dynasty Chengdu.

So this is the cultural context of a dude like Mao Zedong proclaiming that ‘unless you eat chilis, you’re not a true revolutionary’ (不吃辣椒不革命). Many western observers seem to view the quip through the lens of a sort of militaristic machismo, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Instead, it’s a (somewhat light-hearted) rejection of the rigid class system that defined pre-49 China.

And the communist revolution did, perhaps, help spread the chili pepper in its own way. But even more critical, I think, than the political revolution in the 40s was the social revolution that occurred in China in the 80s through the 00s. It’s an oft-told tale, of course — in the wake of Deng’s reforms, waves after waves of migrant workers from the rural interior streamed into coastal cities for work, indelibly changing everything in the process. Mao (infamously) endeavored to break down class barriers by sending urbanites to the farms. Deng, perhaps, succeeded by opening the cities to the rural.

But while many people might have images burned into their brain of the Factory Girls, a lesser told tale of that great migration was the role of migrant entrepreneurs. When a village-worth of Sichuanese come to Shenzhen to work in a factory, those workers need to eat somewhere. So little Sichuan eateries pop up—at first subject to all the class snobbery that one might expect. But over the years, the barriers begin to slowly chisel away. One restauranteur finds that while the local Cantonese might not be able to accept Chongqing hotpot, the mildly-spicy Suan Cai Yu (‘sauerkraut [sic] fish’) seems to be a hit — and the dish did indeed trend in Guangzhou in the mid 00s.

From there, maybe the next step for a Cantonese person might be a ‘medium’ dish like Shuizhu chili-poached fish. And then, maybe, said Cantonese person ends up marrying someone from Guangxi. And then, maybe, their kid grows up best friends with a classmate whose family hails from Hunan. And then by the time that kid reaches college age in 2026, the most popular dishes in country begin to be none other than Luosifen, Yangroufen, and Sichuan Hotpot:

Chili Fried Chili (辣椒炒辣椒)

So… that’s the background here. Throughout China, you can find various ‘chili-fried’ dishes — a flavor profile consisting of minced fresh spicy chilis, garlic, and ginger:

It’s perhaps most synonymous with Hunan and Jiangxi, but you can find variations on the theme everywhere from Yunnan to Guangdong. This is a recipe that uses that flavor profile, but with chilis as the base vegetable.

Recipe

Optionally wet

• ½ tbsp douchi (豆豉), Chinese fermented black soybeans

with a touch (~½ tsp) of baijiu liquor, vodka, or water. Set aside.

Mince together

• 25g fresh spicy red chilis (e.g. Thai chilis, Chinese Heaven Facing)

• 3 cloves garlic

• ~1 inch ginger

and set aside.

Lightly crush

• 450g of a mild to medium green chili (e.g. Chinese Luosijiao, Italian Long Hots, Anaheims, Poblanos, or even green bell pepper if you like)

and optionally chop into ~4 inch sections.

To cook the chilis, to a hot wok swirl in

• a thin smear of oil, ~1 tsp

and over a high flame go in with the chilis. Allow to slightly char for ~60 seconds on one side. Flip and go another ~60 seconds on the other. Sprinkle in

• ⅜ tsp salt

and quickly stir fry everything together. Swap the flame to medium low and cover. Allow to cook for 4-5 minutes, stirring periodically. You’ll be done once the chilis roughly smell ‘roasted’ and the skin just barely begin to separate from the flesh6. Remove from the wok.

Swirl in

• ~3 tbsp oil, preferably lard

and allow to melt. Over a medium-low flame, add in the chili-garlic-ginger mixture and the wetted douchi, if using. Fry until fragrant, ~1 minute.

Up the flame to high. Add in the cooked green chilis, and stir fry together for ~30 seconds. Swirl

• ½ tbsp soy sauce

over the spatula and around the sides of the wok, and mix well.

Add in a seasoning of

• ⅛ tsp white pepper

• ⅛ tsp sugar

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder (or more MSG, if keeping veg)

• ⅛ tsp MSG

and stir fry for another ~15 seconds to mix and dissolve.

Chili-Simmered Tofu (辣椒水豆腐)

‘Chili-Simmering’ is a technique that we learned from the writer Huang Xiaoji (黄孝纪) in his excellent book on food in a Hunan village in the 80s, Menu from a Village (一个乡村的食单). They would use the below process for tofu, tofu puffs, egg, etc. The following recipe is our expansion on what he wrote about in the book.

Do note that it’s really quite rustic, so if you’re familiar with Hunan cuisine as you see it in 21st century restaurants, it might look and taste slightly different than you may be used to.

Recipe

Roughly mince

• 1 large clove garlic

and set aside.

Chop

• 10g cilantro7

• 10g Chinese celery (芹菜) -or- scallions

into half inch sections and set aside.

To a hot wok, swirl in

• ~1.5 tbsp oil, preferably lard

and allow to melt. Over a medium flame, add in the minced garlic and fry until fragrant, ~30 seconds. Add in

• One block, ~400g soft tofu (嫩豆腐)

and break it up with the spatula into ~2cm thick rectangular pieces. Allow to panfry for ~2 minutes, or until the oil begins to get clear again. Add in

• ~1.5 tbsp duojiao, Hunan fermented ‘chopped chilis’ (剁椒)

spread it out a bit, then flip the tofu pieces. Swirl in

• 1 tsp soy sauce

then add in

enough water to almost submerge the tofu (for our wok this was ~1.5 cups)

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ½ tsp chili powder

cover with a breathable lid (or leave the lid ajar), and bring to a boil. Boil for ~5 minutes, or until the water’s roughly reduced by half. Season to taste, we added

• ¼ tsp MSG

and then add in the chopped cilantro and celery. Gently mix.

Like a lot of young American dudes, Buffalo Wings used to be my absolute favorite food. They were my go-to bar snack, the default side at a pizza joint. Back when I was in high school, me and my buddies would even gather together for makeshift wing eating competitions: mouth on fire, hands sloppy, chugging Coca Cola, plastic blue cheese containers scattered about…

And so, I’ve — predictably — wanted to share that same experience with my Chinese friends as well. But after a decade and a half living here in China, feeding them to a range of people around the country… pretty much to a man, nobody’s ever actually been into them. Depending on the person I’m subjecting them to, the specific reaction can range from a polite-but-dismissive ‘yeah, ok, thanks for cooking’ to ‘In what ghost’s name are these things? What a waste of a chicken wing…’1

Now, you might expect the reason for the distaste is ‘too spicy’. But China obviously has spicy food — even Cantonese cuisine is less afraid of the chili pepper than their popular image tends to convey. That’s not it.

And so, if I pry a bit, the consistent response is that they’re just too sour.

Which is… a little bit of a head scratcher, right? I mean, sometimes people will describe buffalo wings as ‘tangy’, but when I give them to Steph, it looks like she just ate a damn sour patch kid. But it’s not like China doesn’t use vinegar, either — and it’s Steph that, when we lived in Bangkok, would hit her boat noodles with double fistfuls of extra lime.

So, today’s the first of April. We’ve had a little tradition for the channel to observe the holiday by crafting a recipe that’s… a little more ‘inventive’ than our usual fare. Real recipes, but… Taco Bell Jianbing. Deep Fried Pineapple Pizza Baozi. A Sichuan Laziji, albeit with Guizhou chili chips as the chilis. Etc.

So this year, I’ve decided to tackle the problem. This year, I’m fixing the buffalo wing.

The Fundamental Problem

After spending way too long thinking about this… at a fundamental level, here’s our problem:

Frank’s RedHot is, of course, the very base of a buffalo sauce. It’s the canonical hot sauce for an authentically correct buffalo wing: Frank’s, Butter, and… not all that much else. If you talk to a lot of people, if it’s not Frank’s… it’s not a buffalo wing.

It’s also hot fucking garbage.

This is something that took a very long time for me to admit to myself. And if you’re anything like me, you will want to resist this information. But before scribbling down an angry comment below the post, I want you to grab a bottle of Frank’s. I want you to open it, take a sniff. Have a taste. Compare it against other spicy condiments. Compare it against your favorite American or Mexican hot sauce — Crystal, Valentina, Tabasco, whatever.

Frank’s hot sauce is fucking vinegar. The stuff reeks of vinegar essence — I’d bet good money that that’s what they use as their ‘vinegar’. Chili flavor? Non-existent. Chili fragrance? Non-existent. And compounding the problem is that it’s not even spicy. Like, Da Bomb hot sauce is infamously gross, but at least it can make the guests open up on Hot Ones. Nam Phrik Pao — Thai chili jam — has practically negative heat, but at least has a very nice chili flavor to it. But Frank’s is nothing. It’s just... bad.

My Buffalo Hypothesis

But if Frank’s is actively bad, how did it end up being the base for so many American hot wings?

Here’s my hypothesis — I think it’s fair to say that America, as a culture, didn’t used to have the spice tolerance that we have today. In 2026, Mexican food is ubiquitous. You can find proper Sichuan restaurants in most major metropolitan areas. You can find artisanal hot sauce vendors at bougie farmers markets.

But Buffalo wings were invented at a bar in western New York in the 1960s. It was a very different country then. If I gave my parents or late grandparents a spoonful of Frank’s hot sauce, I would imagine their dominant reaction would be Wow! Spicy! whilst chaotically fanning their mouth. And so to someone with that level of spice tolerance, I think a buffalo wing will likely taste balanced. Because the vinegar? Cuts the heat. The garlic? Cuts the heat. The butter? Cuts the heat. And then you dip everything in a blue cheese dressing…

But now let’s compare our 1960s American to a modern-day Chinese spicy food enthusiast:

Your local Sichuan hotpot joint is functionally your local bar. At the Shaokao, you’ve got a fistful of beef chili bombs. When you’re confronted with a bowl of white rice, you’re dumping on spoonfuls of Lao Gan Ma — not because it’s ‘spicy’ per se, just so that you can actually feel something.

If your mouth has already adjusted to te-ma te-la (特麻特辣)2 Sichuan-hotpot-level spicy, you’re going to taste Frank’s… and it’s going to taste like vinegar. And so if you don’t have that base sensory experience of ‘spicy’, the remainder of a buffalo wing is not going to taste balanced. It’s going to taste like vinegar-butter… and who wants to eat vinegar butter?

The Solution

Now Frank’s is, of course, a fermented American-style hot sauce. The basic approach — used by Frank’s, Tabasco, Crystal, Louisiana, etc — is to make a mash of fermented chili peppers and then blend them with vinegar.

So what I want to do is go back to the basics: fermented chilis. Because while China doesn’t really have an American style hot sauce, it does have some fantastic quality fermented chili peppers — some of which can really get quite spicy. And so, if we start with fermented chilis, we’ll be able to fine-tune the sourness to get things to an appropriate level, for a given spice tolerance.

I decided to use these pickled chilis:

These are pickled millet chilis, xiaomila (小米辣). If you’d like to play along at home, these are also actually quite available at Chinese supermarkets in the west as well (a commonly available brand is the one above, on the right). They’re quite spicy — I’ve seen them ballparked at around 100k-150k SVU3.

Blending them with a bit of garlic and water, the end result was only moderately sour — but quite spicy. Feeding a bit of my ‘homemade Chinese hot sauce’ to Steph, it barely registered as tangy but she coughed from the heat. And this is what we want, because remember that the remainder of our buffalo sauce is going to be a conspiracy to balance that heat.

The Second Pain Point

So, we’ve solved the chili issue. But the other foundational leg of our Buffalo sauce — butter — is almost as problematic. Again, recall that a buffalo sauce is often anywhere between 25% to 50% butter. Have you ever mistakenly left out a homemade buffalo sauce and seen how it congeals the next day? The stuff’s almost gross… you could literally take it, and spread it on toast.

Now, I don’t want to say that modern Chinese food never loads up on borderline-gross quantities of fat. But the genre is often meme food — the sort of stretchy, gooey fare that exists to get college students and influencers excited:

I want something that registers as actually good.

Now, generally speaking, if you search online for how to make buffalo sauce… the techniques on display will usually be somewhat adjacent to a French technique called mounting with butter. You take your hot sauce base, and you slowly whisk cubes of cold butter in — the thick butter blends in with the hot sauce, and you’re left with a thick, rich sauce.

But that’s not the only way to make a buffalo sauce — nor is it even the most traditional. The following is one of the oldest written recipes for buffalo sauce, from the creator herself in the Buffalo Courier-Express (courtesy reddit user u/sjbluebirds):

Ingredients.
• 6 Tablespoon (3 oz.) of Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce.
• ½ stick of margarine.
• 1 Tablespoon white vinegar.
• ⅛ teaspoon celery seed.
• ⅛ to ¼ teaspoon Cayenne pepper.
• ¼ teaspoon red pepper.
• ⅛ teaspoon garlic salt.
• dash black pepper.
• ¼ teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce.
• 1 to 2 teaspoon Tabasco Sauce

Melt the margarine and Frank’s together in a small saucepan, and mix everything else in. Use margarine instead of butter to avoid milk solids scorching on the bottom of the pan and floating in the sauce.

Dry the wings, and working in batches deep fry until cooked. Toss the cooked wings in the sauce, and optionally bake for 5 minutes in a 250° oven. Serve with blue cheese and Genny Cream.

The original buffalo sauce used margarine, not butter. I’ve tried this recipe before — and margarine, indeed, makes for a better buffalo sauce than butter. And that’s because butter sauces break, which can be a big problem when you’re introducing piping hot wings from the deep fryer. Margarine, meanwhile, has stabilizers (lecithin most commonly) that’ll keep the sauce thick.

Another other way to make a buffalo sauce is to simply use this product:

That is, a pre-made buffalo sauce.

I’ve known a handful of people that’ve worked in sports bars and the like, and they seem to work off of that jug. Maybe add a little more cayenne, a little more hot sauce… but they’d either use that stuff straight, or toss it in a squeeze bottle with a couple alternations. Not claiming that they’re necessarily representative, but certainly from an operations point of view you could see the practicality.

And that jug?

Yeah, zoom in. It’s got stabilizers — Xanthan Gum.

So in order to crack the richness nut, I think I’m going to avoid the whole ‘mounting with butter’ approach that’s so ubiquitous online. I’ll be adding a non-insignificant amount of butter, obviously, but I’m not going to rely on the godless quantities of butter required to get my sauce thickness to where I want to get it to. Instead, I’m going to (1) stir fry a sauce, then (2) thicken with a potato starch slurry, in the Chinese manner. We’ll both start and finish the stir fry with butter, but I’ll also be adding milk powder to my sauce, in order to cut the richness without having to cut the ‘dairy-ness’.

Final Guidelines

Now, I don’t want to go off the deep end here. I want my ‘China-localized’ wing to still resemble a buffalo wing. It should still tickle the brain of the most devout Buffalonian as a buffalo wing (even if they have opinions on the topic). After all, McDonalds and KFC do well in the Chinese market, partly, I think, because their local adaption is partial. Dunkin’ Donuts failed because they tried to be BreadTalk — and they’re not BreakTalk.

The platonic form of a buffalo wing, is, of course, a matter of great debate. This is where I come down on the subject:

1. Buffalo Sauce should be spicy. Everyone’s spice tolerance is different — that’s why different heat options exist. But I think buffalo wings should feel spicy just on the edge of ‘challenging’, maybe getting slightly past challenging at around your fourth wing.

2. Buffalo Sauce should be quite buttery. If you don’t add butter (or, well, margarine), it’s not a buffalo wing — it’s a hot wing. Many recipes go as far as one part butter to one part hot sauce (I’ve even seen a recipe that went three parts butter to one part hot sauce).

3. Buffalo Sauce should be somewhat tangy. A bit of garlic is also nice. We’ve talked at length about tamping back the sourness, but we do still need some tang in the mix. Many American hot sauces contain garlic as well, and complementing the sauce with a bit of fresh garlic or garlic powder can be nice.

4. Buffalo Sauce shouldn’t have any weird ‘other’ flavors inside. The biggest offenders I’ve seen are (1) ketchup and (2) blue cheese. If you want to add a little bit of something, that’s fine. Worcestershire sauce for depth, maybe a touch of ketchup to make use of its thickeners. But if you can taste ketchup in the sauce, it’s way too much. And blue cheese is in the dip, not in the sauce.

5. Buffalo Sauce should be thick enough to adhere to the wing. This is somewhat of a controversial opinion, but I’m not overly a fan of the ‘thin’ buffalo (or hot) sauces that easily drip off the side of the wing. Because at that point, why even dress them? Might as well have the sauce as a dipping sauce — this way your hands stay clean and the wing stays crispy.

6. The Wing should be ‘naked’, or have a thin crispy coating. The ‘authentically correct’ wing for a hot wing is naked — no marinade, no coating, no nothing. You fry the thing until crisp, done. But a light flour or starch coating can also be nice, I think… but the breaded coatings are too much. At the same time, I strongly feel that the cooking internet often deeply overthinks the ‘crispiness’ variable — go to a nice bar, American-style hot wings never really have a concussive crunch to them. The flavor of the sauce is more important than the crispiness of the wings.

Okay. That’s what I’m going for.

And this is what I ended up doing:

Buffalo Wings, Remixified

I ended up going with a light coating — specifically the style of coating that’s used in Yunnan’s Sheng Zha Ji, ‘direct fried chicken’, which we discussed in our deep fried ribs post here.

To

• 15 chicken wings, ~600g

mix

• 1 tsp salt

• ½ tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ½ tbsp red chili powder, e.g. Kashmiri or Goshukaru

• ½ tbsp spicy chili powder, e.g. cayenne pepper4

• ½ tbsp soy sauce

• ½ tbsp bourbon

• ½ tbsp tabasco

• ¼ tsp white pepper

• ¼ tsp garlic powder

and let marinate for at least 90 minutes.

While the chicken wings are marinating, make the sauce. To do so, first blend together

• 85g Chinese pickled xiaomila chilis

• 2 cloves garlic

• ⅓ cup water

and pass through a fine mesh sieve. Then, to the makeshift hot sauce add

• enough water, or chicken stock, or a combination to get to 1 cup worth of liquid total (likely ~⅔ cup)

and then to that add

• ½ tbsp milk powder

• ½ tbsp Tabasco

• 1 tsp sugar

• 1 tsp rice -or- white vinegar

• ½ tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ¼ tsp white pepper

• ¼ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp garlic powder

and set that aside.

Once the wings are done marinating, mix together a coating of

• 1 egg white, thoroughly beaten

• 10g starch

• 10g water

and add it to the marinated wings. Mix well.

Deep fry the wings for one minute at 120C. Then get your oil up to 175C, and deep fry the wings for 4-5 minutes, or until browned and very crispy. Remove and reserve, but try to move quickly with the next step to ensure the wings are still hot5.

To stir fry the sauce, to a wok add in

• 2 tbsp butter

and let that melt over a medium low flame. Optionally skim off any obvious milk fats and toss it together with the sauce. Once foaming, fry

• 1 clove garlic, finely minced

until fragrant, and add

• 3 pickled Chinese xiaomila chilis, optional (for garnish mostly)

• ½ tsp spicy chili powder, e.g. cayenne pepper

and up the flame to high. Brief mix, then swirl

• 1 tbsp bourbon

over your spatula and around the sides of the wok. Brief mix, then add in the reserved sauce. Bring it up to a boil, then swap the flame to low. Drizzle in a slurry of

• 2 tsp starch, preferably potato starch

• 2 tsp water

It should be somewhat thickened but still nowhere near spoon-coating consistency. Then shut off the heat and add in

• 2.5 tbsp butter, very cold from the fridge, cut into cubes

and slowly mix those in with the sauce.

Add in the wings and mix well to coat. You will have excess sauce! Transfer the wings to a plate and excess sauce to a bowl.

To sop up the excess sauce, serve with deep fried mantou. Together with, of course, the mandatory celery and blue cheese dressing.

• Click to jump to how to ‘home-fry’ a one-year-aged Pixian Doubanjiang

• Click to jump to our personal recipe for a home-fried mix

• Click to jump to recipe for Homestyle Braised Ribs

• Click to jump to recipe for a Saucy Homestyle Braised Green Bean

• Click to jump to recipe for a Homestyle Stir-fried Pork

There’s no ingredient that has consistently gaslighted me more than Sichuan Chili Bean paste, Pixian Doubanjiang.

I mean, I’ve personally had no problem with it — here in China it’s always been simple enough for me to waltz to my local market or supermarket and pick up a bottle. Use it in some Shuizhu chili poached beef. Use it in Mapo Tofu. Whatever. But when you’re writing recipes for the internet, you’ve got to be attuned to the struggles of the recipe reader. While I’ll never be able to craft borderless instructions like the geniuses that make the Ikea manuals… “well, it worked on my machine” isn’t exactly a suitable response to someone that’s struggled with one of our recipes.

And while it’s still not a majority, by far the most consistent critique of Chili-Bean-Paste-laden recipes are that they’re just “too salty”.

Now, some of this might be personal taste. Years of messaging from public health officials have made many homecooks in the west extremely tentative with the sodium chloride — I mean, just the other day on /r/cooking there was a cook that blew their own mind by properly salting things for the first time. And while Chinese cuisine isn’t exactly as precious as the west is with our ‘low sodium soy sauces’ or what have you… Sichuan Chili Bean Paste is, undeniably, salty as fuck.

And that might be the issue. But I hesitate to chalk it all up to taste, when there’s just so many products out there sold under the English name “chili bean paste”. So… pop quiz: if you’re making a Sichuan Mapo Tofu, what’s the chili bean paste that you’re looking for?

