Deep Fried Corn, Hubei Style (椒盐玉米)
A salt-and-pepper corn dish from the Hubei province
Today, I wanted to show you how to make one of my personally favorite dishes from the Hubei province – Jiaoyan Yumi, a kind of deep fried corn dish.
This dish is part of the Chinese ‘salt and pepper’ flavor profile that’s used with fried foods (a translation I’m not crazy about, more on that later). It’s not necessarily the most representative dish in its category, nor is it honestly that common in Hubei cuisine, but… I personally love it. I suppose as someone that grew up in the US, “Crispy deep fried stuff” plus “fresh corn” just speaks to me on a primal, visceral level. And it’s corn season, so why not?
Ingredients
Before we get into the ingredients, a quick note on this ‘salt and pepper’ flavor.
There’s… no pepper.
I mean, well… there can be, but that’s not what the flavor profile is, at its core. Let me explain – and feel free to jump ahead if a rather byzantine discussion on language isn’t your cup of tea. At a basic level, this flavor – “Jiaoyan” (椒盐) – refers to a mix of salt (i.e. “yan”, 盐) and Sichuan Peppercorn (i.e. “huajiao”, 花椒). Pepper, meanwhile is “hujiao” (胡椒) – which, maybe you could notice, is the same character.
A convincing argument could be made that this isn’t actually a mistranslation, and that the ‘pepper’ is just shorthand for ‘Sichuan peppercorn’. But I feel like in English “salt and pepper” just so universally refers to black pepper (as it’s the most dominant basic seasoning in European cuisines) that it can, and does, confuse people.
But almost as much as a flavor, these Jiaoyan dishes also point to a technique - deep frying something with a cornstarch coating until crispy, and then following it up with a dry stir-fry that (1) fries the ingredient with a Jiaoyan spice mix (2) doesn’t add any liquid in the process and (3) uses the barest minimum quantity of oil.
So that Jiaoyan spice mix has a ton of regional variants. Some common Jiaoyan mixes are:
Salt and Sichuan peppercorn: the most classic one.
Salt, Sichuan peppercorn, Fennel, Dried Tangerine Peel: The most common mix if you buy a packet of the stuff in China.
Salt, Sand Ginger (i.e. Kencur): A classic Cantonese variety.
Salt, Sand Ginger, White Pepper Powder: Another Cantonese sort, IIRC the most common mix in Straits Chinese (i.e. Malaysia/Singapore) cooking, but could be wrong there.
Salt, Five Spice Powder: Another mix we’ve seen called “Jiaoyan”. In our opinion should really more properly be labelled five spice flavor, but again… Jiaoyan is often almost as closely associated with the technique as it is the flavor.
So right. What this dish does is use the classic Jiaoyan spice mix – salt and Sichuan peppercorn. Sometimes there’s a couple other spices in the mix though, and during testing we personally also enjoyed it best with a bit of white pepper powder in there too… so that’s what we’ll call for, but know that you could absolutely skip the white pepper if you feel strongly on the subject.
Fresh corn, ~2 small ears, ~250g of kernels. Should we have tested this using frozen corn too? Yes. But it’s corn season, and we didn’t. Sorry about that. Slice the kernels off the corn however you’re used to.
Jiaoyan spice mix: ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp Sichuan peppercorn powder (花椒粉), ¼ tsp white pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ½ tsp sugar, a sprinkle of MSG (味精). So actually the lower quality powdered peppercorn mixes are preferable here because we’re not aiming for any ‘numbing’ quality – so whatever you can buy at the supermarket should work great. And also, again, feel free to skip the white pepper powder – it’s not an overly traditional addition to this mix. Lastly, just for reference… my definition of a ‘sprinkle’ is somewhere between 1/16 and 1/8 of a tsp.
Scallions (葱), 3 springs. White and green portions separated – both thinly sliced. The white part will go in with our aromatics, the green part’ll be added at the end of the stir fry.
Dried Chilis (干辣椒), ~8. So we used Sichuan erjingtiao chilis here but you could honestly use anything moderately spicy in the C. Annum or C. Frutescens cultivars. Arbols, Tien Tsins, Cayennes… whatever.
Aromatics: 1 inch ginger (姜), 3 cloves garlic, the white part of the scallion from above. Ginger and garlic both finely minced.
For deep-frying: ~7 tbsp cornstarch (生粉), ~1 tbsp beaten egg. Ok, so I know it’s really really annoying to call for “one tablespoon” of egg. Sorry about that. It’s just that sometimes the coating of this dish uses egg, sometimes it doesn’t. The sort with egg ends up with a thicker coating that ultimately makes for a crispier Jiaoyan corn, but unfortunately the thick coating requires a longer frying time and the corn loses a bit of its freshness. So we like an awkward midpoint between the two – adding a little bit of egg gives enough of a coating so that it has this sorta crispy texture, but doesn’t require a very long frying time. If you’d like (or if you’re cooking for a vegan or something), you can skip the egg.
Lastly, note that the quantity of cornstarch is a bit of an estimate. That was simply the quantity that we ended up using on video – depending on how dry your corn is after blanching, it might end up needing a little more or little less egg.
Process
High level overview at first: blanch the corn, dry then coat it, do a double deep fry, then do that ‘dry’ stir-fry with the rest of the ingredients.
Prep your ingredients. Slice the corn off the cob, separate the white and green portions of the scallion, thinly slice the scallion, mince the garlic and the ginger, mix together the Jiaoyan spice mix, de-seed the chilis, cut the chilis into ~1 cm pieces.
Blanch the corn for ~90 seconds until floating. You don’t want to deep fry the corn for too long or else it’ll get dry and not really have a juicy ‘pop’. You’ll know it’s done once the corn’s floating.
