Dry-fried string beans + a Mother's Day card

I know, St. Patrick's Day has barely come and gone, but you know what? Mother's Day will be here soon. And if you love your mom as much as you love dim sum (and you know you do), then have I got a suggestion for you!

Papyrus commissioned me to make them a Mother's Day card with a dim sum theme, and how could I resist? 

You can most likely find this in your neighborhood card shop, but if not, it's available here, too. I love Papyrus's stationery, so this was a dream come true. So give her a card and treat her to the perfect brunch. And then apologize for that thing that happened, you know the one I'm talking about...

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To my way of thinking, there is only one divine way to eat string beans, and that is dry-fried. The problem is that these sometimes can be nigh on impossible to find, even in a good Sichuan style restaurant.

That’s because nowadays too many cooks are skipping the first step, the most important step, the one that turns these beany flavored green things into olive strips of silk. Instead, they plunk down a plate of what can only be described as stir-fried beans, and if they really want me to see red, they’ll toss in some zhacai (Sichuan pickled tuber) and chile sauce and call it a day. This sort of thing will put me into a major funk for at least a couple of hours.

Fry 'em up!

So, what’s the first step? The beans are washed and carefully dried, and then they are deep-fried until the skins are blistered and the interiors have turned soft and squishy. And if you taste them at this point, you may think to yourself that these are ok, but nothing to write home about.

That is where the sauce comes in. Once the beans have been turned a toasty brown, they are then stir-fried in a savory sauce that gets sucked up by these now thirsty beans. But wait, there’s more: a genuine dish of dry-fried string beans will be robed with yácài 芽菜, a type of preserved mustard green (kind of like a pickle) from Sichuan.

Yacai is a terrific ingredient you should get to know, for it has a darkly savory flavor, a touch of piquance, and (something really unusual for salty preserved things) a super silky texture. And that is what is going to make this dish particularly delicious. You will be tossing in what will seem like a whole lot of yacai, and yet it will turn around and cosset each of the beans so that there is yet another layer of texture in here.

So good...

Yacai is becoming increasingly easy to hunt down in Chinese markets; just head to the pickle aisle, where they will usually be waiting for you in a small cardboard box. They will be either whole or chopped—get whatever you want. Their flavor and texture really is a game changer, as you will probably already noted in that noodle dish from a couple weeks back.

Also like that noodle recipe, this dish is heavily influenced by the cuisine of Yibin, a city in the southwestern corner of Sichuan. It straddles the headwaters of the Yangtze River and is just a stone’s throw from Yunnan Province. In other words, you should expect to eat really, really well here, and of course you do. 

Every Yibin dish I’ve ever devoured has offered wonderful textures and flavors. Nothing overwhelming to spoil my reverie, just a balanced symphony that makes me smile. And so, you should put finding a box of yacai at the top of your To Do list.

Yacai, chile peppers, garlic, & ginger

Frying the string beans ahead of time is highly recommended. That way you can have everything cleaned up and your wok ready for the quick braise. I let the blistered beans cool off and then stick them into a resealable plastic bag. Then, from fridge to table requires only a few minutes.

A note for the nerds out there: This recipe uses a character you won’t run across every day: biān 煸. This is used almost exclusively in Sichuan cooking and refers to quickly stir-frying. It’s usually found in two verb combinations: gānbiān 幹煸 (dry-fried, as in today’s recipe, where only a bit of oil is used in the final step) or biānchăo 煸炒 (stir-fried, with the wok set on the heat before oil is added, and then the ingredients are flash-fried).

Leftovers are good, too. I even eat this cold, like leftover pizza. Don't judge.

 

Dry your trimmed beans

Dry-fried string beans

Gānbiān sìjìdòu 乾煸四季豆

Sichuan

Serves 4

Around 1  pound | 500 g fresh string beans

Frying oil, as needed

4 ounces | 100 g good quality ground pork or turkey, optional

½ cup | 50 g finely chopped yacai

4 dried Thai chiles

3 tablespoons finely chopped green onions

1 teaspoon finely chopped ginger

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons mild rice wine (Taiwan Mijiu)

2 teaspoons regular soy sauce

2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil

Chop the meat until fluffy

½ teaspoon sugar

1. Rinse the beans and remove the stem ends, but leave them whole, if you like, and I like. Use a terry towel to rub off as much water as possible, since this will explode once it hits hot oil. Really now, get them totally dry. Have a spatter screen, a slotted spoon ready, and a clean medium work bowl ready.

2. First fry the beans: Set your wok over medium-high heat. Pour in about 1 inch | 2 cm oil. As soon as the oil starts to shimmer, insert a chopstick into the oil—it should be covered with dancing bubbles. Slide in a small handful of the beans. You don’t want too many, as these will fry up more evenly and quickly if you do this in smaller amounts. Adjust the heat as needed and stir the beans around as they fry. When they are browned and slightly crispy, use your slotted spoon to remove them to the work bowl. Repeat with the rest of the beans until all of them have been fried. Pour off all but about 1 tablespoon of the oil.

Readying the sauce

3. If you are using meat in this dish, first use the back of a heavy knife or two to chop it back and forth, up and down, as this lightens the meat and improves the texture. Rinse the yacai and squeeze it dry. If it is not already finely chopped, do so now. Break the chiles in half and shake out the seeds before tearing the chiles into smallish pieces.