If you selected picture three, congratulations. Jump here to learn how to employ the product in the form of the Sichuan ‘homestyle’ flavor profile. For everyone else:

• Picture one is a Cantonese-style chili bean paste. It can be employed in dipping sauces to make a variant of the classic Cantonese chili and dausi — fermented Chinese black soybean — dip.

• Picture two is a one year aged Sichuan chili bean paste, from a fantastic brand called Juanchengpai. It is packaged without oil.

• Picture four is a three year aged Sichuan chili bean paste, also packaged sans oil. A very delicious product with a very deep Jiangxiang (“fermented sauce fragrant”) flavor, beginning to reach that sort of salty, chocolate-y depth that you might find in, say, a Cantonese Minsi paste.

• Picture five is a Taiwanese style variant. It appears to be employed in somewhat ‘Sichuan-influenced’ Taiwan dishes such as Taiwan style Zha Jiang and Taiwan-style braised tofu.

• Picture six is a Japanese chili bean paste, to be employed in dishes such as the Japanese-style Mapo (“Mabo”) tofu.

But I can already see some of you wondering what’s going on with pictures two and four. They’re Sichuan brands. They’re labeled Pixian Doubanjiang. Why can’t they be used in a Mapo Tofu?

Well, they can. For sure. But maybe… not quite yet.

The Two Types of “Red Oil” Chili Bean Paste

When you’re reading any sort of Sichuan recipe — in English, or in Chinese — if they call for Pixian Doubanjiang, 99 times out of 100 what they mean is a Red Oil Chili Bean Paste (红油豆瓣). It is, as you might guess, a Sichuan-style Chili Bean Paste that, well, contains red oil inside of it.

But further confusing everything? Even in Sichuan itself, there are two distinct styles of… “Red Oil Chili Bean Paste”.

First, there’s what I’ll call “type one”:

These are chili bean pastes that have been aged with oil. The traditional way to make a red oil chili bean paste is to ferment broadbeans until all nice and fuzzy, then mix it together with chili peppers, seasoning, and a whole bunch of salt. Then that goes into a fermentation crock together with a good bit of rapeseed oil, and left to age. If you’re in the market for a fermentation project, the always-excellent ChinaSichuanFood blog has a full recipe here.

But for the vast, vast majority of homecooks today? What they’ll be using is the bottle on the left. It’s what we use when we call for the product on the channel — it’s the standard. It’s easy, it’s ready to go.

Second, there’s what I’ll call “type two” Red Oil Chili Bean Paste:

This is a chili bean paste that’s been fried with oil. The product on the left is a homemade red oil chili bean paste that is, in turn, made from the product on the right — a one year aged oil-less Sichuan Chili Bean Paste. Said pack is rather famous in a restaurant setting, but in the markets in Sichuan you can also find people selling small-batch — and similarly oil-less — chili bean paste (center).

These are, quite often, very nice products1. What you’ll do is take these products home and fry them on low with a good hunk of oil. If you then keep that product for dishes, this is also — especially in a restaurant context — referred to as ‘red oil chili bean paste’.

So perhaps this might be the answer to our salinity mystery? Because if you went online and mistakenly purchased the oil-less pack and blindly used it in a recipe, your final result will be (1) not red enough and (2) about 50% too salty!

But before cursing your pack of one year aged Juanchengpai with its cool paper wrapper and twine, again, you should know that it is a nice product. Don’t toss it — fry it.

How to Get the Oil-less Packs of Pixian Ready to Use

Now, if you take a gender at your pack of 1 year Pixian Doubanjiang, it does have instructions on how to use it right on the pack:

Get a wok filled with a suitable amount of oil up to 100 centigrade. Use about a tablespoon worth of Doubanjiang for two people. Use a low flame and fry it until loose and fragrant. Then add a suitable amount of ingredients and stir fry until cooked. Season to taste.

So yes. You can, indeed, vibe cook together with the pack if you’ve got a bit of experience under your belt. But if you’re trying to use the oil-less pack in a random recipe online that calls for Pixian Doubanjiang, you’ll run into two issues:

1. The Oil-To-Doubanjiang ratio will likely be off. The pack is a more concentrated product than the red-oil bottles, and you also do need a certain quantity of oil to properly fry your oil-less Doubanjiang.

2. You’ll probably underestime how long to fry the Doubanjiang over low. This step is called ‘frying out the red oil’ (炒出红油), and at the very least you’re going to need about ~3 minutes for one tablespoon worth. And if you’re using more than that, I’ve found that it can go up to 8-10 minutes before it reaches the stage that we want.

The best way counteract these issues, I think, is to pre-fry a batch of Doubanjiang. This is an approach that’s practically mandatory in restaurants (given the time-sensitive nature of a Chinese restaurant kitchen), but the approach can be seen in home kitchens too.

Here’s how you do it:

In a wok, toss in

• ½ cup oil

See the note below if using a raw oil such as Sichuan-style rapeseed oil2.

Then, add in

• 100g packaged oil-less Pixian Doubanjiang

and swap the flame to low/medium low. The oil should be hot enough for the paste to be bubbling. Fry until fragrant and the chilis have just begun to curl/lose their color, ~10 minutes:

Set aside. This stuff’ll last basically forever. Use like you would use the bottle of Red Oil Chili Bean Paste.

The Color Problem

There is, however, one issue that you might find with your ‘home-fried’ Red Oil Chili Bean Paste — compared to the bottle, it’s nowhere close to the same vibrant red color. Little less red, a little more… ‘orange’:

Of course, if you’re cooking for yourself (i.e., not professionally in a restaurant or a content-creation setting)… obviously not every dish you whip up needs to be super, super red. And the home-fried sort can be very delicious! So functionally, I feel like for us as cooks… type one will have a superior color, and type two a superior flavor (unless you happen to actually be fermenting the stuff yourself).

But if you do happen to want a redder color to your home-fried Pixian Doubanjiang dishes, you could perhaps try these solutions:

1. Include a half part of a red, fragrant chili powder (上色辣椒) to your recipe. E.g. something like Kashmiri chili powder or Gochugaru chili powder. So if your recipe is calling for 1 tbsp of Chili Bean Paste, also toss in a half tablespoon of chili powder together in the early stages of the stir fry.

2. Use half type 1, half type 2. If you happen to have both a home-fried and a bottled red oil chili bean paste on hand, you could try going half/half. Home-fried for depth, bottled for color.

And on that note, if you do happen to have access to different styles of Pixian Doubanjiang, you could also…

Fry Up Your Own Flavor

In my personal opinion? One of the biggest benefits of the pack is that, as a cook, you can fry up your own flavor of Red Oil Chili Bean Paste — according to your own tastes.

In Sichuan, one of the most classic mixes is to go half one-year-aged Chili Bean Paste and half three-year-aged chili bean paste3. But in restaurants, sometimes you can also see people mix together the bottled Red Oil Chili Bean paste together with the one-year pack, perhaps adding a bit of the three year (or even some Douchi fermented black soybeans) for depth.

Further, you can also, if you like, add some spices or aromatics to your oil base. Some variants can even get a bit wild and add in some ham or dried shrimp! If you’re curious, below is a recipe for a mix that we personally enjoyed.

Thinly slice

• ¼ onion

and smash

• ~3 inches of ginger

and set aside. In a bowl, toss in

• 1 psc sand ginger (沙姜/山奈)

• 1 dried bay leaf (香叶)

• ¼ tsp Sichuan peppercorns

• ¼ tsp fennel seed

and wet with a bit of vodka or baijiu liquor. Skip any spices you can’t find or don’t like. Then, in a wok, toss in

• 1 cup oil

and see the note below if using a raw oil such as Sichuan-style rapeseed oil (菜籽油). Add in the onions and ginger, and fry on medium flame. After about ~5 minutes, add the liquor-wetted spices. Fry until the onions are nice and golden brown, ~5 minutes more.

Strain, then return the oil back to the wok. Add

• 90g Red Oil Chili Bean Paste (红油郫县豆瓣)

• 90g 1 Year Aged Chili Bean Paste (一级郫县豆瓣)

• 30g 3 year Aged Chili Bean Paste (特级郫县豆瓣)

and mix well. Slowly fry on low/medium-low for 10 minutes, or until the oil is stained red, the chili peppers slightly curl and lose color, and the pot is fragrant. Remove and reserve.

Sichuan Homestyle Flavor (家常味型)

Probably the most obvious application of Red Oil Chili Bean Paste — particularly the more involved ‘home-fried’ sort — would probably to be the ‘Sichuan Homestyle Flavor’ (家常味型). As the name suggests, it’s one of the more common of the 24 flavor profiles in Sichuan, the thing is…

• Red oil chili bean paste

• Soy sauce

… and honestly not all that much else. Depending on the recipe you might see a bit of Sichuan pepper, or douchi, or (often) green garlic. But that’s the core.

It also, I think, makes it for a nice Sichuan flavor to execute outside of China, as it’s pretty dead simple on the sourcing front. You’ve already got soy sauce, you just need some of that… red oil chili bean paste.

Of course, the homestyle flavor profile being, well, a flavor profile… you can see it in a number of different forms. It can run the gamut from soupy to dry — perhaps the most common is to see it as a base for a braise, but the most iconic application is Sichuan’s Twice Cooked Pork (回锅肉).

Below are three recipes — braised ribs (soupy), braised beans (saucy), and stir fried pork (dry, inspired by a dish called Yanjianrou — 盐煎肉).

Homestyle Braised Ribs (家常排骨)

Smash:

• 1 inch ginger

Heat on medium high, to a braising pot, add in

• 2 tbsp oil

• 650g ribs, chopped across the bone into ~1 inch sections

and fry over a medium-high flame. Once the ribs have changed color (~5 minutes), add in the smashed ginger. Continue to fry until the ribs have turned lightly golden brown.

Swap the flame to low, and add in

• 1 tbsp (20g) Red Oil Pixian Doubanjiang, Chili Bean Paste (红油豆瓣)

and fry until all the ribs are coated in red oil. Then add in:

• 1 liter hot water

• 1 scallion gently wrapped into a knot

• ½ tsp Sichuan peppercorn (花椒)

• 2 tbsp soy sauce

• ½ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp sugar

Turn the heat to medium low, braise for 1 hour. While it’s braising, peel

• 500g daikon

and cut into ~1-inch pieces. After the ribs been braised for an hour, add in the daikon, let them cook together for half an hour.

After that time, season with

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

• ¼ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

And thicken with a slurry of

• 2 tsp starch, preferably potato starch

• 2 tsp water

Optionally garnish with a bit of cilantro, and/or an additional sprinkle of ~¼ tsp Sichuan peppercorn powder.

Homestyle Braised Green Beans (家常四季豆)

This recipe can be used with a variety of different green beans, but in my opinion it is maximally delicious with a green bean that is good for braising. We used the Chinese ‘Bai Bu Lao’ (白不老) Romano bean, of which Italian Romano bean is incredibly similar. You may need to add ~5 minutes or so to the braising if using an Italian Romano — just take the softness to taste.

Take

• 400g Green beans good for braising, e.g. Chinese Bai Bu Lao Romano beans or Italian Romano beans

and snap off the tips, and remove the strings. Snap your bean into one inch sections.

Slice

• 100g pork belly

into ~3mm sheets.

To fry, to a hot wok, swirl in

• 2 tbsp oil

and fry the pork belly over medium high. Once the pork begins to get slightly golden and release a bit of its oil (2-3 minutes), add in the beans. Heat on medium high, fry until it turns slightly golden brown and starts to release some oil.

Fry everything until the beans have changed color, ~1 minute. Scooch everything up the side of the wok and swap the flame to low. Add in

• 1 tbsp (20g) Red Oil Pixian Doubanjiang, Chili Bean Paste (红油豆瓣)

and fry everything together for a minute or so. Swap the flame to high, and swirl in

• 1 tbsp soy sauce

and mix well. Add

• 2 cups water, stock, or a combination

and turn the heat to medium. Cover with a breathable lid (or slightly crack the lid if yours is heavy), braise for 15 minutes. The braise should be running at a light to medium boil.

Season with

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp white pepper powder

and thicken with a slurry of

• ½ tbsp starch, preferably potato starch (土豆淀粉)

• ½ tbsp water

or until thickened to your liking.

Homestyle Fried Pork (家常肉片)

This recipe is, again, roughly based off of Yanjian Pork Belly (盐煎肉), which is, in turn, sort of a ‘simple’ version of twice-cooked pork. Because the essence of a ‘homestyle’ stir fry is that you can really ‘homestyle’ anything, and one of the easiest go-tos for homecooks in China is a bit of lean pork. So… why not?

Chop

• 4 stalks green garlic (蒜苗), preferably, or scallion

into one inch sections. If using green garlic (~120g worth, in this case), first smash the white part flat before chopping. Reserve.

Slice

• 400g pork loin

into 3mm sheets, then marinate with

• ½ tsp starch

• ⅛ tsp white pepper

• ¼ tsp dark soy sauce (老抽)

• ½ tsp Liaojiu, a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒)

Mix well and coat with

• 2 tbsp oil

To fry, to a hot wok swirl in

• 4 tbsp oil

and fry the pork over a medium high flame. Fry until the pork has changed color, at least ~90% cooked, ~2 minutes. Remove the pork and swap the flame to low.

Add in

• 1 tbsp (20g) Pixian Doubanjiang, Sichuan Chili Bean Paste (郫县豆瓣酱)

and mix well with the oil. Add back in the pork and mix well. Swap the flame to high. Brief mix, then swirl in

• 1 tbsp soy sauce

and fry for another minute. Add in the green garlic (or scallion). Fry until the green garlic has changed color and cooked through (~30 seconds), or once the scallion is wilted.

Finish with a seasoning of

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

Mix well, heat off, and out.

• Click to jump to recipe for Youqiang Tripe

• Click to jump to our (slightly inventive) recipe for Youqiang Shrimp

Throughout Yunnan today, you can find a dish — well, a flavor profile really — called Youqiang (油呛). It equally graces the menus of popular Kunming restaurants and humble bordertown eateries… and it’s not overly difficult to see why. A Youqiang is a spicy, herbaceous stir fry that’s (1) easy to love, and (2) can come together in an absolute flash. It’s delicious, and it’s practical.

…and from a cultural point of view, it’s also really weird.

You see, Youqiang originally hails from the tourist town of Jinghong in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, near the Laotian border.

Traditionally, this corner of Yunnan was very much the home of the Dai people. And as the name might imply, the Dai people are, indeed, related to the Thai. And so if you go around Xishuangbanna, their cuisine bears many of the same characteristics that you would find down in Northern Thailand: the mortar as a primary cooking tool, ubiquitous use of herbs and fresh chilis, leaning on the grill as a heat source, and a love of sticky rice. And like a lot of global cuisines, Dai cuisine also has a ‘holy trinity’ of sorts — a classic mix that seems to come up again and again: lemongrass, garlic, ginger, and fresh spicy chili.

And so to make a Youqiang, you then pound that all in a mortar — down into a consistency that would immediately be recognizable to their Prik Kaeng curry paste slinging cousins down in Thailand. The specific mix is of course different1, but it’s not too far off from how you might start off something like a, say, wintermelon Kaeng ‘curry’ in Chiang Mai.

But then the dish does something weird. It uses a non-insignificant quantity of oil (in the below recipes we use a quarter of a cup), and then it qiangs (“sizzles”) dried chili and Sichuan peppercorn to flavor the oil. It then fries the aforementioned curry-paste-like-object in the flavored oil, before finishing everything up over maximum flame.

In short, it uses Sichuan cooking techniques.

The Oil Puzzle

Now, I don’t want to make it seem like Dai — or Thai — cuisine never stir fries. Down in Thailand, the technique is called Khua (คั่ว). But compared to the oil-laden spicy stir fries of Southwest China, Khua dishes are more judicious with the oil quantity, and often add a bit of water in the process. Sometimes these dishes are even translated as ‘dry curries’ — you can see the process in action here2:

The end result of a Youqiang, however, is quite different. Compared to the Northern Thai Khua dish on the left, the final result looks a lot closer to the Sichuan-style stir-fry on the right:

It also, of course, uses that distinctively ‘Southwest Chinese’ technique of flavoring the oil with sizzling dried chilis and Sichuan pepper, Qiang (呛), giving the dish its name.

Now, Youqiang was reportedly invented in Jinghong in the 1990s, which coincided with a large influx of Sichuan migrants to the city. And it was around this time that Jinghong began to morph from “humble Mekong river town” to “the Chinese Honolulu”. Go around Jinghong today and bumping into someone from Chongqing is almost as common as a Dai person ancestrally from Xishuangbanna. And, of course, Sichuan migrants leaving an imprint on local cuisine is far from an unknown story throughout China. Xinjiang Big Plate Chicken is thought to have Sichuan influences, ditto with Shenzhen chicken pot.

So Youqiang being another entry to that storied list is certainly well within the realm of possibility. But if that’s the case, leaning on a pounded Dai ‘holy trinity’ seems super odd. So… was Youqiang the result of a Sichuan person being inspired by Dai food, or a Dai person being inspired by Sichuan food?

We don’t have any answers, but that’s what makes food in this corner of Yunnan just so damn cool. It’s where, demographically and geographically, two of the world’s great cooking systems — greater Tai and Southwest Chinese — are mingling and interacting with eachother.

… and, for us, it’s fascinating to see what delicious things pop out of that soup.

So What Can You Youqiang?

I mean, literally anything. This is, fundamentally, a flavor profile — it can work with whatever ‘main’ you’ve got handy. Want to youqiang some boneless skinless chicken breast? Go for it.

With that said however, in Yunnan by far the most common ingredients to see youqiang’d are organ meats. Tripe and heart3 are particularly popular. This is because youqiang is particularly good with ingredients that have lots of little nooks are crannies that allow the sauce to hook onto it, and organ meat tends to fit that bill with flying colors. But it obviously doesn’t stop there — I’ve even seen some youqiang French fries before, albeit, of course, crinkle cut.

So below we’ll have two recipes for youqiang. First, we’ll cover tripe (a classic)… but then we’ll also show you how to youqiang some shrimp. And to do so, we’ll be a touch inventive ourselves, and do so using the Cantonese Haa Kau — ‘shrimp ball’ — preparation. It’s our favorite shrimp preparation, and perfect for this sort of dish here.

Youqiang Tripe Recipe (油呛毛肚)

Note: most of the below ingredients should be western supermarket available with the following exceptions: (1) Culantro, (2) Sichuan peppercorns, and (3) Lemongrass. If you don’t have access to lemongrass or Sichuan peppercorn, unfortunately there’s no substitute for these and you’ll be unable to continue with the recipe.

For the culantro, it’s an herb that’s classic to Dai cooking — and really, Yunnan at large. It is also used in Thai, Vietnamese, and Mexican cooking. If you have access to it, awesome. If not, substitute it for cilantro.

Lastly, for the dried chilis simply use the highest quality dried chilis you have available to you. In North America, I would personally use Guajillo for this dish. In Europe, Aleppos might be nice. But just use what you have access to.

Snip

• 8g dried chili, e.g. Sichuan erjingtiao, Sichuan zidantou, Guajillo, Arbol, Aleppo, Cayennes, etc etc

into one inch sections, then set aside in a bowl together with

• 1 tsp whole Sichuan peppercorns (花椒)

Roughly chop

• 5 cloves garlic

• 10g spicy fresh chilis

• ~1.5 inch knob of ginger

• 40g lemongrass4

then toss to a mortar. Pound for ~5 minutes to reach the consistency we showed above:

If using a food processor, this is also what you’re aiming for. Set aside.

Chop

• 15g culantro (大芫荽), preferably, -or- cilantro

into about half inch sections. Set aside.

Mix together a stir fry sauce of

• 1.5 tbsp soy sauce

• 1 tbsp oyster sauce

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp sugar

• ⅛ tsp MSG

and set aside.

Prepare the tripe. Slice

• 300g tripe, preferably black tripe (毛肚)

into ~1 inch wide slices. Then blanch in a pot of boiling water for ten seconds. Immediately dump in cool water, and rinse under running water to stop the cooking process. Drain well.

To stir fry, to a hot wok swirl in

• ¼ cup oil

and over a medium high flame add in the chilis and Sichuan peppercorns. Fry until the chilis deepen to a ‘chestnut color’, ~1 minute. Then add

• 1 tsp red, fragrant chili powder (上色辣椒面), e.g. Kashmiri or Gochugari

and stain the oil, ~15 seconds. Add in the pounded Dai ingredients, and swap the flame to maximum. Fry for ~1 minute, until the oil begins to separate back out from the aromatics.

Add in the tripe, stir fry for a quick ~10 seconds.

Add in the sauce, stir fry for a quick ~15 seconds.

Heat off, add the culantro (or cilantro). Mix well, out.

Youqiang Shrimp Recipe (油呛虾球)

Note: the most common way to see shrimp in a Youqiang in Yunnan is shell on, and — if I’m honest — overcooked. My years in Guangdong have made me very opinionated about shrimp.

Now, if you’re just as opinionated about shrimp texture as me… you can optionally change your order of operations a touch in the stir fry itself. In the below recipe, we add the shrimp in the same manner that we added the tripe above. However, if you want to ensure that perfect shrimp texture, you can fry the shrimp in that quarter cup of oil before you do anything else… then remove, set aside, and add them back in around when you’re adding the sauce. The shrimp texture will be ideal using this approach, but the shrimp will take on more flavor if you fry in the manner we do below5.

Lastly, you can also prepare shrimp however the hell you like to prepare shrimp, if you’re a normal person without my insane preferences.

