Guizhou Chili Crisps (香辣脆)
Addictively delicious Chili Chips from the Guizhou Province
This week I wanted to teach you how to make a classic Chinese snack – crispy fried chili chips.
Of course, full disclosure that “chili chip” is kind of my own personal translation. I’ve always referred to them in that way because, well, they basically fit the bill: they’re fried, they’re crispy, they’re salty, they’re addictive. You can pick up a bag of them in (many) supermarkets in China – they go absolutely perfect with an ice cold Tsingtao beer.
But the process here’s actually a lot more interesting than you might assume! It’s not just a matter of taking dried chilis and frying them til crisp. These aren’t potatoes – dried chilis are naturally kind of hard and chewy after all, and don’t really contain any starch either. And on top of that? Dried chilis really love to lose their color after hitting hot oil. I mean, heat some oil up to any sort of standard frying temperature, toss a dried chili in, and see how fast that guy turns pale orange…
These problems are mitigated in two ways:
The chilis are coated/filled. If you’ve ever eaten Chinese chili chips, it might not be immediately obvious that they’re stuffed. They’re tossed with a flour/sesame mixture, which then slides into the cut chilis. The sesame seeds bear a striking resemblance to chili seeds, so it’s quite easy to be none the wiser. This combo helps give the chili a lot of the missing ‘crunch’.
The chilis are fried at a low temperature. Like, very low. 100 centigrade low. It’s a gentle process - the pigments seem to degrade at higher temperatures. I can’t find any proper sources to back up that claim, but that had been our experience.
So right. Note that these chili chips are traditionally found in both the Guizhou province and the Hunan province. We researched the Guizhou sort, but off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you if there’s any actual differences between what’s made in the two provinces.
Ingredients
Dried Chilis, red, reasonably fresh, C. Annum or Frutescens, 90g. Ok, so that’s a mouthful. What I mean is anything like Arbols, Cayennes, Heaven Facing, Japones… whatever. Here’s the thing: in Guizhou they generally use a specific variety of chili called ‘bullet chili’ (子弹头) for this, which we… didn’t have handy. But really, what matters more than the specific cultivar is the freshness of the chili itself. For the video, we used Guizhou Chicken Claw pepper (鸡爪辣 a.k.a. Guizhou longhorn), which worked best because it was the freshest dried chili we had available. Use what you got handy – just know that the chili’ll lose color super quick if it’s too old. Also, I’m a little unsure how a smoked chili would handle this whole process, so caveat lector and all that.
Coating/filling: 6 tbsp sesame seeds (白芝麻), 3 tbsp flour, 3 tbsp cornstarch (生粉), 1 tsp salt. The sesame seeds here are raw/untoasted and for the flour we used AP (not like it really matters). Some people use rice flour in place of flour.
Seasoning mix: 1 tbsp Sichuan peppercorns (花椒), ½ tbsp fennel seed (小茴香), 1 tsp salt, ½ tbsp sugar, ½ tbsp MSG (味精). Both the Sichuan peppercorn and fennel seed are whole. They’ll be toasted, ground, and mixed with the other seasoning. Sidebar: this season mix is like crack.
Oil, for frying. So if you’re using a round bottomed wok you don’t really need to use all that much oil – we used three cups. It’s ok if things get a touch crowded compared to your normal deep frying situations, given that we’re frying this at such a low temp.
Process
Ok, so high level overview here first. Deseed your chilis, then snip them into 1-1.5 inch pieces. Reconstitute with hot water, dry them, then toss them with the coating/filling. Fry at ~100C for 5-30 minutes (yeah, you read that timing range correctly) until the chilis are dry and crisp. Season.
Snip off the stems and tips; deseed the chilis. How paranoid you are when deseeding really depends on how hot your chilis are and how high of a heat tolerance you have. If you’re working with very hot chilis, I would be quite paranoid here. You are, after all, munching on straight up chili peppers as a casual snack.
Cut the chilis at a 30 degree angle into 1-1.5 inch pieces. The angled cut will help the filling better slide into the chilis. Something like this.
Reconstitute the snipped chilis with hot, boiled water for ~30 minutes. Enough to submerge the chilis. We’ll sort all our other prep during this time.
Mix together the ingredients for the coating/filling.
Toasted the Sichuan peppercorns and fennel seed over a medium low heat for ~2-3 minutes, then grind in a mortar together with the salt/sugar/MSG. Toast the spices until the Sichuan peppercorns are fragrant and slightly blistered. If you don’t have a mortar, you could potentially use a spice grinder… but I’ve found the mortar tends to do a better job with Sichuan peppercorns.
After the soak, remove the chilis from the water, briefly pat dry, then drain on a strainer for ~15 minutes. You’re not going to (nor are you trying to) get these completely dry here. Just trying to remove the bulk of the surface-level water.
In a big bowl, toss the chilis together with the coating for a couple minutes, pulling and twisting from the bottom up. So this is slightly difficult to describe – the tossing motion you’ll be doing here is grabbing the chilis from the bottom of the bowl and tossing upwards while slightly twisting. That’s an awful description, so here’s a picture, and if that’s still unclear, this’s at 2:55 in the video. This tossing motion helps some of the coating/filling enter the chili, but as you can see from the still there, not everything’ll get inside.
Get a wok of oil up to 130C, drop in your chilis, then fry for 5-30 minutes at ~100C over a medium-low flame, or until the chilis are dry and crispy and the oil temp’s inching back to 130. Ok, so here’s the deal: how long this frying process will take is 100% going to depend on the moisture content of your chili. We’re waiting for the moisture in the chili to evaporate, which’s why we’re frying at 100C and no higher (hot oil will scald your chili). If your pepper’s an old, dry one… you might be looking at a crispy (and likely pale orange) chili at the 5-8 minute mark. The Guizhou chicken claw peppers we used in the video took a super long time to get to that point, ~28 minutes. You can tell the moisture’s gone once the oil temperature is beginning to creep back up past 100. We like taking out the chilis once that oil hits about 130C once again. I’d guess that that point would likely be ~15 minutes for most of you, but again – it completely depends on your chilis.
Lay the chilis out on a paper towel lined baking tray. Liberally sprinkle the seasoning all over everything. Toss for ~5 minutes, or until the chilis are relatively cool once again. You’ll probably want to remove the oily paper towels sometime in this process.
Store any that you don’t devour immediately in an air-tight container.