Dunk the corn in cool (or ice) water to stop the cooking process, then toss in a strainer and let it dry for ~15 minutes. We just used cool water because we were lazy. You can use a proper ice bath if you feel strongly on the subject.
Coat the corn with a tablespoon of cornstarch to remove the surface moisture. Then add the tbsp of egg and mix well. Then add the remaining six tbsp of cornstarch, or until the corn can flow off your hand as individual kernels. So total amount of cornstarch added here? It depends on how dry your corn it. Basically, add enough to get to the point we illustrate at 2:44 in the accompanying video. The corn’ll look sticky like this when its clumped together, but then’ll still be able to flow from your fingers like this.
Fry once at 180C for 45 seconds, then fry again at 195C for 10 seconds. Place on a paper towel lined plate to absorb excel oil. To crisp up the coating. Basically the blanching is to cook the corn and the frying’s to cook the coating. If you want some random advice/thought on oil management and such, check out the note below.
Stir fry. So as always, first longyau: get your wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil – here only ~1/2 tbsp (I told you it was a small among), and give it a swirl to get a nice nonstick surface. Heat on high now, immediately:
Garlic/ginger/scallion whites, in. Quick fry for ~15 seconds until fragrant. Trust your senses – be careful to be quick and not burn the aromatics, because we’re not going to be able to swirl in wine to cool things down like we usually do.
Dried chilis, in. Quick 10 second fry. Or if things’re starching to scorch on you after a super brief mix just add in the corn (which’ll cool things down significantly).
Corn, in. Quick 10 second fry to mix everything together.
Powdered seasoning mix, in. Fry for ~1 minute until the powder’s evenly coated everything.
Scallion greens, in. 15 second fry (a bit longer than usual because scallion goes great here).
Heat off, out.
Note on deep frying set-up:
So I know there’s a massive swath of people out there that’ll totally shut down whenever I speak those four words: ‘deep fry at home’.
In the periodic threads that come up here where someone asks “which foods are not worth it to cook for yourself”, deep frying always comes up near the top of the list. The argument generally goes like this: you have to use a massive quantity of oil – like, liters worth – to deep fry, which isn’t cheap. Then you do it, the kitchen gets all messy and oily, and then you need to deal with the oil.
You decide to keep the oil (because of course you should), so after waiting for the oil to cool down you strain it into a container – great, another oily dish to wash. But then the kicker? It might be weeks if not months before you plan to deep fry again! After all, deep frying isn’t the… healthiest… of cooking methods. Maybe deep-frying at home would be worth it, you think, if you were making fries with every meal and fried chicken every Sunday. But I mean, most of us have some kilos to work on, and that doesn’t seem like the wisest lifestyle choice…
So I get it! But let me explain our deep frying set-up, which ends up being really easy. Maybe you’ll find it still a little too annoying, but at least for us it’s really not that bad at all:
We use a round bottomed wok. Most people in the US deep fry in a Dutch oven or whatever, which needs… like a couple liters of oil. Round bottomed woks, meanwhile, need a fraction of the oil a Dutch oven needs – we probably use about three cups of oil for most deep fried dishes. I know that for you guys without gas round bottomed woks are sort of an impossible fantasy, but even a flat bottomed’ll like use around half the oil a dutch oven would.
We use an infrared temp gun. They look fancy but they’re cheap, ~20 bucks or less on Amazon IIRC. With it, you don’t need to always place your thermometer in the oil to get a reading – pull of a trigger and you’re good to go. Now before anyone out there says that “that won’t get you the true temperature of the oil, it’ll only get you the surface temperature” … yes. True. Don’t try to make candy with a temp gun. But testing it against our instant read, I got a difference of temperature of ~3-5C between the two. Big enough to make a difference deep frying? No. I mean, probably most people in China determine their oil temperature by how rapidly bubbles form around a pair of chopsticks. Deep-frying does not need to be an exact science.
We have a separate pot for oil next to our stove. Something nice and heat proof, so once you’re done frying you can more or less immediately pour it in. Ideally something with a wide lid so nothing spills when pouring. In an ideal world, they say that you should keep the oil in a cool dark place. We don’t do that, but with a lid we definitely still fulfill the ‘dark’ requirement.
We strain the oil into the pot, then keep it for ~1-2 weeks. Straining’s imperative, no getting around that extra oily dish to do. C’est la guerre. They say that frying oil keeps for about ten uses… sounds about right. To be honest we just eyeball it and if it starts to look marginal we’ll end up tossing it. Sometimes that ends up taking a while though, I could definitely believe we’ve pushed ~3 weeks or so if we haven’t been doing a lot of frying.
We use that oil for the Guoyou “Passing through oil” technique. This is the big tip right here. Probably the biggest difference between, say, your local takeout’s beef and broccoli and your beef and broccoli isn’t their wok burner… it’s that nine times out of ten, that takeout joint is passing the beef through oil. What does that entail? After marinating (or velveting, whatever you wanna call it), they’ll give the beef a super brief ~10-20 second deep fry THEN stir-fry it. This technique evenly cooks the beef and makes for incredibly juicy, tender meat… and is usually the key to “that restaurant taste”.
Nice thing about passing through oil? The amount of calories you’d be adding to your meat in that coatingless 10-20 high temp deep fry is basically negligible and it’ll make your stir fries so much better.
Not only that… if you’re looking for ways to make use of your side oil bowl, you use it for the proper restaurant version of longyau - that is… getting your wok piping hot, taking it off the flame, pouring in however much oil you feel like from your side oil bowl, swirling it to get a nonstick surface, and finally pouring out the excess oil. For us, we tend to do that method when our oil is fresher, and the method we show in the video/these posts when it’s already been used a bit.