Peel

• ~600g head on, shell on shrimp (we will be aiming for ~300g of shelled shrimp)

and and remove the head. Rinse well. Submerge the shrimp with water and mix with

• 1 tsp Sodium Carbonate6 (碱面) -or- Kan Sui lye water (枧水)

and let it sit for 5-10 minutes.

Rinse well, then let the shrimp sit and rinse under a trickle of running water for another 5-10 minutes.

Transfer to a strainer and drain well. Then transfer to a paper towel, and lightly squeeze out any excess liquid. Move over to a rag or kitchen towel and roll it up to finish drying.

Butterfly the shrimp by slicing into the back of the shrimp and opening like a book. Remove the vein (i.e. digestive tract), if needed. Transfer the shrimp to a bowl, and mix with

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp sugar

• ¼ tsp white pepper powder

• ¼ tsp Shaoxing wine

and then coat with

• 1 tbsp oil

and let marinate as you’re preparing everything else.

Snip

• 8g dried chili, e.g. Sichuan erjingtiao, Sichuan zidantou, Guajillo, Arbol, Aleppo, Cayennes, etc etc

into one inch sections, then set aside in a bowl together with

• 1 tsp whole Sichuan peppercorns (花椒)

Roughly chop

• 5 cloves garlic

• 10g spicy fresh chilis

• ~1.5 inch knob of ginger

• 40g lemongrass

then toss to a mortar. Pound for ~5 minutes to reach the consistency we showed above:

If using a food processor, this is also what you’re aiming for. Set aside.

Chop

• 15g culantro (大芫荽), preferably, -or- cilantro

into about half inch sections. Set aside.

Mix together a stir fry sauce of

• 1.5 tbsp soy sauce

• 1 tbsp oyster sauce

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp sugar

• ⅛ tsp MSG

and set aside.

To stir fry, to a hot wok swirl in

• ¼ cup oil

and over a medium high flame add in the chilis and Sichuan peppercorns. Fry until the chilis deepen to a ‘chestnut color’, ~1 minute. Then add

• 1 tsp red, fragrant chili powder (上色辣椒面), e.g. Kashmiri or Gochugari

and stain the oil, ~15 seconds. Add in the pounded Dai ingredients, and swap the flame to maximum. Fry for ~1 minute, until the oil begins to separate back out from the aromatics.

Add in the shrimp7, stir fry for 25-30 seconds, or until visually ‘cooked’.

Add in the sauce, stir fry for a quick ~15 seconds.

Heat off, add the culantro (or cilantro). Mix well, out.

Now, I know that not all of you are necessarily imminently traveling to Asia, or even necessarily interested in traveling to Asia. My hope is that I can give an interesting nonetheless introduction to the food scenes of these cities, even if you never actually plan on going to them.

Our overview of the food scene (and neighborhoods to stay) — the bulk of the article — will be free as always, together with our top one or two recommendations in said city. However, we’ll be putting the remainder of the recommendations behind a paywall. If you’re traveling to a certain city and like the same kind of stuff we do, I think that it’s a reasonable value add :)

Level of Familiarity1: Resident

Last Visited: November 2025

Let’s get something out of the way at first — should you even travel to Shenzhen for food?

I’ve got a rule of thumb for eating around in China: the more special the economic zone, the worse the food. And, of course, there’s no economic zone in China that’s more ‘special’ than Shenzhen.

There’s always something enchanting about a boom town, but I think it’s fair to say that most cities built after mid 20^th century aren’t exactly knocking it out of the park as cultural destinations. Brasilia usually isn’t on anyone’s bucket list, and Dubai’s such a common punching bag online that the shade is starting to border on the cliché. Shenzhen is often slagged on in China as a ‘cultural desert’, and not wholly without reason — large swaths of the city are practically an amalgam of all the country’s sterile ‘new towns’ smushed together into a single unit. If you’re capping off a grand foodie tour of mainland China, I would recommend skipping Shenzhen.

But viewed from another angle, that amalgam-like nature can also become a feature instead of a bug. Because I mean, basically everyone in Shenzhen does comes from somewhere else — it’s the type of town where “where are you from?” is practically a reflexive greeting. So provided you know where to go, you can find cuisines from virtually every corner of the country: while the very best Sichuan food in China is in Sichuan, the second best Sichuan food is in Shenzhen2.

So if, instead, you’re on a general Asia tour — if you’ve got that sort of jet-setting itinerary where Hong Kong’s penciled in between Bangkok and Taipei? Shenzhen is a fantastic choice for a brief foray into mainland China. If you’re already going to Hong Kong, I heavily, heavily recommend extending your trip into Shenzhen.

Because let’s be frank — I love Hong Kong, but non-Cantonese Chinese food in Hong Kong is downright fucking garbage3. Cantonese food? Amazing, top tier, like you’d expect. Thai? There’s some impressively delicious restaurants across the bay in Kowloon City. Japanese? I’d give the edge to Bangkok and Taipei, but there’s definitely some nice spots. But stumble on a Sichuan restaurant in Hong Kong… run for the damn hills.

This contrasts nicely with Shenzhen — the city’s strengths (a diversity of Mainland cuisines) are Hong Kong’s weaknesses. Shenzhen’s weaknesses (Cantonese and International food) are Hong Kong’s strengths. There’s a nice symbiotic relationship between these two twin cities.

So what’s Shenzhen have on offer?

Above all, remember: despite its location, Shenzhen is not a Cantonese city. It’s a migrant city, placed smack dab in the middle of Canto-country courtesy of Deng Xiaoping.

I may be exaggerating slightly (I mean, we do have a couple Cantonese restaurants listed in the guide below), but only just. While there’s communities of Cantonese in the historical center of Bao’an (near the airport), in much of the city the most Cantonese thing about the place are the Hong Kong weekenders that hop the border for cheap meals and massages.

As such, the major cuisines in Shenzhen are:

1. Teochew (Chaozhou) cuisine. The Teochew (Chaozhou, in Mandarin) people are the most populous sub-group in Shenzhen. Hailing from the Han river estuary a half day drive up the coast… Teochew cuisine is sometimes mistaken for Cantonese, but any apparent similarities are quite surface level. There’s not much crossover in dishes, and what dishes they share often have different versions. From the style of Cheong Fun Rice Noodle Rolls (commonly smothered in gravy), to the default meatballs that you can purchase from the market (firm and bouncy)… it’s Teochew cuisine that’s set much of the basic undertones of how Shenzhen eats.

2. Hakka cuisine. The Hakka are the second largest subgroup in Shenzhen, with many people coming to Shenzhen from the northern hills of Guangdong: Heyuan, Meizhou, Maoming4, and Shaoguan. But in addition to those migrants, before Deng Xiaoping circled Shenzhen on the map, much of the original inhabitants of Shenzhen were Hakka — particularly in the eastern peninsula of Dapeng. Beyond that, the next door city of Huizhou is also very much a Hakka town, further influencing the Hakka restaurant scene in Shenzhen.

   Like, Huizhou, much of the Hakka cuisine in Shenzhen belongs to the Dongjiang Hakka school, with its rather obvious Cantonese influences. In my personal opinion, Hakka restaurants are probably one of the better choices for food in Shenzhen.

3. Sichuan cuisine. Almost everywhere in China will have some sort of Sichuan fare on offer — as of 2026, Sichuan food is practically the national cuisine of the country. But a lot of Sichuan food outside of Sichuan is quite standardized: ‘the Sichuan restaurant’ is very much an ecosystem that an aspiring entrepreneur can buy into.

   In Shenzhen, there’s enough of a critical mass of Sichuan people that you can find niche local dishes that aren’t usually overly represented outside of the province itself.

4. Hunan cuisine. Hunan people build the backbone of much of Shenzhen’s working class population, from construction workers to taxi drivers. As such, Hunan food can be a fantastic choice for humble kuaican (‘fast food’) meals — smaller eateries are often almost as good as you would find in Hunan itself.

These four cuisines will be your best bet in Shenzhen, but they’re also far from the only ones on offer. The drug of eating around Shenzhen is the promise that, in spite of the swath of mediocre chain restaurants that dot the air conditioned malls of the city, you might be able to find a very authentic version of a cuisine from some random pocket of the country.

Where to Stay in Shenzhen

How pleasant and walkable you find Shenzhen will very much depend on the specific micro-geography of where you book your hotel.

Shenzhen is quite spread out, and is very much a city of neighborhoods. There’s a reason those ‘Shenzhen cyberpunk’ photos online are always taken from the air — the main boulevards usually look more like this from the ground:

Oof. Definitely don’t want to find yourself on the sidewalk there during the heat of summer.

And yet, it’s not all bad. Much of the city contains little oases of walkable ‘urban villages’ — a very China-specific development oddity. During reform, the farmland of the villages that existed within Shenzhen was sold to developers (who then dutifully built superblocks and ten lane roads, as developing countries are often wont to do), but the existing village remained — and densified.

The result are these haphazard, favela-like neighborhoods that have some of the best street life of the city — and often, the best food.

So when booking your hotel, take a gander at the satellite view of where you’re about to stay. The more dense and clustered the neighborhood, the better:

This travel advice is generally applicable to the entirety of mainland China, but in Shenzhen it’s practically mandatory. If you’re not careful, you can easily find yourself in a sterile, highway-laden hellscape taken straight out of one of LeCorbusier’s wet dreams. The specific neighborhoods that I’d recommend:

• Shuiwei/Huanggang Villages (水围村/黄岗村). I used to live in this neighborhood for many years. It’s a fantastically dense swath of urban villages, with some great little restaurants to boot. When I go back to Shenzhen, I usually will stay at this Vienna Hotel – and easy hop over Jintian road into Huanggang village.

• Xinzhou Village (新洲村): The other large swath of urban village in South Futian, and also a nice base to explore the city.

• Southern Luohu, near the border checkpoint with Hong Kong: Luohu was one of the first areas of Shenzhen to develop, and has a bit more of an organic form than the CBDs of Futian and Nanshan. It feels very much like a ‘city’. I’d recommend anywhere in walking distance of the Guomao (国贸) or Laojie (老街) subway stations.

Food Recommendations

A couple notes before we get into this.

First, for more information on how to use these recommendations, check out the instructions here. If you have Apple Maps — or a Dianping account, obviously — this will be pretty straightforward. If you’re on Android and without a Chinese phone number, finding this stuff will be somewhat obnoxious and I would heavily recommend reading our instructions.

Second, I should emphasize that the style of restaurant that me and Steph enjoy are generally quite humble: the hole-in-the-wall, the family-run restaurant that’s been slinging delicious food for decades. Of the 32 recommendations below, you could count the places ‘suitable for a business meeting’ on less than one hand (maybe less than one finger, depending on how picky you are on that front). These are usually not the type of restaurants with pristine bathrooms and exquisite service. If you’re the type that loves high end restaurants, we’re quite simply not the guides for you.

Third, while we’ve got our own pictures for a couple of these spots… for many, the images will come from Dianping. Just the nature of the project.

Anyway. Being the inaugural post in the series, let’s put two restaurants above the paywall.

Top Choice: Gaosanjie Douhua Restaurant (高三姐豆花店)

• Address: 梅村路上梅林新村56栋102号铺

• Dianping.

• Apple Maps.

We’ve featured this restaurant in our Sichuan Tofu Rice video, and in the meantime, the place absolutely exploded in popularity.

They specialize in tofu rice, a dish that’s practically a food group in much of Sichuan. They’ll give you a large bowl of jiggly soft tofu, you top it with a chili laden dipping sauce, and you use that to down large quantities of steamed white rice. The owners of this restaurant are a family from Luzhou, and the dipping sauce on offer is a specifically Luzhou variant.

But besides this, they have a variety of Sichuan stir-fries and dishes on offer, which they do a fantastic job with. Frankly, you could plop this restaurant smack dab in the middle of Chengdu and it would still be one of the better restaurants in the city. Highly, highly recommended.

With all of that said, fair warning that — in addition to being generally popular among Sichuan people in Shenzhen — the place did also get on the ‘online foodie’ map sometime around 2023. So be sure to get there early: I’d recommend arriving by 4:45 for dinner, and 10:45 for lunch. Otherwise, the lines can get rather absurd.

Off-the-grid Choice: ‘Little Youxian’

This is really a small cluster of restaurants (many of which are very solid), but you can go to “新乡村大碗菜”:

• Address: 福民路皇岗新村169号102号

• Dianping.

• Apple Maps. Note: not on Apple Maps, linked location should be about right.

Youxian is a county town outside of Changsha — notable in Shenzhen because an absurd proportion of Shenzhen taxi drivers, for some reason, hail from this one small corner of Hunan. Go to Youxian during the New Years holiday, and reportedly Shenzhen taxis outnumber the local ones. Chit chat with a random Shenzhen taxi driver, and I’d gather that about 30% come from Youxian (always good for a laugh if you guess it correct).

And for some reason, relatively recently — after we moved from Shenzhen — Youxian people began to cluster in this one specific corner in the back alleys of Huanggang village. Above I’ve listed the information of one specific restaurant, but there’s really a number of solid Youxian restaurants here – hell, if you wanted you could even get a snip from a specifically-Youxian hair dresser.

As for what Youxian food is like… it’s basically a subset of Hunan food in general. They specialize in a couple of dishes — blood duck, pounded chili with century egg — but the general logic of Hunan food applies: go to a restaurant, get a mound of white rice, order a couple spicy stir-fries and go along for the ride. Probably won’t grace a Michelin list anytime soon, but one of the world’s great cuisines to devour in an alley alongside a cold Tsingtao.

Read more

And Dianping, you should know, is simultaneously my favorite app… and the worst fucking app in existence.

The ridiculously cool thing about it is that unlike Yelp or Google Maps, it uses a recommendation algorithm. The main page is people snapping pics of their food ala Instagram, but embedded in those posts are links to the restaurants. As you interact with the algorithm, it learns “oh, you’re the type of person that loves hipster craft beer bars and old, family run, beloved-by-locals eateries with aggressively delicious food”, and alters your recommendations accordingly. The end result is that I can now open my Dianping to practically any random city in the country and get a stream of fantastic recommendations. That Silicon Valley hasn’t thought to do the same boggles the mind (hey, free business idea for anyone out there reading this).

Now for the downsides.

First, unlike Bilibili or Red Note, you need a Chinese phone number to access Dianping. This makes it extremely, extremely annoying to share recommendations to potential travelers. If they didn’t have this restriction, it would be relatively easy for me to organize these posts into Dianping lists. It’s very much one of those pieces of software that absolutely hates its users — it functionally killed off desktop years ago, it hates when you try to copy-paste stuff from it, and I’m not going to even comment on the UX.

Second, it’s important to understand that scores on Dianping ratings are literally useless. Famously, the only way to get above a 4.0 on the ratings is to pay the platform — for the restaurants, it’s simply a fucking shakedown1. If you’re in a larger city like Shenzhen or Shanghai (i.e. younger, more tech savvy cities that have a large number of Dianping users), restaurants usually find it worthwhile to bite the bullet and open the wallet. If you’re in a smaller city (e.g. our current home of Yuxi), restaurants often don’t give a shit and refuse to pay. So if you’re reading our forthcoming Yuxi guide, that’s a big reason why the average scores will be lower2.

How to Use These Guides

If you have a Chinese phone number and a Dianping account, everything’s pretty straightforward. Click on the Dianping link, accept opening the app, save the restaurant we gave you.

If you’re on OSX, it will also be pretty easy.

Apple Maps actually works in China. And something that’s cool is that it also has Dianping integration. So I can send you the link to a place, and you can see some basic information and even a few pictures of the food and the environment:

Google Maps, meanwhile, famously does not work in mainland China. Even if you’re on a VPN or international roaming, it’s subject to a GPS offset that shifts roads locations about 300 meters in a random direction. Makes it functionally useless.

So the difficult thing would be if you (1) don’t have a Chinese phone number and (2) use Android. This was our workaround:

Step one — download either AMap or Baidu Maps.

Step two — in the guides, one of the pictures will always be a screenshot of the Dianping page. Save this to your phone.

Step three — in your phone’s photo app, using OCR copy and paste the name of the restaurant to AMap or Baidu Maps. Often these map applications will have the restaurant itself, so you can easily save it.

Step four — doublecheck the location by copy/pasting the address to AMap or Baidu Maps. Sometimes the map application doesn’t have certain restaurants, or directs you to a similarly named restaurant. So just doublecheck using the address to make sure that you’re in the right ballpark (I don’t want you to end up someplace super random).

• Click to jump to Mala Beef Recipe

• Click to jump to ‘Stinky Tofu’ Recipe

• Click to jump to Furu & Seasoned Chinese Chives

If you’ve spent any time in China, you’ve inevitably been introduced to Chinese Muslim food — Hui people food — most immortalized by the Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle joints that dot practically every urban area, from east to west.

If you love dough, you inevitably fall in love with the Muslim cuisine of the Chinese northwest.

But as astute observers might notice, the article that you just clicked into is an episode of our ongoing “over rice” recipe series — not an “over noodle” recipe series. And for the most part, the vast majority of Halal food exists north of China’s fabled wheat-rice divide:

But if you zoom into the far south of the above map, there is actually one little pocket of Hui people below that divide — in the eastern bit of Yunnan, around the Kunming plateau.

The Hui Food of Yunnan

Why there even is a Hui community in Yunnan has always been a bit of a mindfuck for me — apparently the lineage traces back to the Mongol empire, when Chinese Muslims were sent down as administrators. I’m always a little skeptical of grand histories dating almost a millennium back… but apparently that’s indeed what we’re looking at here.

Still, these days in Yunnan however… it can sometimes be difficult to disentangle where Hui Muslim food ends, and central Yunnan food in general begins. Different groups borrow pretty extensively from eachother — I’m still somewhat unsure whether to categorize much of Yunnan food more in terms of ‘ethnicity’, or ‘geography’ (I’m increasingly leaning towards the latter).

So I should definitely be clear that none of the dishes in this post are exclusively Hui people food. But throughout central Yunnan, around lunchtime you can find people of all stripes piling into Halal over-rice fast food joints, and these are some of the dishes you can find:

Mala Beef (麻辣牛肉)

If there’s one thing Hui people are famous for in Yunnan — outside of their fantastic bakeries, of course — it’s beef. Literally every single beef vendor at my local market here in Yuxi is Chinese Muslim. There’s Hui owned-and-operated Niucaiguan (牛菜馆) — beef restaurants — scattered all across central Yunnan. And at least where we live in Yuxi? The aforementioned Halal fast food eateries are almost certain to carry Mala Beef.

Mala is, of course, a classic flavor profile in Southwest Chinese cookery… referring to the combination of chilis and Sichuan peppercorns, internationally made famous (infamous?) via Chongqing spicy hotpot.

In Yunnan however, said Sichuan peppercorn is commonly green Sichuan peppercorn — qinghuajiao (青花椒). While similar, it’s a bit less earthy and floral than its red counterpart, with a bit of a more obvious ‘numbing’ kick. For those outside of China, red Sichuan peppercorn is a fine substitute. However, given that red Sichuan pepper is indeed a touch less numbing… I’d definitely recommend working from toasted-then-ground whole Sichuan peppercorns.

To do so, simply toss the Sichuan pepper in a dry wok and toast over a medium-low flame for ~2 minutes, until the pepper is obviously fragrant (if it leaves little oily splotches on the wok that’s a surefire sign, but sometimes older peppers aren’t oily enough to have that effect). Toss in a coffee or spice grinder, then toss into the dish.

Recipe for Mala Beef

Note that in a homecooking context, Mala Beef is a dish where often people will deep fry a very large portion and slowly eat it over a week. The below recipe has been adapted to be a smaller, one meal sized portion.

Slice:

• 3 scallion whites1

• 1.5 inches ginger

• 10g dried chilis

Slice the scallion into ~2 inch sections, the ginger into sheets, and snip the chilis on a bias.

Slice:

• 500g beef loin -or- picanha (outside of Yunnan, I think picanha would be a nice cut for this application)

against the grain into ~3mm sheets. You do not need to be too obsessive, a little thicker is also okay.

Add to a bowl, together with

• 2 tsp Sichuan pepper powder, preferably green, preferably toasted-then-ground (as described above)

• 2 tsp red, fragrant chili powder (e.g. Kashmiri, Gochugaru)

• ½ tsp salt

• 1 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• 1 tbsp dark brown sugar -or- Chinese slab sugar (片糖)

• ¼ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

• ¼ tsp white pepper

• ¼ tsp dark soy sauce (老抽), optional for color

and mix well. Add the sliced scallion, chilis, and ginger. Add

• 1-2 tbsp oil, to coat

and mix well. Marinate for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours (we usually do 7-8 hours).

To a hot wok, add in

• ½ cup oil

• 2 star anise (八角), optional

• 1 Tsaoko, a.k.a. Chinese black cardamom (草果), optional

and over a high flame heat the oil up until the spices begin to bubble, ~150C. Add in the marinated beef, and stir fry over a high flame (or if using a strong stove, medium to medium high). Cook until the beef has dried up and the oil has gotten clear again, ~5 minutes.

Strain through a fine mesh sieve. Return the oil to the wok, and place the beef and such in a mixing bowl. Toss on

• 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds (熟芝麻)

• ½ tsp MSG (味精)

and begin to heat the oil back up over a medium-high flame. Once you see slight wisps of smoke, ~170C, shut off the heat and add in

• 2 tbsp chili flakes, preferably a toasted chili flake (胡辣椒) -or- a smoked chili flake like chipotle

then mix briefly, and transfer the hot oil over the sesame seeds, MSG, and beef. Mix well, transfer to a serving plate.

