January 16th

January 16th
For a guy who claims he doesn’t make a lot of Chinese food, making it twice in a week is a lot. But I had picked up some tofu at the Asian grocer and didn’t want to let it sit too long (again). I like Chinese food a lot, it’s just that I don’t do a lot of it at home because home stoves don’t get hot enough and I don’t feel like I understand the complexities of the cuisine well enough to cook in the instinctive way (ie, no recipe) that I normally do. I have fallen in love with Szechuan food since first getting Fuschia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty out of the library. It’s an incredibly well researched book written by someone who actually studied Szechuan cooking at a state run school in Szechuan. Most Americans know that there are regional differences in Chinese food (Cantonese, Hunan, Szechuan, etc.), but there aren’t many cookbooks that specifically deal with regional Chinese foods. If you haven’t gotten this book, check it out. It’s eye opening, authentic, and the recipes work.
There is a famous Szechuan dish that loosely translates as the Pock Marked Woman’s Tofu (I believe it is Ma Po tofu in Chinese, but don’t quote me). Not an appetizing name, but a great dish. It’s chunks of tofu in a sauce of chile bean sauce, soy, Szechuan pepper corns, garlic and has a small amount of ground beef added (which becomes part of the sauce). The unusual ingredient in the dish is the beef. In most provinces in China (including Szechuan), pork is king and beef is very unusual, but according to Fuschia Dunlop, beef is the correct ground meat to use in this dish. There are a lot of recipes that call for pork, but I try to stick with beef because of her comments. In any event, it’s about 4 ounces of beef per pound of tofu, and the meat is ground which helps incorporate it into the sauce.
It’s important to sauté the tofu first in a little oil to help give it a little bit of a crust which also firms it up a bit. I normally do that first, then pull it from the pan, and add the beef. Once the beef is browned, add the sauce ingredients, toss it all together and add the tofu back in. I always serve it over steamed rice. Last night’s was a little salty but very good. It’s supposed to be a hot dish but I toned it down a little and relied more on the peppercorns instead of the chiles. The peppercorns also give you a unique numbing that’s different from the heat of chiles, which I also really like. Buy whole Szechuan peppercorns if you can (they were unavailable for a while because if import restrictions but are now available again) and toast them slightly before grinding. It’s another quick and easy meal.
All I had at home was homebrewed beer and opted for the spiced tripel with the food. I thought it was a little too big for the food, but it did have enough residual sweetness to offset the heat and the fruit flavors from the yeast and hops actually were quite nice with the food.