Braised Stinky Tofu (砂锅臭豆腐)

Braised stinky tofu is probably the most iconic “over rice dish” in this corner of Yunnan… but I do need qualify the ‘stinky’ bit.

When I say the words “stinky tofu” you probably have visions of the type of funk that leaves western influencers gagging. While I’m pretty critical of said genre2, in fairness, some stinky tofu in China can indeed get pretty intense. The characteristic funk comes from a specific brine called a lushui (卤水), which can be made quite differently in different corners of the country. In Shaoxing, the lushui is made with fermented amaranth stem; in Hunan, it’s made with fermented black soybean, bamboo shoots, and ham.

Yunnan stinky tofu is somewhat unique in that it doesn’t actually use a lushui. Tofu is simply placed in a warm environment – a ‘nest’ (窝) of straw and hay — covered, and allowed to ferment for a couple days. The end result is a very mild stinky tofu, with a level of funk that hits somewhere in the midpoint between Brie and blue cheese. If you ever find yourself traveling to Yunnan, I highly recommend trying the local stinky tofu.

Of course, “specifically-Yunnan-style stinky tofu” isn’t exactly supermarket available in much of the world, so we’ll clearly need to substitute. And given the taste of Yunnan-style stinky tofu… in my head, said substitute was pretty self-obvious:

Firm tofu, mixed with a touch of blue cheese.

The ratio that I settled on after testing was one part blue cheese to thirteen parts firm tofu. I found that with a higher quality blue cheeses (our initial tests were with Blue d’Auvergne) you could potentially push the cheese quantity a bit higher. But mass produced blue cheeses can easily overwhelm the dish, and the only Halal-certified blue cheeses3 I could find on Taobao were the mass produced sort.

Still very tasty, you just don’t want to push it.

Recipe for Braised Stinky Tofu

Mince:

• 1 clove garlic

• 1cm ginger

• 1 scallion

• 2 small sprigs cilantro

And place in a mixing bowl together with

• 325g firm tofu

• 25g blue cheese

Roughly break up and mix together the tofu and the cheese. Then, add in

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ¼ tsp MSG

• ¼ tsp Sichuan pepper powder

• ⅛ tsp white pepper powder

• 1 tsp red, fragrant chili powder (e.g. Kashmiri, Gochugaru)

• 1 tsp soy sauce

• ½ tbsp oil, preferably schmaltz or duck fat

Mix well. The tofu should be roughly the consistency of a medium-curd scrambled egg.

In a small claypot, cast iron pot, or your vessel of choice, lay down

• Enough scallions to cover the bottom of your pot (for my pot, this was ~6 scallions)

and drizzle in

• 1 tbsp oil, preferably schmaltz or duck fat

and heat over a medium flame. Once the scallion is just beginning to sizzle, add in the tofu mixture together with

• ¼ cup chicken stock (preferably) -or- water

and allow the liquid to come to a light boil. Cover, and let simmer for eight minutes.

After that time, swap the flame to low and add

• 1 tsp toasted sesame seeds, optional

• ½ tsp Sichuan pepper powder

on the top of the tofu. In a separate little pan or pot, heat

• 2 tbsp oil

until it just begins to smoke, or about ~175C. Shut off the heat and quickly stir in

• 1 tsp red, fragrant chili powder (e.g. Kashmiri, Gochugaru)

and quickly sizzle on top of the Sichuan pepper powder and optional sesame seeds. Garnish with a bit of cilantro.

“Dish” #3: Chili Furu, Fermented Bean Curd

I know that we’re going a little heavy on the concept of ‘fermented tofu’ in this post, but it’s impossible to talk “over rice” in Central Yunnan without mentioning Furu, fermented bean curd.

Called lufu (卤腐) in Yunnan dialect, it’s commonly fermented with chili and I think it’s fair to say that it’s the province’s go-to rice killer. We’ve heard people joke that you can tell that a restaurant isn’t so great if you hear a Yunnan customer say the sentence “geyou lufu?” (个有卤腐) — i.e. do you have any fermented beancurd? (The idea being that the dishes aren’t delicious enough to down their rice, so they need some fermented bean curd instead).

There is some excellent chili furu that’s available at the markets here — my personal favorite is this sort, which is wrapped in pickled cabbage and drenched with chili oil:

When it comes to internationally-available mass produced Fermented Bean Curd, the closest match to the Yunnan style is Lao Gan Ma’s very-quite-solid Fermented Bean Curd Chili Oil (available on Weee here):

At a basic level, you can simply smear a bit of the stuff over your rice, and use that to devour a bowl (I’ve seen people do this as a slow train snack). But to make a complete meal with this, I would recommend pairing it with a bit of vegetables in soup — while we only have a recipe for the Guizhou variant (in Yunnan often it’s soup instead of water), this would also be a humble-but-delicious combination.

Besides the vegetable, another nice little addition would be some seasoned Chinese chives (韭菜). To make some, simply chop

• 300g Chinese chives

into about one inch sections. Then, toss it in some boiling water and blanch it for 30 seconds. Strain, rinse with cool water to stop the cooking process, and thoroughly squeeze out the extra moisture. Then mix with

• ¼ tsp salt

• ½ tsp sugar

• ½ tsp soy sauce

• optional 2 tsp of the chili oil from the chili oil Furu

In one corner of China, you start your day with tea and a bit of delicate Dim Sum; in another, you finish it with 120 proof baijiu and sweating over a Chongqing hotpot. The south is famously the land of rice (further south still, sticky rice), while in the north, noodle-slinging homecooks are as particular about dough as an Italian grandmother. Waxing poetic about Chinese culinary diversity has gotten to be practically a cliché — so much so that it’s easy to forget the similarities.

Many of the through-lines are well known around the world, as they’re often staples of the take-out menu abroad: Fried rice. Fried noodles. Sweet and Sours. Dumplings and wontons, etc etc. But in addition to those household names, in China itself there’s also Zha Jiang Mian (炸酱面) — meat sauce noodles. Literally translated,

• “Deep Fried” (Zha)

• “Sauce” (Jiang)

• “Noodles” (Mian)

…at the most basic level the dish is some sort of noodles mixed with a rich, savory meat sauce. Said sauce is made by rendering out the lard from some fatty pork, and then, well, ‘deep frying’ some a thick fermented sauce inside of it.

But how you choose your fermented sauce, how you fry your pork, how you end up using the final product… all of this will depend on where in the country you happen to be. And a bit like barbecue sauce in America, often these decisions are a matter of great debate — and laced with more than a bit of local pride.

The Geography of Zha Jiang

The Andes are the home of the potato, and it’s there that you find the greatest diversity of potato. And it’s in the province of Shandong that you can find the most styles of Zha Jiang Mian:

The world of Zha Jiang in Shandong will need to wait for another day — it’s its own monster of a research topic, and one that’ll need its own dedicated post1. But from this cradle of meat sauces… Zha Jiang spread, and seemed to do so in two directions: North and South.

Speaking in the broadest of generalities, Northern-style Zha Jiangs — exemplified by the Beijing and Tianjin variants of the dish — often straddle the line between ‘sauce’ and ‘meat sauce’. While all Zha Jiang will work from a base of fatty pork, the Northern-style often opt for the ham cut of the pig, and proceed to slice it into a larger (“D6-sized”) dice. The fatty pork is then shallow fried in a non-negligible quantity of oil — soybean oil, generally — and then the local fermented-sauce-of-choice is added. In Beijing and Tianjin, it leans on a fermented soybean sauce called Ganhuangjiang (干黄酱). Similar to the Fushan style of the dish in Shandong (center, above), Northern-style Zha Jiangs are often quite salty, so you need to be a bit judicious with the final quantity that you top your noodles with.

Southern-style Zha Jiangs — called Za Jiang (杂酱) in Southwest Mandarin — is a bit closer to what you might think of as a meat sauce. It tends to reach for pork belly over ham, and cuts it up (or coarsely grinds it) into a much smaller “mungbean-sized” dice. The southern variants tend to start frying with less oil, and put a greater emphasis on rendering out the fat from the mince. The universe of fermented sauces used in the ‘southern style’ is a bit wider than what you’ll bump into in the North, and will often include some sort of spicy component in the mix.

I think it’s fair to say that those are the broad strokes of things. But to cover my bases, definitely don’t take my North-South Zha Jiang theory-crafting as some sort of gospel. There’s exceptions to this framework, as well as a difficult-to-categorize world in central China. For example, in the Henan province their Zha Jiangs tend to also add a grab bag of ‘fillers’ — celery, potato, garlic scapes, etc.

In this post, I’ll teach you three styles of Zha Jiang to give you a basic sense of things. One Northern sort in the form of the Beijing-style Zha Jiang, followed by two Southern styles: Cantonese and Sichuan.

Old Beijing Zha Jiang Mian (老北京炸酱面)

Old Beijing Zha Jiang probably the most well-known in China, and is a dish that commands borderline religious devotion. It’s one of those beloved local dishes where the only ‘correct’ recipe tends to come from someone’s own grandparents (to any Beijing people reading this, definitely leave your own preferred recipe in the comments!)

No matter what though, both the Beijing (and Tianjin) Zha Jiang Mian will lean on this ingredient:

The stuff’s called Gan Huang Jiang (干黄酱), and what it is is a fermented soybean paste supplemented with wheat (sort of akin to soy sauce). It’s quite sticky, and really packs a wallop — as of the time of writing, the sauce is available on Weee, Yamibuy, and Amazon. It’s so fundamental to the recipe below that I’d say that if you can’t find it, don’t make it — make some other style of Zha Jiang Mian.

This sauce is then mixed with Tianmianjiang (甜面酱), often translated Sweet Bean [sic] Paste. Alternatively (and more correctly, IMO) translated ‘sweet flour sauce’, traditionally Tianmianjiang was made via fermenting steamed mantou buns. It’s a product that should be available at most Chinese supermarkets, but’s similarly available on Weee, Yamibuy, and Amazon.

Sometimes you will see these two sauces supplemented with a third fermented sauce: Huangdoujiang (黄豆酱) — Northern-style fermented soybean sauce (confused yet?). Some Beijing recipe writers are very strong on the inclusion of this ingredient2, but I’ve yet to find an unseasoned version of the sauce outside of China.

After the sauce is whipped up, it’s usually paired with freshly made noodles and a bevy of different toppings:

So in addition to the Zha Jiang Recipe below, I’d definitely recommend whipping up some homemade noodles (recipe also below) together with at least a smattering of toppings.

Also, you can also find a recipe video from us here on the topic, if you’d like a basic visual... but it’s an old one. The below recipe is a new-and-improved version of what we did in the following video:

(the basic differences are more meat, simplifying the frying process, and adjusting our sauce ratios)

Old Beijing Zha Jiang Recipe

Separate the lean from the fat from

• 500g pork leg (后退, i.e. the ham cut)

You should be looking at roughly 350g lean and 150g fat. You can alternatively use fatback for the fat, and loin or shoulder for the lean.

Mix together

• 165g Gan Huang Jiang (干黄酱)

• 85g Tian Mian Jiang (甜面酱)

• ¼ cup Shaoxing wine (绍酒)

• ¼ cup water

• 1.5 tbsp soy sauce

Mince

• 125g welsh onion (大葱) -or- scallion whites -or- leek

• ～3 inches ginger

In a wok, toss in

• 5 tbsp oil

and go in with the fatty bits of pork. Fry the pork fat over a medium flame, until the pork begins to render out its lard and get ever so lightly golden brown, ~5-8 minutes.

Add in the lean. Fry until the oil becomes clear and the lean also begins to get ever so lightly golden brown, ~2-3 minutes. Add in the ginger and ¾ of the onion/scallion. Fry until fragrant, ~1 minute.

Transfer to a claypot or a large, deep, non-stick skillet. Over a medium flame, heat up the oil until it can start to bubble around a pair of chopsticks. Add in the sauce (a silicone spatula can help), stirring constantly. Once mixed well, swap the flame to medium low and cover.

You are looking for the sauce to evaporate off the excess moisture and deepen in color. You will be done once the final result resembles bubbling lava. Stir often, once every couple of minutes — the sauce can easily scorch on the bottom of a claypot. The process will take around 25-30 minutes.

Add the rest of the onion/scallion whites and mix well. Season to taste — the final result will be very salty, which is expected. I added an additional

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

• 2 tsp granulated sugar (optional3)

To make the noodles

Makes two standard servings, one Northerner-sized serving

Mix together

• 250g AP Flour (中筋面粉)

• ¼ tsp salt

and then slowly drizzle in

• 115g water

and mix well.

Knead for 10 minutes, then form into a ball. Rest for 30 minutes to let the gluten relax.

Flatten the dough. Using a rolling pin or a pasta maker, roll the dough into a 2mm sheet (setting 4 on a pasta maker). Using either a knife or a pasta maker, then slice the sheet into ½ cm noodles.

Dust with flour, boil as soon as possible.

To boil, first bring a pot of water up to a boil and add the noodles. Once the water has returned to a boil, pour in one cup of cool water. Once the water has returned to a boil again, taste the noodles and see if they’re done. Once cooked to your liking, strain and move to a serving bowl.

To serve

To one standard-serving-sized bowl of noodles, toss in ~1 tbsp of the sauce. It will be very sticky, you can add in a little bit of the extra oil if you need to loosen it up.

Besides this, the Beijing Zha Jiang Mian is often served with a bevy of toppings. Some classics include:

1. Cucumber. Julienned.

2. Carrot. Julienned.

3. Chinese celery. Blanched for 10 seconds, then minced.

4. Mung bean sprouts. Blanched for 10 seconds.

5. Edamame. Blanched, then peeled.

6. Chinese Toon. Julienned.

7. Napa Cabbage. Julienned.

8. Radish. Julienned.

9. One big raw clove of garlic. Peeled. A particular classic.

Sichuan Za Jiang Mian (川味杂酱面)

Where this meat sauce sits culturally within Sichuan cuisine is somewhat different than you’ll find in the north. While Zha Jiang Mian in Beijing is thought of as an iconic ‘dish’, in Sichuan it’s more of a general ‘noodle topping’… or more specifically, a “Saozi” (臊子).

Within the Sichuan noodle universe, a Saozi is some heavily flavored minced [something] that’s used to complete a noodle. It’s usually meat, but you can see vegetarian Saozi too. The meat you often see on top of a Dan Dan Noodle? That’s a Saozi.

So that’s the context here. It’s the star of one specific noodle dish — Chongqing’s Wanzamian (豌杂面), which mixes it half/half with braised splitpeas — but you can find the stuff as a general topping for mixed noodles and soup noodles as well:

The fermented sauces employed here are a mix of (1) Pixian Doubanjiang, Sichuan Chili Bean Paste and (2) Sichuan style Tianmianjiang. Chili bean paste, of course, needs no introduction… but the second one does have some considerations.

While you might be able to find it at specialty retailers like Mala Market (where it’s available for purchase as of the time of writing), by far the most widely available Tianmianjiang outside of China is the Northern style that we used above. The Sichuan style, unfortunately, tastes pretty radically different, and in our opinion the two cannot be used as direct substitutes for each other.

Much close would be the Minsi paste — “Ground Bean Sauce” — used in the Cantonese recipe below. That could be used, or if you prefer, you can try our (somewhat convoluted) substitute, which will equal the 15g that you need in the recipe:

• 1.5 tbsp Cantonese Minsi paste -or- Japanese red miso

• ½ tbsp Northern-style Tianmianjiang

• ½ tbsp minced douchi (豆豉), Chinese fermented black soybeans

Finally, to serve, you’ll have the choice whether to have this as a dry mixed noodle (干拌) or a soup noodle, both of which we’ll show you below.

Sichuan Za Jiang Recipe

Mince

• 15g ginger

and set aside.

Mince

• 25g Pixian Doubanjiang, a.k.a. Sichuan Chili Bean Paste (郫县豆瓣酱)

and set aside.

Finely, finely dice into ‘mungbean-sized’ pieces, or coarsely grind:

• 500g pork belly (五花肉)

Alternatively, you can use the fattiest ground pork that you can find.

To a wok, drizzle in

• 1 tbsp oil

and over a medium/medium high flame, add in the ground pork belly. Patiently fry the pork — after about ten minutes, it will stop sticking to the wok. Add the minced ginger at this time.

Once the pork’s lard has rendered out and is lightly golden brown, ~10 minutes more, add the sauces.

In a small bowl, add a couple tablespoons of the oil in with

• 15g Sichuan-style Sweet Bean Paste (甜面酱) -or- your substitute of choice

and then add it in. Mix well with the sauce.

Do the same move with the minced chili bean paste. Fry for ~2 minutes to stain the oil red. Add

• ½ cup stock (preferably) -or- water

Simmer for ~3 minutes. Season with

• ¼ tsp salt

• ½ tsp MSG (味精)

• ½ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

• ½ tsp granulated sugar

• 1 tbsp liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒)

Mix and briefly simmer, then thicken with a slurry of

• 1 tbsp potato starch (土豆淀粉)

• 2 tbsp water

slowly adding it in bit-by-bit. Once thickened, reserve in a bowl.

To Make the Noodle

You will have two choices here — mixed, or as a soup noodle. Either way, to each serving bowl, we will add a base seasoning.

The one basic seasoning that will need to be ‘prepared’ is a bit of garlic water. To make it, just mix together

• 1 clove minced garlic

• 1 tbsp hot water from the kettle

Once mixed, prepare each bowl by adding a base seasoning of

• 1 tsp garlic water from above

• ½ tsp Chinese dark vinegar (香醋/陈醋)

• ½ tbsp Sichuan chili oil (红油)

• ¼ tsp Sichuan peppercorn powder (花椒面)

• ¼ tsp toasted sesame oil (麻油)

• ½ tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG (味精)

If making the soup noodle version, also add one cup stock to the bowl.

If making the mixed version, add quarter cup stock -or- water to the bowl.

Boil

• 60g dried Sichuan-style alkaline noodles (枧水面), per serving

• 2-3 pieces of baby bok choy (上海青), per serving

until done to your liking.

Remove, top with 2-3 tbsp of the Za Jiang meat sauce.

Cantonese Zha Jiang Mian (广式炸酱面)

Cantonese Zha Jiang (Zaa Zoeng, in Cantonese) is a classic choice at wonton noodle shops.

Like the Sichuan sort, it’s more of a ‘topping’ than a ‘dish’. But in the Cantones world it squarely functions as a mixed noodle, a Lo Mein: it’s topped over some boiled wonton noodles, and mixed at the table — often with a bit of soup on the side to loosen things up if need be. These days in Guangdong you might not be able to find it at some of the newer shops, but it’s definitely a fixture in the proper old school wonton noodle joints:

Cantonese Zaa Zoeng Recipe

Finely, finely dice into ‘mungbean-sized’ pieces, or coarsely grind:

• 400g pork belly (五花肉)

Alternatively, you can use the fattiest ground pork that you can find.

To a wok, drizzle in

• 1 tbsp peanut oil

and over a medium/medium high flame, add in the ground pork belly. Patiently fry the pork for 15-20 minutes, until its lard has rendered out and the pork is lightly golden brown.

In a small bowl, add a couple tablespoons of the oil in with

• 40g Minsi paste (面豉), a.k.a. Ground Bean Sauce

then add it in and mix well. Do the same move tempering and adding

• 40g Guilin chili paste (桂林辣椒酱)

• 80g Hoisin sauce (海鲜酱)

one by one. Then add in

• 100g plain tomato sauce

mix, and fry your sauces together for ~5 minutes. Add in

• 200g stock, preferably, or water

and allow to come up to a light boil. Continue to boil for another ~5 minutes while stirring constantly.

Season to taste, or with

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

• ½ tsp MSG (味精)

then slowly drizzle in a slurry of

• ½ tbsp starch, preferably potato starch (土豆淀粉)

• 1 tbsp water

and allow to thicken. Remove and store in a bowl. The sauce will be able to keep in the fridge for about one week. It also freezes well.

To make a Cantonese Zaa Zoeng Lo Mein, boil

• 60g dried wonton egg noodles (全蛋面), per serving

strain, and add to a bowl. Toss

• 1-3 pieces of romaine lettuce, per serving

into the noodle boiling liquid. Boil for a brief 10 seconds, then remove to the plate. Drizzle

• ½ tsp melted lard -or- toasted sesame oil (麻油)

over the noodles and the lettuce. Top with 2-3 tbsp of the Zaa Zeong meat sauce. You can keep a bit of hot water or stock on the side to add to the noodles in case in needs loosening up to mix. Devour alongside a juice box of lemon tea.

American Zha Jiang (老扬基炸酱面)

Often with these recipes and such, I feel a twinge of guilt. I get visions of people going on these desperate hunt for Sichuan-style Tianmianjiang, Northern-style Ganhuangjiang, etc — obsessively sifting through the walls of their unsuspecting local Chinese supermarket, trying their damndest to set Google Lens on various sauce labels and the like.

We’re not specific with the ingredients in these recipes to be pedantic dicks, we’re doing it because (1) it’s actually surprising just how much is actually available in the west these days and (2) it’s still cheaper than purchasing a plane ticket and eating out in China. Plus, giving no-holds-barred information helps you be, well, more informed — there’s absolutely zero wrong with taking some loose inspiration from Chinese technique and making something your own.

In the above video (and below recipe), I had some fun and endeavored to make an “American” Zha Jiang using a tomato base. It was pretty good, I’ll definitely be making it again — even if it ended up as a weird reverse-engineered Skyline chili.

Old Yankee Zha Jiang Recipe

The night before, snip the stems off of

• 15g dried chilis, e.g. Guajillo, Cayenne, or Arbols, or a mix4

and toss in a bowl together with a bit of hot, boiled water from the kettle. Cover and soak.

The next day, make a paste with the chilis. Crush with

• 2 cloves garlic

• ¼ tsp salt

and mince until pasty, and set aside. You could alternatively use a food processor.

Finely, finely dice into ‘mungbean-sized’ pieces, or coarsely grind:

• 450g pork belly (五花肉)

• 100g (~5 strips) American-style bacon

and set aside.

Thinly, thinly slice

• ½ medium onion

and toss to a non stick pan together with

• ¼ tsp salt

• 1 tbsp oil

coat well, then add just enough water to cover the bottom of the pan. Cover and soften the onion over a low flame, 20-30 minutes. A nice idea is to do this step simultaneously with frying the pork.

To do so, to a pot, drizzle in

• 1 tbsp peanut oil

and over a medium/medium high flame, add in the ground pork belly. Patiently fry the pork for 15-20 minutes, until its lard has rendered out and the pork is lightly golden brown.

In a small bowl, add a couple tablespoons of the rendered in with the chili paste from above. Then add it in and mix well. Do the same move tempering and adding

• 1 tbsp tomato paste

mix, then add in

• 1 tbsp paprika

and the softened onions. Fry for a couple minutes to ensure that the oil is stained nice and red. Then toss in

• 200 grams crushed canned tomatoes

• 200mL homemade stock (preferably), or water

• 200mL light beer (e.g. Budweiser), or water

and bring to a light boil. Season with

• ½ tsp chicken bouillon powder

• 2 tbsp dark brown sugar

• ½ tsp ground coriander seed

• 4-5 cracks of black pepper

Simmer over a medium/medium high flame for ~20 minutes, or until the onions have basically dissolved and much of the added liquid has evaporated away. The sauce should begin to get to a sort of ‘bubbling lava’ stage. Thicken with a slurry of

• ½ tbsp starch

• 1 tbsp water

added over a low flame, bit by bit. Season to taste — I added an additional:

• 1 tbsp dark brown sugar

• ½ tsp MSG

• 5-6 cracks of black pepper

• 1 tsp Tabasco sauce

To serve:

For each portion, add in a base seasoning of:

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ⅛ tsp sugar

• ⅛ tsp soy sauce

• ⅛ tsp Worcestershire sauce

• 3-4 cracks of black pepper

to each bowl.

Boil

• 100g, per serving, of Angel Hair pasta -or- Spaghetti

until done, then strain. Jiggle with chopsticks in the strainer to allow the excess steam to escape, so as not to overcook. Add to the serving bowl together with

• 1 tbsp paste boiling water

and top with 2-3 tbsp of the American Zha Jiang. Optionally grate over a generous quantity of American cheddar cheese on top. Serve alongside

• Pickled jalapenos

• Fresh chopped chilis

• Sour Cream

• Diced onion

• Scallion

• Doritos or Tortilla chips

It’s a fun little story, but a while back (a good while back now) Fuchsia repeated it on the podcast Conversations with Tyler. And in it, there’s an exchange there that my brain keeps on coming back to, where Mark Miller seemed to be almost personally offended by the tale:

MILLER: My question is, one, within Chinese perceptional framing, why can’t they move over to, for instance, a meal at The French Laundry? Why can’t, when they say, “nature,” just appreciate like a roast squab, a roast chicken with nothing done. None of the fishiness or the wildness taken out, but just accept it as natural and then roasted?

DUNLOP: Well. I don’t think that their experience at The French Laundry is any different from a Westerner’s. You could get a very accomplished Western eater who’s eaten at many fine restaurants, but who will not ‘get’ sea cucumber. The texture of sea cucumber is totally alien.

MILLER: I only eat sea cucumber in Spain, where they actually do a better job because they don’t have that slimy part. They’ve actually perceptively changed it. They’re called espadrilles in the south of Spain.

COWEN: That’s sea cucumber? Oh I like those.

MILLER: See? So there’s cultural framing, again. One culture doesn’t accept, it’s not the ingredient, but basically how we use our senses and frame that experience. One part is food that’s accepted to the body. The other part, “These things are very strange. I have no reference, and I really don’t like it.”

DUNLOP: I don’t think there’s anything remarkable about this. I think it’s just how people —

MILLER: No, it’s not. But the Chinese have this problem with accepting — you said you cooked a meal of Western food for your Chinese friends in your memoir. They said, “It’s so boring.” Yet, I think, roast chicken or roast squab, just by itself, is perfect. Roast game, roast beef.

DUNLOP: Yeah, but from a Chinese point of view, it is very boring.

MILLER: But there are subtleties within aged beef, for instance, that they’re not getting.

I’ll give you a good example. I’ve spent most of my time in Japan. We have a really developed rice culture in Japan. A Japanese person will pick up a bowl. They’ll smell it. It’s not fresh meaning that it’s milled more than a month ago. They can tell you where it’s from.

The chefs will talk about their mixtures of rice and sushi. In China, I have never, myself, personally, had seen that sort of connoisseurship about rice.

…Fuchsia’s always had the patience of a saint.

With that said though, in that particular moment… I think she kind of fumbled the response.

Because in my opinion at least, I think there’s a really interesting reason why the Sichuan chefs were likely unimpressed with the French Laundry — and no, it’s not xenophobia.

How to Appreciate a Roast Chicken

It’s important to understand New California cuisine — i.e. the style of The French Laundry — as a reaction.

As a society develops, agriculture gets increasingly mechanized. This has a tremendous amount of benefit on net, but ingredient quality certainly suffers. Fruits and vegetables become larger. Meats become softer. The flavor of everything becomes somewhat muted. This process happened in America, in Europe, in Japan, in China… everywhere. The intensity differs between societies and where you are on the development curve. Modernity is a trade that everyone should want to make, but it’s not a completely costless one: as Dawei (Steph’s Dad) sometimes wistfully reminisces, “if only we had modern restaurants with those ingredients…”

The food of Alice Waters and that whole movement was (and is) an attempt to chase that concept: a modern restaurant, with those ingredients. Thomas Keller can impress Americans with ‘extremely high quality chicken, executed simply but well’, because many Americans have never tasted a chicken that tastes like chicken. And I mean, a heritage breed, with good feed, given some space to roam? It’s a beautiful thing. No one should be ashamed for loving the French Laundry.

But a little like the Provence that Waters fell in love with in the 60s, China today is at an earlier point on the development curve. And that means that you can find chicken that tastes like chicken in China… and you don’t have to go to one of the most expensive restaurants in the country for the privilege. You simply drive outside of the city — sometimes not even all that far! — and go to a nongjiale (农家乐).

Alternatively called nongzhuang (农庄), these are small restaurants that run out of village houses. They’re generally family run, use high quality ingredients, with some uncle whipping up simple, traditional dishes whipped up over an (at times, even wood powered) wok. If you’re getting something like an entire free range chicken, it’s still not going to be cheap, but it’ll be approachable.

So, no, it’s not that Chinese chefs “can’t appreciate the pure taste of roast chicken”. It’s that if you’re going to a restaurant famed for being The Best In America, you’re going to expect something… more… than an American nongjiale with fancy plating. It’s going to be extremely unimpressive, because you can already get good chicken in China, right?

Layer in the cultural and economic power differential between the two countries — that you’re socially expected to be wow’d — and I could imagine even being a bit miffed: “I can literally turn chicken into tofu, but it’s Thomas Keller that’s rich and world famous, for… roasting a chicken? Go down into the mountains, and Yi peasants can roast you a chicken…”

If Fuchsia truly wanted to impress the Sichuan chefs, I think technically demanding classical French dishes, or perhaps something along the lines of Molecular Gastronomy, might have been a better bet. Or, alternatively, maybe she could have set some expectations:

Hey, we’re going to an American nongjiale. It’s super popular, everyone loves their chicken. The area’s also really famous for their local wine, let me get us all a few bottles. My treat, get me back the next time we’re eating in Chengdu…

我带你去一个美式农家乐吃饭！那里很有名，烤鸡是他们的招牌菜。本地的酒也很有名，我叫几瓶，大家试一下！这次我做东，不要客气，下次在成都你们再请。(just in case you ever find yourself in this exact situation)

• Click here to jump to the recipe

If you’re in the west and have an itch for ‘tropical’ flavors, you’ll probably order some Thai. If you’re in Yunnan, you’ll likely go out for some Dai.

As the name might suggest, yes, there’s certainly a relation! The Dai1 (傣) are one subgroup along with the Thai (ไทยสยาม) , the Shan (တႆး), and the Lao (ລາວ) among a larger category of Tai peoples. As an analogy, you could think about the Tai in a similar sense of the Germanic peoples — English, Dutch, Bavarians, and Frisians aren’t the same, but the languages are closely related and the cuisines seem to share some similar ideas.

And among the Tai groups? Same deal. Food wise, you’ve got fresh chilis, sour tropical fruits, and a bevy of herbs. There’s thick soups (“curries”) and a love for sticky rice. Grills are nearly as common as gas stoves, and much of the kitchen is centered around a large bamboo mortar and pestle.

I… absolutely adore this stuff. If you’ve ever traveled to the north of Thailand and thoroughly enjoyed Lanna cuisine in Chiang Mai or Chiang Rai, the only thing I have to say is... But wait! There's more! There's a similarly rich tradition on the Yunnan side of the border, with a diversity of Tai groups — each with their own unique foods.

But really, there’s this whole stretch of mountainous borderlands — from Yunnan to Northern Thailand, from Laos to Shan State Myanmar — that’s got some of my favorite cuisines in the world. And while others might be in a better place to introduce you to what’s going on in Thailand or Laos, I think we might be able to give you a decent look into the Yunnan side of things.

The Three Types of Dai Food in Yunnan

Of course, if you ordered some Thai takeout in America, it’s going to look a good bit different from the fare you’d get in Bangkok. And similarly, if you randomly selected a Dai restaurant in the provincial capital of Kunming, the dishes aren’t quite going to be the same fare that you’d get in the hills of the borderlands.

This is commercialized Dai food. Dishes have been selected and altered to (1) satisfy the tastes of the (often younger) Chinese diner, as well as (2) adhere to the imagination of what a ‘Southeast Asian’ cuisine looks and feels like.

There ends up being an odd mish-mash effect, with a number of actually Thai dishes (e.g. fried fish with peanut sauce) and (lime… everywhere) flavors added to the mix. I can already sense that you might be recoiling a bit, but perhaps we should reflect on the existence of the generic western ‘Pan-Asian’ restaurant before judging all too hard.

Authenticity sticklers might turn their nose up at commercialized Dai food, and admittedly, some of these restaurants can definitely get a bit too theme-y. But swearing off the category entirely would definitely be their loss — and not just due to the fact that I’d happily slug a Yunnan Falooda right next to some P.F. Chang’s Dynamite Shrimp.

Because all throughout Yunnan these days? Within the commercialized Dai space, you can also find these Dai Liangban ‘Salad’ stands, and they’re… absolutely fucking incredible:

The Liangban salad stand, of course, is a F&B concept that appears to have gotten its start in Sichuan. At these sorts of stands, you’re greeted with a whole bunch of various ingredients: you select what you like, and they’ll mix and dress it for you.

It’s a concept that really snugly fits into the Yum-like salads that you see in Dai food. They’ll take the basic materials that you might be able to find in a Sichuan liangban stand, mix it with some Dai herbs and the like, and then finish with an metric ton of bottled lime juice, rice vinegar, and fresh lime juice to achieve fuck-you levels of spicy-sour.

It might not be traditional, but who could say no to a bit of Sichuan-Thai-Dai fusion? I do give you my word that we will absolutely circle back to these salads someday soon.

For the remaining two, it’ll probably be helpful to look at a map:

From the above map, you can see three major clusters of Dai settlements: the “two cores” areas in the south and west, as well as the “one belt” along the Hong He (Red River)2.

In the western “two cores” area, close to the Myanmar border there are the Dehong Dai, or Tai Nuea. The food here, predictably, shares a lot of crossover with that of the Tai Yai neighboring Shan state — without getting into the weeds too much, there’s nothing more synonymous with this region than the combination of tomato, chili, and peanuts.

Then we’ve got the cluster in the south: this is the home of the Banna Dai, or Tai Lue. This area, Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna in Thai), was one of the last places to be integrated into China proper. During both imperial China and the Nationalist era, it was indirectly ruled as a ‘tusi’, being controlled by a local Dai chieftain until 1953.

The main urban center of Xishuangbanna is in Jinghong, which over the years has unfortunately developed into a sort of ‘Dai theme park’. Jinghong forms a triumvirate with Lijiang and Dali as ‘the most touristy places in Yunnan’ — and perhaps China at large. If you blindly went into the center of town, you’re probably going to be greeted with mostly commercialized Dai. But if you know where to look, particularly in the surrounding towns, there’s some fantastic Banna Dai food:

Now again, there’s more Dai groups in Yunnan than these, so we are somewhat scratching the surface here. But these are the major three schools, the stuff that’s widely available in restaurants: Commercialized, Dehong, and Banna.

They’re all fantastic in their own right, and there is certainly a good hunk of crossover between the three as well. We’ll be delving into each over time… but first, we wanted to introduce you to a simple dish that you can find across all three: Tomato Nam Mi, a spicy tomato dip.

Tomato Nam Mi (番茄喃咪)

This dish was among my first ‘true loves’ in Dai cuisine — the first time we traveled to Dehong, I was guilty of ordering it almost every meal.

It’s just one of those simple, good things: a spicy tomato dip for various fresh or boiled vegetables (or deep fried pork skin, if you’re so inclined). It’s eminently re-creatable — if you’ve ever had Nam Prik Ong in Northern Thailand, it’s sort of a pared down, simpler version of that dish.

I was taught how to make the Dehong Dai version, which is what we’ll cover today. The basic idea is to grill tomatoes, garlic, and fresh chilis, season and pound them, and… that’s pretty much it. You could also use an oven, but I do find this to be an absolutely fantastic dish to grill up on the side for a cookout. It’s super low stress, there’s zero running inside — just bring out the mortar and the seasoning, and you can easily pound the thing on the side over a couple beers.

Plus, with one (easily substitutable) exception, this dish is also almost western supermarket friendly.

Recipe for Tomato Nam Mi

Okay, so the aforementioned ‘easily substitutable’ non-western-supermarket-available ingredient is Thua Nao, a.k.a Douchibing (豆豉饼) — Dai fermented soybean cake.

It’s a really nice ingredient that adds a lot of depth to the dish. That said, push comes to shove? Forget about it. Commercialized Dai food will rarely ever make the inclusion, so really, don’t stress too hard over it. I’d imagine that ‘what you’d find in Kunming’ is probably a good enough quality standard for most recipe writers.

That said, I have two other potential routes you could go, if you’re particularly obsessive:

1. Douchi, Chinese Fermented Black Soybeans. These would be widely available at pretty much every Chinese supermarket (and most Asian supermarkets). The most common kind would be the Cantonese style, labeled “Yangjiang Preserved Beans with Ginger”, which is what we decided to test with. Note that Douchi are not a general substitute for Thua Nao, but the ingredient does go phenomenally with both chili and tomato. I enjoyed this dish more with grilled douchi than I did without anything.

2. Thai Shrimp Paste. In Northern Thailand, sometimes you will see fermented shrimp paste and Thua Nao used in similar applications. They’re obviously not the same ingredient — shrimp paste definitely packs more of a fishy, fermented punch. But similarly, I enjoyed this dish more with Shrimp Paste than I did without anything.

Grill or roast:

• 400g tomatoes

• 4-8 spicy fresh red chilis

• 8-10 cloves of garlic, roots removed

• 1-2 sheets (25g) Thua Nao, if using

Remember to poke some holes in the tomatoes and chilis to avoid explosion.

If roasting, roast at 185C: 40 minutes for the tomatoes, 25 minutes for the garlic, 20 minutes for the chilis. (If using Thua Nao, you can microwave on medium high for 60 seconds, or until it shows white blisters)

If grilling, grill each ingredient until it looks like this:

Optionally, wrap with tin foil, then grill or roast:

• 15g douchi -or- half tbsp Thai shrimp paste

• 1 tbsp tomato paste, if your tomatoes are not high quality

If roasting, roast for 10 minutes. If grilling, grill until fragrant (5-10 minutes).

Peel the garlic. Snip the stem off the chilis, then snip into ~1cm sections. Remove the skin from the tomatoes, and snip out the stem.

To a mortar, add

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp coriander seeds

and the Thua Nao, if using. Pound into a powder.

Add the garlic. Add, if using, the douchi or the shrimp paste. Pound into a paste.

Add

• 2 tbsp toasted chili flakes -or- chipotle flakes -or- run of the mill chili flakes3

and the snipped chilis. Pound until the grilled chilis are at least mostly broken down.

Add the tomatoes, and (if using) the tomato paste. Gently pound and break apart the tomatoes with the pestle. You do not want to go too hard or else the tomato will get everywhere — a gentle stirring motion is okay. It is also ok to keep it chunky (I like mine smoother). Season with

• ½ tsp salt

• ¾ tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ¾ tsp MSG

• ¼ tsp sugar

or to your own tastes. It should be ever so slightly on the salty side for dipping.

Optionally garnish with some chopped culantro or cilantro.

To serve:

You can serve this with either fresh vegetables or cooked vegetables. Ideas for fresh vegetables:

• Cucumber. Cut into ~3mm thick sheets.

• Carrot. Cut into ~3mm thick sheets.

• Napa Cabbage. Slice into ~1.5” wide sections.

Cooked vegetables:

• Cabbage. Cut a half a head of cabbage into four wedges. Skewer each wedge with a bamboo skewer to hold it in place when boiling. Boil for six minutes, then strain and rinse with cool water to stop the cooking process.

• Okra. Cut off the stem of the Okra. Boil for one minute, then strain and rinse with cool water to stop the cooking process.

Another classic to eat alongside this is fried pork rinds. So if Chicharrónes are common where you live, they would certainly be a nice thing to dip as well!

“I’m going to smash you like I smash a clove of garlic!” -Steph’s Dad, when she’d screw up as a kid1

Let’s be straight with each other: me and Steph, we’re not professional chefs. We know our place — we know you’re not coming to us to learn stuff like knife skills. You’re coming for well-researched recipes. Our strengths are delving into old cookbooks, scouring the country looking for unique local dishes, figuring out the puzzle of translating obscure ingredients… not impressing the internet on the chopping board.

But I’ve had enough. I’ve simply seen too many threads on Reddit with people quite obviously struggling with garlic: discussions on the virtues of grating on a microplane vs using a garlic press, various defenses of jarlic (i.e. jarred minced garlic) on the basis of its ease of use, etc etc. So I felt led to address it here.

If you’re an experienced cook, you probably have your own way of handling fresh garlic, and that’s great — this post isn’t really for you. This is for people that, when they read “two cloves garlic, minced” in a recipe, they see a hurdle after the comma.

If that’s you? I have good news: you can mince garlic in three seconds flat.

And it’s not difficult in the least.

Why does Western Cooking mince garlic so damn slow?

If you come from a western kitchen, you’ve probably learned how to mince garlic in this sort of style:

Or alternatively, you might have learned like I did — by making a series of horizontal and vertical incisions first, as chef Frank Proto demonstrates in this excellent video.

Now compare those styles to this demonstration from Martin Yan:

He sorts that garlic in literally the blink of an eye. Horizontal and vertical incisions? What in gods name are we even doing here?

Now, you’re probably not a chef either… so you might naturally wonder if this sort of smashed garlic takes practice, or any special technique. The unfortunate answer is “kind of”, so we’ll circle back to this style at the end of the post.

But in the meantime, for beginners, there’s a very easy way to get started. All you’ll need is a caidao, i.e. a Chinese chef’s knife. You can get them on Amazon for like thirty bucks (this is the brand we personally use — not an affiliate link), basically the same price as a garlic press.

Chop Garlic in Literally Three Seconds

So yeah. For everyday applications, this is the way that I personally mince garlic:

Basically, you’re using the edge and the front ~20% of the caidao to press down and crush the garlic. If you’re in the mood, you could give it 3-4 chops in the other direction. Done.

After I was taught this method, I was frankly almost embarrassed that I spent so much time mincing garlic before.

Now, I’m probably guilty of being slightly hyperbolic with the “three seconds” there, because you usually don’t start your garlic from unpeeled. ‘How to peel garlic’ is, of course, another whole can of worms… and there’s obviously no shortage of tips, tricks, and hacks out there on there on the English language internet.

So this is the entire process, front to back — it takes me about 30 seconds, though someone more talented than me could likely be quicker:

1. Cut off the root of the garlic.

2. Lightly smash to loosen up the peel, then remove the peel.

3. Using the edge and front ~20% of the caidao, press down and crush the garlic. If you have a large clove, you might need to repeat once or twice.

4. Optionally give it 3-4 chops in the other direction.

And here it is in video form:

What if you need a finer mince?

The above is going to be good enough for the vast, vast majority of homestyle applications — it’s somewhat rare to come across a dish that you need it finer than this.

But they do exist. One example might be something like a Cantonese Crystal Qian (a.k.a. “white sauce”) — it’s a little fancier, a little more elegant of a restaurant dish… and you’d probably want to ‘hide’ the garlic mince a bit better in the sauce.

Definitely not rocket science! All you need to do is just chop the thing a bit more. Start from the smashed garlic from above, replacing the ‘optional 3-4 chops’ with ‘30 seconds of mincing’:

1. Cut off the root of the garlic.

2. Lightly smash to loosen up the peel, then remove the peel.

3. Using the edge and front ~20% of the caidao, press down and crush the garlic. If you have a large clove, you might need to repeat once or twice.

4. Continue to chop for 30 seconds.

Starting from the end of step four, this is what that looks like in video form2:

What if you need it even finer?

So… we’ve actually meaning to cover how to smash garlic for while. A few years back, me and Steph were watching YouTube, and stumbled on this Wired video of Gordon Ramsey instructing how to mince garlic. I won’t make you jump into the video — in it, he teaches this (rather convoluted) trick of sprinkling a little kosher salt onto the garlic, and then patiently smearing it with the western chef’s knife to get it into a bit of a paste.

To us, it just felt like the definition of overthinking the exercise: why not just smash like people do in China, and sort it all in three seconds? And ‘chop garlic in three seconds’ was added to our big list of video ideas.

With that said, I am a believer in actually trying something myself before I criticize it3, so… I decided to give it a whirl.

And while somewhere inside of me it pains me to admit it, it is actually a pretty cool trick. It’s fantastic if you really want that next level of garlic fineness — e.g. soups and stews where you don’t want a bunch of little garlic pieces floating around your final dish. And seeing as garlic is an emulsifier, the salt not only helps the it break down: it also helps the garlic combine with other ingredients, ala aioli or curry paste. So you can also mix it with your ginger or your scallion whites, and have a nice fine paste of aromatics on the side ready to go.

It’s certainly not my default mince, but I’ve ended up using the trick way more than I ever thought that I would. So over the years, this here ended up being my personal ‘fusion’ of sorts. Maybe it’ll be helpful, maybe not, up to you:

1. Peel and crush as usual.

2. Sprinkle a tiny touch of salt onto the garlic — maximum a sixteenth of a teaspoon or so. Crush the salt in, then chop it back up into a little pile.

3. Leave the garlic alone for ~60 seconds to let the salt do its thing. This might be a nice time to toss some garlic peels, or maybe start a little ginger on the side.

4. Smear again. The garlic should already be very pasty. Optionally give it ~15 seconds of chopping if it needs.

In video form, with a couple cuts:

To Review: Three ‘Levels’ of Minced Garlic

Again, I want to emphasize that this is my personal garlic mincing strategy — especially the fusion-y salt trick. But with that caveat aside, Steph did draw up an infographic for easy referencing:

…now what about that proper smash?

In the accompanying video, I did try to show how to also perform the smash that Martin Yan did. There’s a few ways to do it, but frankly I’m not super great at it — Steph’s a bit better, and gave a reasonable enough demonstration:

But again, we do understand our lane. If you’re in the market, Wang Gang has an excellent video on the topic (with English subtitles):

But honestly? If you’re struggling with it, unless you’re working in a restaurant I strongly feel that there’s nothing wrong with the ‘homestyle smash’ that we presented in this post. Because the risk of this style of smash is garlic explosion — if you do it wrong, it’s very easy to get little bits of garlic on the counter, on the walls, on the ceiling…

If you’d like to practice it, definitely follow Wang Gang’s instruction. But in the meantime, as the grad student running the tutorial to Dr. Wang’s lecture, I think I can give a couple random tips:

1. Do not put too much arm motion into it. The easiest way to achieve garlic explosion is winding up as if you were Gallagher going in to smash a watermelon. For a beginner, a good starting knife position is what your see from Wang Gang’s student at about 3:15 in the video — starting from the board and twisting is a good way to ensure you’re not smacking too high.

2. I know it’s annoying to say something like “be strong with it, but not too strong”, but… be strong with it, but not too strong. If you’re too light, the garlic won’t crush, ala my little ‘strike one’ in the video. If you’re too strong, it’s garlic explosion. Adjust your strength according to the direction of the problem you’re encountering.

3. This is difficult to explain, but mentally try to have the knife ‘pin’ the garlic under it. This is why it would be impossible to perform this move with a western chef’s knife, and also why it’s a little easier with the chef caidao (which are a bit fatter than the sort we usually work with at home).

• Click to jump to recipe for the Yunnan version

• Click to jump to recipe for the Western supermarket version

One of the few open border crossings between China and Myanmar is in the town of Ruili. The city’s primarily known for the jade trade — Myanmar is the source of much of the world’s jadeite; with much of that, in turn, coming from a very specific stretch in the Kachin State known as the Jade Tract. If you’re in the gem business in China, you certainly already know of Ruili.

What’s a lot less well known is the food scene, which I personally also find pretty special. Being a city whose raison d’être is economic, it does take a bit of navigating — after all, the more special the economic zone, the larger the number of mediocre restaurants. But the diversity on offer is, simply put, absolutely fucking incredible.

Administratively, Ruili is a part of the “Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture”, so there’s a predictable Dai backdrop to it — the grilled meats, the spicy dips, and the rice noodles are very much on full display.

But what’s special about Ruili is that the prefecture is one of only a few in China that actually allows for foreign guest workers. So that Dai base is then layered with a healthy mix of eateries catering to the town’s Burmese expatriate community.

But then of course, there’s also those jade traders, so you can also a very healthy smattering of food concepts from all around China. The ‘national cuisines’ of Cantonese and Sichuan are as well represented as you might expect, but Ruili is also famous for their own local style of potstickers and mixed mala ‘salad’ — the latter becoming quite popular throughout Myanmar as well.

And perhaps most unique is the eponymous ‘other half’ of the autonomous prefecture: if you know where to look, you can also find the food of the Jingpo people.

Ruili’s Jingpo Alley

In you’re familiar with Southeast Asia, you might’ve heard of the Jingpo people before as the ‘Kachin people’. This is what they’re referred to in Myanmar, though ‘Kachin’ is actually a collection of various groups, of which Jingpo is the largest. They live in the incredibly rugged swath just south of the Tibetan plateau: ranging from Arunachal Pradesh, across the Kachin State in Myanmar, and into the western hills of Yunnan.

And because they traditionally mostly lived up in the hills, in Ruili Jingpo food isn’t exactly super common. But you can still find it: near the center of town, across from the hospital, there’s an alley called Xinmin West (新民西巷), and it’s lined with Jingpo eateries.

They’ve got Jingpo style barbecue, Jingpo style congee, Jingpo ghost chicken:

But our absolute favorite were the Jingpo Rice Balls.

What are Jingpo Rice Balls?

I should say that the concept of a ‘rice ball’ isn’t exactly rare in China — I mean, sticky rice fantuan are probably one of the most popular breakfasts in Shanghai. And you can find similar concepts up and down the entire east coast of the country.

But Jingpo rice balls seem to have a very different lineage — stemming less from ‘sticky rice eating’, and more from the ‘minced raw meat’ traditions that you can find across many parts of highland Southeast Asia.

It was originally a hunting dish. In a similar manner that might find in Thailand or Laos, when you’d get a fresh kill one of the first things you’d do is mince up the fresh loin with a little blood and eat the thing raw. You can definitely see echos of this tradition in North Thailand’s culture of laab eating today, where kind of like barbecue in the Anglosphere, it’s a bit of a ‘dude’ thing to get together and chop up some raw bloody meat.

But the Jingpo would also do something a little unique: they’d also bring a bit of leaf-wrapped white rice together with them on the hunt. They’d then mix the mince with whatever herbs they could forage around, and take that package and mix it together with the leaf-wrapped-rice.

Nowadays, families will make this dish at home using beef, which was the version we had in Xinmin West Alley. It’ll also tend to feature a pretty heavy mix of various local herbs, so today we’ll cover two versions: a no-holds-barred, as-authentic-as-our-understanding recipe, followed by another adjusted for the western kitchen.

Recipe for Jingpo Rice Balls, Yunnan-style

There are a number of ingredients in this recipe that are likely unavailable outside of China or Southeast Asia. Most critically, this dish uses Thua Nao (豆豉饼), which is probably not findable in most countries. You may be able to find it if you have a Northern Thai or Burmese specialty grocer.

Another that we had thought would be unavailable would be pennywort, Centella asiatica (马蹄菜). Apparently this is reasonably available from both Vietnamese and Bengal grocers. Another perhaps difficult to source herb is Laksa leaf, or rau răm, though this is likely available at a good Vietnamese grocer. Culantro should be available at Southeast Asian or Mexican grocers.

If you’re uninterested in chasing down these ingredients, I definitely understand – swing on down to the ‘Western Supermarket Club’ version below if you want something easier on that front.

Cook

• 400g Jasmine, Champa, or Calrose Rice

and keep warm.

Mince

• 40g Laksa leaf, a.k.a. rau răm (香柳)

• 40g Culantro (大芫荽)

• 30g Thai basil (金盖/罗勒/九层塔)

• 25g Indian Pennywort (马蹄菜)

• 15g Cilantro

and set aside.

Mince

• 20g (~4 cloves) garlic

• 15g (~1.5 inches) ginger

• 2-3 spicy red chilis

and separately set aside.

Toast

• ¼ tsp Coriander Seed (香菜籽)

over a low flame until fragrant, then pound or grind into a powder.

Toast, grill, or microwave

• 10g Thua Nao (豆豉饼)

over a medium low flame until fragrant, then pound or grind into a rough powder.

Cut into cubes, then mince

• 100g beef loin

into a fine paste, either by hand with a cleaver or using a food processor. Combine with

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

• ½ tsp MSG (味精)

• ½ tbsp toasted chili powder -or- chipotle powder -or- chili flakes

and then mix in the Coriander seed powder and the Thua Nao powder.

Mix in the herbs, ensure well combined.

Add in one third of the hot rice, mix well. Then add in the next third and mix, followed by the final third. Once well combined, roll into balls roughly ~70g each.

Recipe for Jingpo Rice Balls, Western Supermarket-style

With this recipe, we mostly cut back on the herb mix above. Instead, we opted for a mix of cilantro, Sweet or Thai basil, and dill. Dill might seem like an odd addition, but Indian Dill is widely used in Lao cuisine — the ingredient is literally referred to as ‘Lao Coriander’ in Thai — so you do see it around in the broader context of food in highland Southeast Asia. It adds a bit of herbaceous depth that we were missing from cutting out the Laksa Leaf and Pennywort. We used European Dill in testing this recipe (similar to Indian Dill, but a touch milder).

I do wish that we could have figured out a nice substitute for Thua Nao, but it’s a very unique ingredient. The seasoning was slightly adjusted to compensate.

Cook

• 400g Jasmine, Champa, or Calrose Rice

and keep warm.

Mince

• 30g Cilantro

• 30g Sweet Basil -or- Thai Basil

• 15g Dill

and set aside.

Mince

• 20g (~4 cloves) garlic

• 15g (~1.5 inches) ginger

• 2-3 spicy red chilis

and separately set aside.

Toast

• ½ tsp Coriander Seed

over a low flame until fragrant, then pound or grind into a powder.

Combine

• 100g of the leanest, highest quality ground beef you can get -or- hand minced beef, as above

with

• ½ tsp salt

• ½ tsp MSG (味精)

• ¼ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

• 1 tbsp toasted chili powder -or- chipotle powder -or- chili flakes

and the toasted coriander seed powder.

Mix in the herbs, ensure well combined.

Add in one third of the hot rice, mix well. Then add in the next third and mix, followed by the final third. Once well combined, roll into balls roughly ~70g each.

This article is none of those things. It’s a weird one, for sure — it’s just… something I wanted to say.

So fair warning and all that. I do hope you enjoy it, and maybe for one or two of you, perhaps my experience might be useful. But either way, don’t worry, we’re not going to be making a habit of it — and a proper recipe post is coming your way in just a couple days!

In 2018, the New York Times profiled an American guy named Erik Hagerman (“The Man that Knew Too Little”). Erik, in the wake of Trump’s election, decided to stop following the news — a decision that morphed into a strict blockade. At the time, the online liberal mindset was very much in ‘all-hands-on-deck-resistance’ mode, and Erik was dragged relentlessly on social media.

It’s been seven years, and I’m sure most of us have totally forgotten about the story. But the other day, I was putzing around on Reddit and found a thread curious for a follow up with Erik:

This is a profile I’ve thought a lot about over the years, and I feel like it would benefit from a follow up. Did ‘The Blockade’ survive the first Trump presidency? Did it extend to Biden? Trump round 2? How is Erik thinking about the experiment now, or at this point has it just become a normal way of life for him?

I can’t find much online about Erik Hagerman these days, which I’d imagine might be by design. But what I can do is answer some of these questions.

Because Erik, he wasn’t alone in his “blockade”. Between 2017 and 2020, I also stopped following the news. I tuned it all out. I quit thinking about politics altogether.

It was a decision that indirectly led to us starting this channel, and I’m starting to think that maybe I should consider doing it again.

Why I (originally) quit my news and politics habit

In 2017, how I saw the world — that entire architecture was crumbling.

Like a good hunk of people, the election of Trump was part of it. But for me there was actually a much more personal, visceral contradiction: the ongoing destruction of US-China relations.

For those of you that’re old enough, you might remember that in the late 00s there was a ‘halo’ of sorts around the China story. China’s reform and opening up was a triumph of neoliberalism, and there was much excitement and hullabaloo about this new grand era of globalization. Perhaps even some more of the wide-eyed political science sorts convinced themselves that the democratization of China would also be just right around the corner. There was a lot of noise that learning Mandarin would somehow be a key to a successful business career — hedge fund manager Jim Rogers famously got a Chinese speaking nanny for their kid, and in the wake of the financial crisis you’d see articles peppering elite media in the manner of “Go East, Young Man”.

And dutifully, I went east.

I think it’s fair to say that lot of the excitement was very much irrational exuberance — even at that time, the only industry in China that actually ‘wanted’ random young American dudes in their 20s was education. English training centers, SAT prep, that sort of deal. So I went into education, and in the process brought a few of my friends over to China as well. I continued to recruit a number of teachers over those years. During that time, many of our friend group’s conversations would often center around a shallow sort of “look what we’re doing man, this is awesome and such a good career decision” circlejerk. Cringe, absolutely. But at least it’s positive — it’s a little how I imagine young dudes in Silicon Valley might talk to each other.

But as the 2010s wore on, all of that started to bump up against a new reality. There was a flip in narrative. All across elite media, the new China story was one about ‘the rise of totalitarianism’: the new authoritarian menace, the expansion of the dystopian party state. Recruiting teachers was getting much more difficult. This coincided with a certain increase in strictness on the ground level — drug busts, crackdowns on shoddy visas, and certain uncomfortable rumblings about Xinjiang. But I still liked living in China.

When your media diet becomes incongruent with your lived reality, some people turn on their media diet. Times readers become Tankies, that sort of thing. And I had friends in China that went that route. Others, meanwhile, turn on their reality — in the late 10s, a lot of foreigners in China left (I swear, there were going away parties happening on a monthly basis). And I had friends that went that route as well.

And then, Trump was elected. An already noisy American political media turned into a cacophony. Every day had the outrage-of-the-day.

So I chose a different route — I chose to turn it all off.

The “three Ds” of How to Break an Addiction

If you’re from an educated family in the USA, you probably have a politics addiction. It’s how we were conditioned — you’re supposed to keep up with the news, form your own views, and debate and discuss with others. This all culminates with The Vote — a civic ritual with a borderline spiritual connotation to it. This is the ‘civil society’, and culturally, it’s universally considered to be a very good thing.

And maybe it is. But as the saying goes, the difference between a medicine and a poison is in the dosage. In the Andes, the indigenous people would traditionally chew coca leaves — besides being a mild stimulant in the manner of caffeine, it’s remarkably effective at curing altitude sickness, and the leaves themselves are quite high in calcium.

But the civil society, like coca leaves, can be refined. We got cocaine in the form of cable news and the 24 hour news cycle. And social media? Maybe it’s a little more freebasing crack at 2am behind a dumpster.

If you’ll grant me that leap, then how do we break this addiction? I forget where I’ve learned this — Google seems to be giving me a different list of Ds — but from cigarettes to politics, this is what’s worked for me:

Distance.

Pretty self explanatory. If you’re an alcoholic and you have a group of friends where you know everyone’s going to be drinking in quantity, maybe give yourself some distance from that friend group.

For me, living abroad, this was pretty easy. I don’t have cable news blaring at every restaurant over here. There’s not political debates at the gym. Especially in China, you generally need to go out and find your politics, so for me it was simply a matter of rearranging some of my subreddits and continuously training my YouTube algorithm to stop recommending me Colbert.

For a dude like Erik Hagerman, going from that New York Times piece, it was a lot harder — bringing noise cancelling headphones to the coffeeshop and the like.

Displacement.

This is, I think, the most critical bit in kicking any kind of habit.

You need to find the place in your head where this activity resides. Then you swap it with a similar, less destructive, habit. If you’re a smoker, swap the cigarettes for tea — that sort of thing. If it’s a nice day and you want a breath of fresh air, you can go outside and have a cup instead. For me, I always loved sitting outside and playing chess with the uncles while chain smoking — drinking an ungodly quantity of Tieguanying has its pleasures too.

For politics, by far the easiest thing to swap in is sports. You get the same dopamine hit from following the daily news, there’s a ton of online discussion, and it’s actually probably easier to randomly chit chat if when you’re meeting someone you don’t know at a bar.

And I did do that. But there was still a small politics-sized itch that I couldn’t quite scratch with sports. For me, politics was always about these ‘big ideas’, and there were endless intellectual rabbit holes I could find myself jumping into. Bored with the day-to-day politics of a shutdown? Swap over to international politics and learn what’s happening in the Middle East. Bored with that? Why not study healthcare policy. Obviously if you’re intricately familiar with a sport there’s a lot more to appreciate, but I’ve always been very much the rando in the general audience yelling at my TV screen to “shoot the damn puck!”.

So in addition to sports, I also threw myself into my hobbies. Me and a close friend started brainstorming an intricate fantasy conworld, and subsequently began a weekly Dungeons and Dragons game. And I always loved food and cooking, so I also (obsessively) delved headfirst into my previously off-and-on study of Chinese food.

A couple months after that, me and my wife Steph started a YouTube cooking channel called “Chinese Cooking Demystified”. Schleppy name, but hey.

Disgust

After you quit smoking, the first thing that you start to notice is how much easier it is to climb a set of stairs. The second thing you notice is the smell — wait, is that how I’ve smelled this whole time?

After I quit the news, the first thing I started to feel was a sense of quiet. It’s hard to describe — it’s sort of like a ringing in my head stopped.

It’s not just the noisiness of the political media… though there’s that, too. It’s also that I didn’t realize just how much mental energy I was spending on things that were completely, utterly, out of my control. It’s like, turning off the radio turns off the noise. But then there’s a separate, deeper quiet when your inner voice stops thinking about what was on the radio.

After a while, the noise of politics starts to feel a lot like a smell of a cigarette. It starts to feel… disgusting — wait, why was I talking about this all the time?

I’m deeply, deeply grateful for the years I spent kicking my news and politics habit. During that time, sometimes people would ask me: “but Chris, what would happen if you really needed to know about something happening in the world? How would you be informed?”

And I’d usually quip back something along the lines of, “well… if it’s really, truly that important, I’m pretty sure the news will find me”.

The End of the Blockade

It was about a week before Chinese New Year, 2020. Steph was a bit panicked, pulled her nose up from her phone, and told me about this new virus that was going around Wuhan.

I dismissively, embarrassingly, responded along the lines of “listen, people panic over this kind of stuff all the time, like Ebola. Maybe you’ve been watching too much news recently.” Then two days later, I started to see masks on the street.

The news had found me.

COVID was the end of the blockade. During a global pandemic, you kind of have to follow the news. I don’t want to dwell too much on our COVID story — sort of like dreams, they’re a lot more meaningful to you than the person you’re hazily telling them to in the morning.

But I do think the experience is important to push back against the obvious criticism that people sometimes had of me, and of Erik Hagerman. There’s a line of thinking that goes that we’re being irresponsible by not engaging with the news. Back in the late 10s, a lot of this would be couched in a moralistic lens centered around white privilege and male privilege (never mind that the average American white dude is way more engaged in politics than any immigrant family I’ve personally met, but hey).

Now, I should say that I voted in 2018. It’s nice that they let us vote. But I strongly felt I had more than enough information to cast the thing, so why bother burrowing past the point of diminishing returns? And I certainly I didn’t post online or engage with the election in any way outside of that. I mean, simply adding just another angry voice to the pile online — would it actually have helped anything?

Because here’s the thing: by being apolitical, you’ve got a much more impactful of a voice when that one time comes — the moment where you do really need to say something.

The Power of Credibility

Our most viewed video ever is a recipe on Cantonese scrambled eggs. I’m biased, but it’s a nice recipe.

But our most impactful video — the one someone’s sure to bring up if they happen to bump into us on the street — was a video walking through our local wet market in Shunde.

When I turned the news back on for the first time, I was honestly a bit shocked by just how crazed the China conversation had gotten. It was early COVID, of course, and so I was greeted with that moral panic on the topic of ‘Chinese wet markets’: elite media was scribbling endlessly about the “unsanitary” Chinese markets, political figures lambasting them as “gross and disgusting”, there was even a PETA protest outside of a Chinese supermarket in New York City. And there was no shortage of influencers and news outlets online that were quick to sell everything that the public was desperate to buy.

Of course, China’s still a developing country: if you go out searching for some grime to get on camera, it’s not overly difficult to find some. But I’d just spent my last four years traveling around China for food, spending a lot of time in markets in various cities. And I felt like the internet really just needed to see an average, run-of-the-mill Chinese wet market.

If you’re curious, this is the video. It’s not much — it’s just a few minutes of walking around a market. Cell phone video quality. It really shows just how insane the conversation had gotten where such a video actually had (even a small) impact.

I’m proud I was able to stand up and give (at least ~900k) people a mote of reality when they deeply needed it. The video itself seemed to spread a bit where it needed to spread. But a thought experiment: had I been on my Tankie arc, would the video been nearly as well received?

…obviously not, right? People would have dismissed it as motivated reasoning at best, and downright propaganda at worst. Even with being basically completely apolitical for the entirety of our online existence, we still had a smattering of people in the comments yelling at us for being “CCP shills” — just for taking a cell phone and turning it towards the reality we saw with our own eyes. But the reason those voices were a distinct minority, I think, was because an objective voice carries weight.

Union organizers will tell you that the most important person in a campaign isn’t the passionate leftist that attends every meeting: it’s that one person in an organization that everyone turns to if they really need help with something at work. Every company’s got one — someone that’s reliable, someone that knows the ins and outs of the office. They can be tough to get on your side (they’re often highly valued by management too), but they’re the critical domino. They’re the key to the whole shindig, because of their intrinsic credibility.

The way I see it, every single time we help someone make a delicious Mapo Tofu, we’re earning credibility with people. Every single time I feel the need to have some half-baked political hot-take online, I’m spending it. And you can definitely spend a hell of a lot faster than you can save.

Have I Gone Back to Ignoring the News?

To circle back to the original Reddit questions:

Did [the blockade] extend to Biden? Trump round 2? How is Erik thinking about the experiment now, or at this point has it just become a normal way of life for him?

Even as I started paying attention to the news again, I did still maintain a lot of my previous disgust. If I was reading about politics and Steph entered the room, I’d shamefully minimize the tabs, almost like I was watching porn. Biden era, I still tried to mostly tune things out, but I’d periodically start listening to podcasts again — the old, pre-Trump rotation of Sinica, Ezra Klein, and Tyler Cowen. Familiar voices in my head for the elliptical, even if my personal politics were a bit different now than when everything started.

Then last summer, Steph was away for a good bit in China sorting the renovation for our new apartment. I was alone, I was bored, and I… hit the bottle again.

It was the ‘Biden dropping out’ story. It was all just so human. A proud man that couldn’t come to grips with limitations of their age. Loyalists circling the wagon. The backroom intrigue. All in the ultimate high stakes situation, and somehow one of the ‘familiar voices in my head’ was near the center of the whole storm? I was absolutely hooked.

Then that was followed by the whole drama of the veepstakes, itself followed, of course, by the election. Then we get the Luigi Mangione case. Then the muzzle velocity of early Trump 2.0. And then someone shot Charlie Kirk…

…and it was about then that I started to feel the shame of an addict again.

Sometimes I’m struck by how Steph’s parents think about news and politics. Life certainly wasn’t always smooth for the Lis — the Cultural Revolution didn’t exactly smile on the educated descendants of an old merchant family. And even outside of those years, they lived much of their lives in what Americans would have described as ‘grinding poverty’.

They react to politics a lot like how you or me might react to the weather. Sometimes it’s sunny out, sometimes it’s raining. You hope for the former, learn to live with the latter… but ultimately we internalize that the whole thing is completely out of our control, right? There’s no rain dance we can dance to change the outcome. The winds’ll howl no matter how much we whine about them on social media.

There’s a lot of wisdom there, I think.

Is there any possible middle ground here?

Maybe.

Steph sometimes likes to quip that watching a bunch of middle aged dudes sit around and talk politics would be a lot like watching Ming dynasty court eunuchs argue about sex. It’s a sure fire way to take that ‘masculine air of self-importance’ out of the room, and redirect the conversation elsewhere.

Now, every year when I go back to the USA, my Dad picks me up from JFK and drives me home to the suburbs of Philly. It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s always a nice chance to catch up. This last trip, we were chit chatting about politics and such, as we always do. And so I shared with him Steph’s… evocative… analogy, and he gave a hearty chuckle: “…oof. She sure knows how to cut to the core of us, huh.”

But the drive went on. And we chit chatted about this and that, about China, about tariffs, about socialism, about political extremism. I truly, genuinely love the time that I can spend with my Dad talking about all these things, the two of us cosplaying academics-on-a-podcast while barreling down the New Jersey turnpike. It’s nice. And I thought of a different analogy:

“Or maybe… maybe we’re just a couple older dudes playing softball? We know we’ll never be in the majors. We know we’ll never be on Ezra Klein, or be a political consultant. But it can still be fun to get the blood moving, yeah?”

He liked that.

I do think there’s a middle ground here. And I do hope that I can be the type of person who can find myself in the politics equivalent of being “able to have a couple beers with friends, every once in a while”. A podcast every now and then can give some nice intellectual stimulation.

But if you find yourself listening to a politics-related podcast on an almost daily basis? If you find yourself navigating to politico.com, for whatever reason?

It’s no way to live.

Vote, sure, but put your brain back to your hobbies — the stuff that actually makes you happy. Cook. Travel. Whatever. After the last year, I’m thinking I might have to follow my own advice too, at least for a bit. Unfortunately my ice hockey team is in the midst of a (somehow unsuccessful?) tank job, but on the plus side Campaign 4 of Critical Role just started…

Why doesn’t China traditionally have cheese?

It’s a common question — why dairy never really took hold in much of East Asia. And so if you satiate your curiosity with a quick Google search, it’s a good bet the internet will deliver you up a clear, unambiguous answer: lactose intolerance.

According to the above map, China sits at 92% lactose intolerant.

So… case closed, right? If you’ve got a population of people that simply can’t digest dairy products, obviously they’re not exactly going to develop a cheese industry. It’s why China’s always been the land of tofu, after all. No milk, no yoghurt, no ice cream. Simple question, simple answer.

Of course, it’s always a bit unfortunate when an elegant explanation bumps into…

The Reality of Milk in China

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the real world in China (or elsewhere in Asia), you can clearly see the absurdity of the above explanation:

Like, Pizza is ubiquitous — especially for children. Stretchy cheese is practically the definition of meme food. And it almost goes without saying that milk tea is a modern national pastime.

And it’s not just China — throughout Asia we see similar patterns. A juice box of milk is one of the most classic accompaniments to Japanese curry. Korea has its corn cheese. Both should theoretically be 98% lactose intolerant give or take, if I’m reading the above map right.

I mean… Deep fried milk. Seafood Doria. Boba milk tea. Cream stew. Yunnan cheese. The list goes on and on. And that’s not even counting (both Inner and Outer) Mongolia or Tibet, where milk has been a traditional part of their diet for millennia. In mean shit, there’s even dairy in the Qimin Yaoshu…

If you read some western writers, they seem to hand wave away dairy consumption in modern Asia under the banner of ‘imperialism’: well, it was all from the Brits, you see…

And maybe there’s a certain element of truth to that, but it’s ignoring a hell of a lot of contradictory evidence — not to mention agency. Mixue — the ice cream slinging behemoth — isn’t one of the largest companies in China because of some kind of western conspiracy. I’d hazard it might just be because people in China like ice cream.

But what about Lactose Intolerance?

But then, this was the bit that confused both me and Steph.

Because the science behind the genetics of lactose intolerance really seems pretty robust. Sometime around the development of animal husbandry, certain populations of humans developed a mutation to the LCT gene, allowing them to digest lactose into adulthood. This describes roughly 30% of the world. The rest are ‘lactose intolerant’.

When I was growing up, I had a close friend that was lactose intolerant. If he ate any dairy, he’d get incredibly bad stomach aches, maybe even vomit it back out. So when he was around, we’d order cheese-less pizza and skip the ice cream for the Italian ice.

This clearly does not describe people in Asia.

I could try my best to parse some studies on the topic, but frankly I think the world is a little sick of us pseudo-intellectual YouTubers cherry picking academia. So instead of rationalizing our pre-existing beliefs, we decided to reach out to a proper expert: Dr. Jennifer Dubois, a professor of biochemistry at Montana State University. There, she runs the Dubois lab, which specializes in the microbiome.

(she’s also lactose intolerant herself)

A cut version of this interview is available in the above Youtube video, if you just want to zero in on the answer (it starts at 2:57). This is the complete conversation, edited for clarity.

Steph: So, let’s talk about lactose intolerance. I did a gene test, and it actually says I’m genetically lactose intolerant, but I drink milk all the time. What does it mean to be lactose intolerant?

Jennifer: Lactose intolerance is actually a really interesting genetic condition. A lot of people who have a metabolic disorder have a non-functional gene, but lactose intolerance is not that. There are only about 40 people on the entire planet who have a gene that’s non-functional for the degradation of lactose.

What Lactose is is two simple sugars linked together, and there’s a single enzyme called ‘lactase’ that pops them apart. If you lack the enzyme capable of doing that, you can’t digest lactose any further. But the genetic reason behind a lactose deficiency is that you just simply aren’t making the functional lactase product anymore. And that’s because lactose, the major sugar in milk, is baby food. If you’re an adult, you don’t have any real need for lactose itself — or I suppose at least as a, let’s say, pre-industrial mammal.

Steph: I see. People always say that if you’re lactose intolerant, it’ll cause some kind of discomfort. I suppose that could maybe be true for me if you squint? I get full pretty fast from drinking milk straight… or sometimes cheese, if I eat a lot of cheese. Is there any common diagnosis for lactose intolerance?

Jennifer: So lactose intolerance is sort of a spectrum. People can experience a little bit of discomfort, or they can experience a lot of it.

If you experience really significant lactose intolerance — enough to take you to a doctor — they’ll ask you to breathe into a tube. If you’re exhaling hydrogen gas (like the Hindenburg), that’s the easiest diagnostic for lactose intolerance.

The reason why someone who’s lactose intolerant would exhale hydrogen is that they’re not actually the ones digesting their lactose. Their microbiome is digesting their lactose — by fermentation. If you are one of those 30% of the people on the planet who can actually make functional lactase well into adulthood, you would not be exhaling hydrogen gas. But if you’re relying on your microbiome to do it for you, then you would probably be exhaling a lot of it, and that’s part of the reason for your discomfort.

Now, if you are a regular drinker of milk, despite being lactose intolerant, you probably have a very well-trained microbiome. Your microbiome is probably chock-full of microbes that are fermenting your lactose to make hydrogen gas. These are called lactobacilli. If you, like me, are a lactose-intolerant person who likes yogurt and you look at the cultures, you’ll see they say something like “L. acidophilus, L. casei, L. rhamnosus”. The L. is for the genus name Lactobacilli. These are lactose-consuming microbes that live in your GI tract, and they’re enjoying all that lactose that is causing you a problem.

Steph: So, that means our gut is making yogurt for us?

Jennifer: Your gut is making it for you. And that can cause a little bit of discomfort, or it can cause a lot of it.

Now, if you rarely ever drink milk, and one fine day you decide to go to an ice cream party, then you might experience some very bad clinical symptoms. Because it turns out it takes a while to build up a microbiome that has enough lactobacilli to do this work for you.

In fact, you’re probably going to feel sort of like you just ate a sweater! Because you’ve filled your GI tract with something that you can’t digest. And your microbiome can’t digest. So what happens is a bunch of water will rush into your GI tract, really inflate your intestines, and you might end up with a bit of diarrhea. And that’s when people end up with a clinical manifestation that might actually send them to the doctor.

Steph: So in Asia, in modern times, we here tend to have a lot of milk products around. So probably a lot of us who can’t really drink milk genetically, we start building up a tolerance or capability for it when we were young?

Jennifer: That’s right. And for somebody who’s from East Asia, by the time you’re five? 90% of East Asians are not making any functional lactase by the time they’re five. But you do have time to build up a microbiome that’s well-trained to work for you. And you get that training by what you eat.

Steph: For me, growing up in an urban area, I started drinking milk when I was very young. And I continued for basically my entire childhood, because milk is thought to be very nutritious.

Jennifer: Right, so the endogenous lactase production doesn’t shut off really until you’re well into childhood — again, maybe five or six years old is when it really starts to taper off. So, you maintain the capability for a while. And so there’s also a time when you can be slowly eased into building up this capability to digest.

Of course, if you are one of those 40 or so people on Earth who is born without a functional lactase at all, then you have to be supplemented with pill-form lactase. That’s what they would do for an infant with that sort of rare metabolic condition, but similar sorts of products are also available for more run-of-the-mill lactase deficiencies.

Steph: I see. So like, if I’m going to travel in France to eat a lot of cheese, do you think I could also take those kind of pills to help me digest?

Jennifer: You actually can! If you’re a regular dairy consumer but you’re off to a place that really celebrates dairy and you’re going to eat quite a lot, then supplementation usually works for most people.

If you look at the map of people who are more prone to lactose intolerance, you’ll see that it really is most prevalent in East Asia. It’s not prevalent at all in Northern Europe, and it’s in varying degrees prevalent in other parts of the world. There are regions of Africa, for example, where lots of people are very fine with lactase persistence well into adulthood.

You might start to think, is there a correlation between the historical use of dairy in the diet and the retention of lactase well into adulthood? And the answer would be yes! Lactase persistence started to emerge in human populations at the same time that humans started to herd dairy cows. This is an acquired skill. Actually, it’s the people who can drink lactose who are the mutants.

Because I mean, Lactose is baby food, so why would an adult mammal be able to drink baby food effectively for their entire life? It’s effectively a mutation. It arose they think somewhere in Central Europe and has arisen multiple times in human history. It confers a terrific advantage because when you can digest your own lactose, that means you can get a lot of calories. That’s why you see traditional dairy herding and the emergence of this lactase persistence occurring at about 20,000 years ago in human populations, both at the same time.

Steph: That makes a lot of sense because in East Asia, if you look at areas like Inner Mongolia or Tibet — cow herders — there’s actually no shortage of milk products.

Jennifer: Right. There are definitely examples where there are populations within a larger population that happen to be lactase persistent.

But there are also cases of populations where they aren’t lactase persistent, but consume dairy nevertheless. For example, in Africa, there are these Somali herdsmen. They’re completely lactose intolerant genetically, but they consume at least a half liter of milk every day as part of their diet, because that’s how they survive. These are an example of people who have adapted their microbiomes to consume lots and lots of lactose for them. They don’t get all the same nutritional benefit as somebody who is digesting all the lactose themselves because the microbiome is sort of taking a cut for their trouble. But they’re able to get the protein and the water, which is really significant in a milk-based diet. Even though they’re completely ‘intolerant’ from a genetic point of view.

Steph: So, when you said there are subgroups within a larger population that will have maybe higher capability of digesting dairy… I’m mostly familiar with China. Where we live in Yunnan, there’s lots of milk products — goat milk, cheese, etc — but these are often concentrated among ethnic groups that live in the most mountainous regions. Would you say that the reason for that is more genetic, from their diet, or where they live?

Jennifer: There is actually is a difference with respect to terroir and microbiome! Interestingly, where you live has an effect on the composition of your microbiome just as much as your diet — it’s unintuitive, and a very hot area of current research. But maybe we can circle back to that.

But with respect to human genetics, I think the best example would be the United Kingdom. It’s part of Europe, but they have close to 100% lactase persistence in that population because they’re islands, so they’re relatively isolated. They adopted dairy farming relatively homogeneously, and milk has been a broad part of the British diet. So, in that case, while all of Europe is not necessarily lactase persistent—places like Greece and Italy may have less lactase-persistent people—that subpopulation within Europe is highly persistent. So place can have an impact on your microbiome, but it also certainly has an impact on human genetics as well.

Steph: Got it. You’ve made me curious though — what’s the relationship between terroir and your microbiome? Can you tell me a bit why place would affect your microbiome?

Jennifer: It’s a super interesting question. When microbiomes first started to be sequenced — the very dirty secret about microbiomes is the way they’re sequenced is through stool. You look at what comes through a person and then you look at the ribosomal-encoding DNA — that’s like a little address for all the microbes that live inside of you.

When people started doing this sequencing globally, they were looking for dietary signatures. For example, vegetarians. They thought whether you’re in Southeast Asia or North America or wherever, that vegetarians would have certain commonalities because that’s a very important dietary distinction. And yet, what some of those early studies — what they called enterotyping, because they’re talking about your enteric tract — found was that these enterotypes had less to do with what people were eating and more to do with where they were from.

I don’t know if we’ve fully resolved why some of these particular species compositions are observed. Although we do know that certain things like lactobacilli are almost universal. Almost every person on earth is going to have some kind of lactose-digesting organism in them. Whether you have a huge army of them or just a small little friendly band might have more to do with what you eat.

But the global species composition might have a lot to do with where you are. People have speculated that it has to do with water, or maybe broader aspects of the food chain. But nutrition is a very, very difficult science to try and deconvolute what it is about what you eat and the phenotype that comes out. I think that’s why something like lactose intolerance gained a lot of attention because it’s one of the few things where people can point to a single gene that’s leading to an effect.

Steph: That actually reminds me of a traditional Chinese medicine practice here in China. Speaking of the terroir and how it affects your microbiome, if you are moving to a new place and feeling uncomfortable with the local diet, one traditional ‘solution’ is to bring a little rock from your hometown, put it in the water that you drink, and then just drink the water all the time. I’ve actually had a friend that did that. I don’t know how well that works, probably no evidence to support it. But I think it’s an interesting anecdote that links to what you were just talking about.

Jennifer: I think it reflects a beautiful idea.

An idea that I could grow broccoli in my garden or you could grow it in yours. They’re both broccoli, but the fact that mine is growing in a garden that’s fed by a certain mountain stream — I’m up here in Montana and the soil is volcanic — these things are going to make a difference in the kind of broccoli that I get out. The amount of sunlight, all kinds of different things. And so even though we might be growing the same plant, there are elements of its composition that are going to vary. And if that’s what I’m eating a lot of, that has a way of coloring the terroir, not just of the food, but of your fellow eaters that are inside of you. Because they as well start to get colored by the things that you’re eating.

But there’s a lot of research ahead of us. To deconvolute why that is and how it’s actually happening is really at the cutting edge of microbiome research.

Steph: And that happens to be your field of speciality?

Jennifer: It is a big part of what I do. So yeah, it’s very interesting for us. I think that now the scientific studies are fueling a lot of our understandings of how our body reacts to food. We used to have this very simple idea that if you’re lactose intolerant, you can’t consume dairy — and if you aren’t, you can.

But it’s not an on and off switch. It’s a spectrum. It can be a very extreme reaction or just something so very minor that you don’t even think about.

For example, I personally didn’t know that I was lactose intolerant until I had genes sequenced for a completely different reason. And then looking back, it sort of made some sense. My heritage is Central Asian — Iranian, Persian — and that’s not uncommon in that part of the world either.

Steph: I see. So, the effect for people who are genetically lactose intolerant but who can eat dairy and milk has a couple of different factors. The most important one is that they have a microbiome that can help them digest, would you say?

Jennifer: If you are lacking the ability to produce lactase, then yes, having a well-functioning microbiome that can do the work for you is very important. Part of that well-functioning microbiome, in terms of your comfort, is when you ferment the lactose, a downstream product is hydrogen gas.

And hydrogen gas is a gas! It’s going to literally bloat you up. But if you have a friend of that initial consumer who likes to eat the hydrogen, they can cooperate. This is how I imagine it might be working for those Somali herdsmen. They’re really punching above their weight, drinking almost a liter of milk a day. They probably have a very well-conditioned microbiome not only to break down the lactose but to take care of all the downstream metabolic products that come after… and they feel plenty fine.

Steph: So, in the microbiome, besides lactobacilli to help digest the dairy, they could also have something else there to help them mitigate the other consequences?

Jennifer: Correct.

Steph: So, for some people like me or a lot of other Chinese people who love milk tea but maybe feel a little full from it, we probably have a less effective microbiome to combat the consequent gas or other effects coming from dairy?

Jennifer: Yeah.

Now I should say that it’s extremely difficult to control for all the inputs that regulate your microbiome and how much of each bacteria might be present. Perhaps in the future we might be able to regulate it a bit better, but right now we don’t really know much about how to actually exert control. There’s a cottage industry out there that’s sprung up around prebiotics and probiotics, that claim to produce a microbiome composition that’s optimized for one purpose or the other.

But it’s hard. Because while you can train your microbiome, maybe you won’t get it perfect, right?

When it comes to your style of milk consumption however, if the consequence is feeling full? Maybe because you have a little bit of extra gas, or maybe a little extra water retained in your GI tract… that’s not the worst thing in the world. It would probably be clinical if you were vomiting or really showing something that took you to a doctor. Then they would probably say you should take lactase pills if you really have to have that milk tea.

Steph: So okay. I do have some friends that can’t really drink much milk. And I assume that lack of exposure when they were a kid, and now subsequently when they’re an adult, their gut is just really working in overdrive to try its best to handle all this dairy?

Jennifer: Yes, correct.

Steph: I see. So now I can introduce my friends who can’t drink milk to the lactase pills.

Jennifer: Yes. You can get them over the counter, and you can even put it in the drink itself if you don’t want to swallow it.

Steph: Oh, that’s an interesting idea. I wonder... just curious, do I just go get lactase pills, or do they come in specific forms as a treatment for people?

Jennifer: I think that you can get them over the counter. In other words, you wouldn’t necessarily have to have them prescribed. But since it’s a common enough problem, if you went to a gastroenterologist, they would certainly be able to give you lactase pills. Even if you went to a general practitioner, they’ve probably seen it often enough that they could help you out. Their first bit of counsel might be to quit drinking milk. They might say, “Lay off the milk, maybe have more yogurt.”

But I personally take Vitamin D because if you don’t drink milk — and this is something else that a lot of adults find out the hard way — we know that we don’t ‘like’ milk, so we just don’t drink it. We’re not really sure why we don’t like it… but then we discover, oh, we’re actually lactose intolerant!

So you’ve kind of avoided it for a while, maybe much of your life. Then in your adulthood, you might get early onset osteoporosis. That’s actually a big problem in areas of North America where we don’t get a lot of sun. Our major source of Vitamin D — and Vitamin D is what brings calcium into your bones — is dairy. So we’re not only not getting the calcium, we’re also not getting the Vitamin D. A lot of people are inadvertently, by rejecting milk, not getting those things.

Now in East Asia, if you live near a water source and you’re eating a lot of seafood, that might be a primary source of Vitamin D and calcium, particularly if you get any of the fishbones. So in that case, you might not become symptomatic in other ways that show basically your dietary choice is having different kinds of health consequences.

Steph: In China, there are actually areas that also have problems with Vitamin D deficiency because people don’t drink enough milk nor do they have seafood. So there is a problem. I think that’s also part of the reason why the government is trying to push more of this in people’s daily diet as a nutrition plan, so that they can get enough Vitamin D and other nutrition that comes from it.

Jennifer: It is really good for you and there are lots of benefits to drinking milk. That’s why genetic studies show that the natural selection pressure to retain that mutation that allows you to make lactase into adulthood is extremely strong. So once it came up, it really took hold in those regions because there’s a ton of benefits to being able to fully digest milk. Even though it’s baby food.

Steph: And it’s tasty!

Jennifer: And it’s tasty.

Steph: So that all makes sense. I do really appreciate your time and help today to help me — a genetically lactose intolerant Asian — learn why I can actually consume dairy. And most importantly, I learned about this pill, lactase. I’m going to bring it with me next time traveling to a dairy-heavy area so that I can eat all the things that I love.

Jennifer: Do that, they say it helps! Especially when you’re in France and all those happy cheese eaters are making fun of you.

• Click to jump to making ‘oil noodles’

• Click to jump to recipe for stir fried noodles

People online consistently over-rate woks and stoves, and deeply under-rate stir fry prep.

Of course, that’s not to say that equipment doesn’t matter at all — after all, just try to grill a fish with a Bic lighter. And… I like woks. I like gas stoves. But the fact of the matter is that 90% of a stir fry happens before you stir fry. And if you nail that 90%, you can get away with quite a bit of imperfection on the back end.

So it’s a pretty telling coincidence, I think, that the stir fried dishes that the English language internet insists depends most on woks, wok hei, and powerful burners:

• Fried Rice

• Fried Noodles

• Certain meats (e.g. Beef, Boneless Chicken)

… are also the stir fries that, in a restaurant setting, critically rely on rather unintuitive ingredient prep. If you want ‘that restaurant taste’ for your Kung Pao chicken, you’re going to have to take that chicken and ‘pass through oil’ — i.e. give it a brief shallow fry. Beef is even more unintuitive, as (a sometimes non-insignificant quantity of) water is literally slapped into the marinade before said shallow frying to prevent drying. Restaurant-style Fried Rice, meanwhile, often leans on parboiled-and-steamed rice, rather than the rice cooker rice you might be more used to.

And fried noodles, too, relies on prep that takes place way before the noodles ever even sniff a wok.

‘Oil Noodles’: The Building Block

There are two primary ways to prepare noodles for stir-frying: steaming and shocking, and the technique of making youmian (油面, literally “oil noodles”). Today we’ll be teaching you the latter, which is the go-to for street vendors around the country (our friends over at Made with Lau have an excellent video on the steaming method). Of the two methods, it’s slightly easier on the margin, and the noodles keep fantastically in the fridge — making it a very good candidate for a busy homecooks that likes to do the whole meal prep thing.

The technique can work with practically any noodle you can think of. Traditionally it would be done with fresh alkaline noodles, but dried also work great too. In the accompanying video, we used fresh Japanese Ramen noodles for ease of international replication… but even Italian angel hair pasta worked well for us during testing.

With that said though, there is one piece of equipment that’s extremely critical for this recipe: a box fan. Believe it or not, from our experience, there’s simply no substitute — sometimes in Sichuan these are even referred to as ‘fan noodles’ (traditionally, this technique would be done using a hand fan — you can also go that route if you’re skillful).

How to Make Oil Noodles

To make them, boil

• 100g dried noodles (per planned serving) or 150g fresh noodles (per planned serving)

until al dente. If using pasta, try adding 1 tsp Kan Sui lye water (枧水) -or- baking soda to the boiling water to give the noodle a bit more puff and chew. Do not overcook.

Strain, then immediately spread the noodles out on a baking tray, and place the baking tray in front of a box fan.

Drizzle in

• 1.5 tbsp oil (per planned serving)

and continuously lift and jiggle the noodles with a pair of chopsticks to let the steam escape. Move quickly. If you cannot use chopsticks well, you can use your hands.

Transfer to a storage container. The noodles will stay good for at least one week in the fridge.

How to turn these into Stir Fried Noodles

Well! Just refer to the handy infographic:

…okay, I’m not sure how handy that was, we’re still working on our infographic game.

The fundamental point here though is that you can now use these noodles in basically any stir fried noodle recipe you like. It’s eminently riff-able. In the below recipe, we went with the type of seasoning and add-ins that you might see in a street food context in China. We decided to make ours spicy, but you can totally cut out all the chili if you prefer. Change the seasoning. Change the add-ins. Do your own thing.

Sole rule of thumb: just don’t push the add-in quantity too hard. The more vegetable and the like you add in, the more it’ll absorb the cooking oil (and potentially crowd the wok). If you’re working off of 300 grams of noodles, don’t add more than 300g of add-ins.

Street Food-style Fried Noodles

Want to try the recipe, but don’t own a wok? Go for it. This can also be accomplished in a large non-stick skillet.

As we discuss in the attached video, skillets can work well for this kind of thing, but they do have a couple of downsides. First, they can be a bit difficult to maneuver in — especially with something hard to mix like fried noodles. To combat this, try mixing half your dark soy sauce in with the noodles themselves before you fry.

Also, you obviously need to be a bit careful with non-stick over a high flame. When you start to fry, I would suggest adding the oil to a cool pan, swapping the flame to high, and then immediately adding the noodles. So long as you move quickly and do not have an empty pan you should not exceed the surface temperate limit of 260C. If you’re really worried, you can use an infrared thermometer to make complete sure.

Julienne:

• 60g ham

• 30g carrot

• ⅛ onion

Cut into ~1 inch strips:

• 60g baby bok choy (上海青)

Mince:

• 2 cloves garlic

• 1 fresh spicy chili (optional, if you want spicy)

and set all of those aside.

Mix together a dry seasoning mix of

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG (味精)

• ⅛ tsp five spice powder (五香粉) -or- thirteen spice powder (十三香)

• ⅛ tsp chicken bouillon powder (鸡精)

• ⅛ tsp cumin powder (孜然粉)

• ¾ tsp chili powder (辣椒面), optional if you want spicy

Mix together a wet seasoning mix of

• 1 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• 1 tbsp water

• ½ tbsp dark soy sauce (老抽)

• ½ tbsp oyster sauce (蚝油)

and set the seasoning aside.

To stir fry, to a hot wok swirl in

• 1.5 tbsp oil

and add in

• 300g prepared noodles

and over a high flame allow to fry undisturbed for 1-2 minutes. Once the surface begins to look dry and just barely beginning to get ever so slightly brown, flip and fry for ~30 seconds.

Add the ham, stir fry for ~30 seconds.

Add minced garlic and chilis, mix well.

Add the carrot, onion, and bok choy. Continue to fry until the vegetable have slightly wilted, ~1 minute.

Remove the wok from the flame. Add the dry seasoning and mix well, followed by the wet seasoning.

Return to a high flame. Continue to fry and mix the seasoning in with the noodles. Be patient, this will likely take 30-60 seconds. Heat off. Optionally drizzle

• 1 tsp oil

over the noodles for sheen, and mix well.

• Click to jump to the recipe

Sometimes a dish is just in the right time, and the right place.

I’m not sure when or where the idea of “Stir Fried Tomato and Eggs” got its start, but post reform, the dish appears to have caught like wildfire nevertheless. If I had to guess why, it’s because the dish is fantastically convenient to feed kids — but no matter the reason, the thing quickly spread to all four corners of the country. By the time I came to China, you could find Tomato and Egg everywhere from topping Xi’an Biang Biang noodles, to Cantonese school canteens, to Hunanese home kitchens.

What other Chinese dish has the same sort of national reach? It’s somewhat fitting that sometimes you can see people talking online about the national flag of China as “the color of tomato and egg”:

The Invention of Tomato and Egg Noodles

Fast forward to the early 00s. The Tomato and Egg generation has begun to grow up. They’ve hit drinking age, and started to hit the bars on the weekend. And it’s around this time in Chengdu, a nightlife district began to form around Yulin road — centered around a legendary club called “Empty Bottles”.

And while the entire world loves to cap off a bibulous night with some sort of midnight snack, I think it’s fair to say that Sichuan people are particularly enthusiastic fans of the genre. So a noodle shop around the corner from Empty Bottles formulated a dish to appeal to the crowds of young, newly minted drunks — a comforting mix of Tomato soup, Fried Eggs, and of course, noodles. The name of the shop was “Huaxing Jiandanmian”, and the concept proved to be a smash hit.

But the years, of course, have changed Chinese cities. And like many neighborhoods in China, in the 10s Yulin road underwent redevelopment:

In fairness, it appears the project was mostly an attempt to make the area more pedestrian friendly: Yulin road today is still a nightlife district. However, over the years of construction, Huaxing had to relocate elsewhere in the city before re-opening in the newly snazzed-up — and predictably higher cost — Yulin. And reportedly, in that process around the city and back, Huaxing Jiandanmian seemed to go downhill quality-wise (so… maybe don’t center your Chengdu trip around the place).

But in the meantime, the dish itself had already begun to spread. And these days, Huaxing is far from the only name in the game — the soup firmly ensconcing itself as a minor character of sorts in the overarching “Chengdu Noodle Pantheon”.

Let’s Talk Tomatoes (and Eggs, and Pickled Chili Oil)

These days, perhaps the most beloved shop that sells the dish is called Kangji Jiandan Mian, and it’s their style that we based things off of today.

A few elements here:

1. Tomatoes. Kangji Jiandanmian doesn’t appear to use ‘maximally in-season tomatoes’, but their tomatoes do seem to… actually taste like tomato. We’ve heard rumors that some noodle shops in Chengdu will hunt down the best tomatoes they can find and then freeze them to use for this dish. Consistency wise, given the lack of ‘chunkiness’, it feels obvious to me that the tomatoes are blended.

2. Fried Egg. Self explanatory. Kangji Jiandanmian fries their eggs in a wok — and in the noodle shops, that’s generally shallow-frying by any other name. All the little golden nooks and crannies are perfect for absorbing the flavor of the soup.

3. Lard, as a base. The soup itself uses a lard base, and the eggs also appear to be fried in lard.

4. Pickled Chili Oil topping. An optional addition to the dish, though apparently it’s so popular that the oil itself is also available for customers to purchase to bring home.

There’s also an optional meat topping in the above picture (which we’ll skip for the below recipe)1.

Let’s talk tomatoes first. While we won’t need to be insanely obsessive here – no need for maximally in-season tomatoes grown on the volcanic slopes of Mt Vesuvius – again, it will help if our tomatoes actually taste like tomato. Me and Steph are lucky: we live in Yunnan, and with all the province’s little microclimates we can generally get at least ‘solid’ tomatoes pretty much all year round.

So I do worry that if you’re in a colder climate (with large, watery, out-of-season tomatoes), the dish might not have the same oomf to it. In the United States, we of course usually crack this nut by reaching for tinned tomatoes: canned at the height of tomato season, the tin is going to be significantly more ‘tomato-y’ than what’s available fresh from the supermarket.

As such, we also tested this dish with imported canned tomatoes from Italy – the final result was also delicious, because… of course. So, we settled on three possible tomato routes for you to try, depending on your situation:

• Fresh Ripe Tomatoes, 650g. If you’re mostly happy with your fresh tomato quality. We’ll quickly boil and peel these, then blend with a bit of water, salt, and Shaoxing wine to use as a base.

• Canned Tomatoes, 350g. Probably also the easiest route, as you won’t need to boil, peel, or blend the tomatoes. We’ll just need to add a bit of extra water with this route.

• Fresh Tomatoes of any quality, ~450g; Canned Tomatoes, 175g. This was the route that I personally enjoyed the most, and I feel the most confident re its international replicability. As such, in the below recipe, this is the route that I decided to explicitly scribble down. That said, I understand that calling for a mix is somewhat obnoxious, so do feel free to go all fresh or all canned.

Next, the Fried Egg. To execute this style of fried egg, it’s really going to help if you own a round bottomed wok:

…which I know that only a small minority of you do. If you would like to follow the fried egg recipe in this post, fantastic, but definitely feel free to fry up an egg however the hell you like to fry up eggs. Pretty much any style will still be delicious — just try to keep the yolk on the harder side so that it doesn’t risk running into the soup.

The lard, meanwhile, is definitely pretty important to the final taste of the dish. Unfortunately, I know that not everyone tends to keep a big tub of lard in their kitchen; plus, some mass produced lards are definitely better than others2. So what we’ll do in the below recipe is fry up a bit of pork belly in order to harvest some lard, and then use the crispy pork belly as a topping.

If you are keeping Halal or Kosher you can substitute schmaltz for lard.

And finally, there’s the “optional” Pickled Chili oil — optional in quotes because both me and Steph would heavily recommend the addition. While we do have an entire proper recipe for Pickled Chili Oil in our Sichuan Food, Like the Restaurants post, I figured it’d be a bit obnoxious to make you go hunting down that recipe in order to make this one. So in the below recipe, we decided to fry up fresh chilis and mix it with a bit of rice vinegar in order to arrive at a sort of slapdash substitute. Still works (in the context of this specific dish, at least).

Recipe for Tomato and Fried Egg Noodle Soup

To Render the Lard, Make the Crispy Pork Topping

Slice

• 300g fatty pork belly

into roughly 4mm sheets, then cut those sheets in thirds to get strips. Mix with

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ½ tsp soy sauce

and then coat everything with

• ~3 tbsp oil

Add to a cool wok or pot. Over a medium flame, slowly fry the pork to render out as much fat as possible, 15-20 minutes. Transfer the crispy pork belly to a paper-towel lined plate, and reserve the lard.

To Make the Soup

Prepare the aromatics. Separate the white part and the green part from

• 4 scallions

Slicing the green part to reserve as a topping. Finely mince the whites together with

• 4 cloves garlic

• 1 inch ginger

and set aside.

Take

• 450g fresh tomato3

and cut a little ‘x’ into them. Place in boiling water for ~1 minute, or until the peel begins to come off. Remove the peel, and cut into rough chunks. Add to a blender together with

• 175g canned tomato

• ½ cup water

• ¼ tsp salt

• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine4

and blend on the ‘smoothie’ setting to a smoothie-like consistency.

We can now make the soup. To a pot, add

• 4 tbsp rendered lard, from above

and the minced garlic, ginger, and scallion whites. Fry over a medium flame for 1-2 minutes, or until fragrant. Add

• 1 tbsp tomato paste

• 1 tsp red, mild chili powder (e.g. Gochugaru, Kashmiri, or Xinjiang chili powder); optional but recommended

and fry until the oil is stained, ~1 minute.

Add the blended tomato mixture. If still frothy, allow it to bubble on medium-high for a few minutes to let the foam subside. Add

• 2 cups water -or- stock -or- a combination5

• ½ tbsp sugar

• 1 tsp chicken bouillon powder

• ½ tsp MSG

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp white pepper powder

Mix well, and simmer for at least 30 minutes.

Season to taste. Add a little salt if not salty enough, or more sugar if the tomatoes are a bit sour.

Keep warm as you’re sorting everything else. Right before serving, sprinkle in a bit more white pepper powder, to taste.

To make ‘pickled chili oil’ substitute:

Finely minced together

• 15g spicy fresh chilis (Heaven Facing, Thai Bird chili, etc)

• 3 cloves garlic

and over a medium flame fry in

• 1.5 tbsp oil

until fresh chilis begin to dry up a touch, ~2 minutes. Mix with

• ½ tbsp rice vinegar -or- white vinegar

and keep in a bowl.

To fry the eggs

Again, feel free to ignore the below recipe, and fry eggs how you like to fry them!

Per serving, crack

• two eggs

into some sort of easy to pour container (e.g. a Pyrex). Be very careful not to break the yolk, else the egg with be oily.

Heat up a round bottomed wok until very hot, then swirl in

• ½ cup rendered lard, from above

and give it a good swirl. Over a medium-high flame, heat until the oil is smoking.

Add in the eggs. They will quickly puff up. Gently swirl the egg to allow it to cook evenly. You can also scoop a bit of hot oil over the yolk to allow it to set.

Once the yolk is mostly set, ~1 minute, flip. Cook for ~45 seconds on the other side, then flip again. Once the egg has reached your desired brown-ness, remove. Allow the excess oil to drain off, then transfer to a paper towel-lined plate.

To boil the noodles

Boil

• 100g dried noodles per serving (preferably Sichuan-style alkaline noodles) -or- 150g fresh noodles per serving6

until roughly al dente. This was ~4 minutes for the Sichuan-style noodles we had but do follow your own package. Drain and transfer to your serving bowls.

To serve

Top the noodles with the two fried eggs. Smother the tomato soup all over everything. Top with the crispy pork belly, the scallion greens, and the pickled chili oil (we like ~½ tbsp of pickled chili oil with our noodles).

• Click to jump to the recipe

Beans and rice. Pickles and rice. Hot dogs and baked beans.

Everywhere’s got something. And in Yunnan, that tasty, humble light-on-the-wallet dish is guihuolu — literally, “Ghost Fire Green”.

The dish is a pretty simple concept at its core: it’s a mix of fresh chili peppers, herbs (and herb roots), and… that’s pretty much it. It’s seasoned to be on the salty side, with leaning on a mix of soy sauce, salt, and MSG — to be downed, of course, next to a whole bunch of white rice.

Why… “Ghost Fire”? We might be being borderline clickbaity with our character-by-character translation here — guihuo in Southwest Chinese dialect really means something like ‘annoyed’ or ‘frustrated’. A while we’re not sure where exactly the name came from, a bit like a “Sloppy Joe” it’s not exactly the most difficult thing in the world to imagine. Chilis, roots, and rice for the nth day in a row? I might be a little annoyed too…

How to Love Ghost Fire Green

Now, I’m aware that this it doesn’t really look like all that much, and the above introduction probably doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence. A simple mix of cheap vegetables, simply seasoned, whose name literally implies how annoying it is to eat? Not exactly selling the thing, Chris!

But Ghost Fire Green is indeed tasty, and it does have a number of logistical advantages. First off, unlike its other humble brethren (e.g. hot dogs and baked beans), Ghost Fire Green is healthy, and a great way to eat a whole bunch of fresh vegetables. It also keeps well in the fridge — perhaps actually being at its maximally delicious point a couple days in.

Next to some nuked leftover rice, the thing is an absolutely fantastic mindless “I’m hungry, I need something!” meal that can be ready in no time flat. Personally, I also like to complete the bowl with a bit of crispy pork belly — or perhaps a strip of American-style bacon if I’m in the mood (more on that in the recipe).

It can also function as a fantastic side dish. Inviting a couple people over? Mix together some Ghost Fire Green a day or two in advance, keep it in the fridge. Much easier than a lot of Chinese salads…

How to Make Ghost Fire Green

To reiterate, I highly recommend turning this into a rice bowl and completing with some crispy fried pork belly. Sans pork belly, I might actually be a touch annoyed at a meal of “Rice plus Ghost Fire” as well. If you don’t feel like frying up crispy pork belly, again, some American style bacon is also excellent here.

Also, do note that in the original dish, ‘herb roots’ – cilantro root, scallion root, wild chive root, etc – often feature quite prominently. We omitted the roots in the below recipe, as I know they can often be tough to find in Western supermarkets. But do use them if you have access to them.

Slice

• 80g mild to medium chili pepper1

on a bias into thin strips.

Chop

• 50g cilantro

• 50g scallion

into roughly one inch sections. Smash the white parts of the scallion. Include the (washed) roots, if possible.

Thinly slice

• 30g garlic, or roughly a half a head

into sheets.

Julienne

• 40g ginger

and add all the above together into a large mixing bowl. Add in

• ¼ tsp salt2

• ½ tsp MSG (味精)

• 2 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• ½ tbsp dark Chinese vinegar (香醋/陈醋) -or- balsamic vinegar

and thoroughly mix. Wash your hands well first, really go at it, massaging the seasoning into the ingredients.

Toss in the fridge until you’re ready to eat. Consume with white rice, and — in my opinion — crispy pork belly of some sort.

A quick, simple crispy pork belly recipe, if you need

Slice

• 200g pork belly

into ~4mm sheets, then slice the sheets into about thirds. Mix with

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ½ tsp soy sauce

and then coat with a generous

• 3 tbsp oil

Add to a cool wok or pot. Slowly fry the pork to render out as much fat as possible, 15-20 minutes.