4. Now fry the meat and other ingredients: Set the wok back over medium-high heat. When it is hot, add the optional meat, as well as the yacai, chiles, green onions, ginger, and garlic. Stir-fry these until the meat begins to brown. Add the rest of the ingredients, as well as the fried string beans. Turn the heat up to high and toss these all together until the sauce has been absorbed. Taste and adjust the seasoning, then serve.

Yibin's nutty noodles

This is one of those dishes that make you smile at first bite. The ingredients read like a kid’s list of perfect foods: noodles, peanuts, walnuts, and a little bit of pickles. I mean, toss in a sticky sauce, and who isn’t going to love eating this?

It’s a classic street food from the city of Yibin in Sichuan Province. It has a weird name in Chinese (ranmian means “burning noodles,” but no one has ever convinced me that this makes any sense whatsoever—nothing is being set on fire here, so I’m sticking with “nutty noodles”). 

Moreover, this dish is something that even the fussiest of eaters will all agree is startlingly delicious. In fact, I’ve never known of anyone who hasn’t polished off their bowl and then scraped sadly away at the bottom, trying to find a few more of the crunchy crumbs to nibble on.

Delectable crumbs at the bottom

Let’s get the basics out of the way. I’m going to give you the classic recipe, but know that you can use any kind of noodles here and any kind of nuts. They are the main ingredients, yes, but this is the sort of thing that rewards experimentation. Want pecans and macadamias? Be my guest. Love buckwheat noodles? Couldn’t agree with you more.

The only item that you might have trouble hunting down if you don’t live somewhere near a Chinese market is the Sichuanese pickled vegetable known as yácài 芽菜. But don’t worry. Any leafy Chinese pickle will do in a pinch—like snow vegetables (xuélĭhóng 雪裏蕻) or Tianjin’s winter vegetable (dōngcài 冬菜) or even Taiwanese pickled mustard (Táiwān suāncài 台灣酸菜)—since the sole requirement is that there be a touch of slightly tart saltiness in the mix.

If all else fails, chop some Sichuanese pickled tubers (zhàcài 榨菜), or even a cornichon or some capers, into a fine dice, rinse off most of the salt, and you’re ready to go.

Toasted sesame, walnuts, & peanuts

What I’ve found that the pasta I really like here are thin, dried egg noodles. The egg in there makes the noodles fairly tensile and so able to hold up to the onslaught of all sorts of crunchy things tumbling around in there, along with a vibrant sauce. 

But any sort of noodle will do, as long as you don’t overcook it. Just make sure it retains its personality. Floppy pasta won't cut it. 

You can find this dish all over Sichuan, but to my mind nothing comes close to a homemade bowl of these nutty noodles. You get to use a good handful of nuts in here, rather than a miserly smattering, and so each strand of pasta becomes coated with crunch. Plus, homemade chile oil turns up the volume in so many luscious ways. 

Honestly, extra Brownie points are awarded if you have some excellent homemade chile oil (and sweet soy sauce) on hand, as things will just be that much better. Rather than a boring one-note oil that offers little more than heat, the homemade stuff layers on even more flavors and nuances.

Be sure that the nuts and sesame seeds are fresh. That would be my only request. They are the stars of this particular show, so taste them and really make sure. And then prepare to be wowed when they strut their stuff in this marvelous bowl of noodles.

Chewy pasta

Yibin nutty noodles

Yïbīn ránmiàn 宜賓燃麵

Sichuan

Serves 2 as a main dish, or 4 as a side or a snack

¼ cup | 40 g finely chopped toasted peanuts (or sunflower seeds or other seeds or nuts)

¼ cup | 30 g finely chopped toasted walnuts (or pecans or other nuts)

2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

¼ cup packed | 30 g Sichuan yacai pickled vegetables (see headnotes for substitutes)

2 tablespoons | 30 ml toasted sesame oil

2 cloves garlic, minced

1½ tablespoons sweet soy sauce, or 1½ tablespoons regular soy sauce plus 1 teaspoon sugar

1½ tablespoons chile oil (preferably homemade), or to taste

6 ounces | 180 g dried egg noodles (or whatever noodles you’d like)

2 green onions, green parts only, finely chopped

Super easy & amazingly good

1. If your nuts and seeds have not been toasted yet, do that first. The easiest way is to dry-fry them separately in a wok (meaning without any oil) over medium heat until they taste and smell toasty. Chop the nuts and any larger seeds into pieces not much larger than the sesame seeds, as this way they will mingle nicely with the noodles.

2. Rinse the yacai pickle (or whatever pickle you’re using), squeeze it dry, and chop it finely. Bring about 1 quart | 1 liter of water to a boil in a medium saucepan while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

3. Pour the sesame oil into a wok and set it over medium heat. Add the yacai and garlic. Stir these around until they smell divine, and then add the sweetened soy sauce (or soy sauce plus sugar), as well as chile oil to taste. Check the flavor levels and add more of whatever you like to make the sauce sing.

Crush the nuts before chopping them

4. Boil the dried noodles according to the package directions. Drain them and then toss them in the sauce over medium heat to reduce the sauce and to fully bathe each strand, about 3 minutes. Divide the noodles among your bowls. Sprinkle the nuts and seeds on top, as well as the chopped green onion. Serve hot. Each diner should admire this masterpiece before tossing the crunchy bits into the noodles.

Tip

Soy sauces and sweet soy sauces vary in depth of flavor and saltiness, so add less of either the first time around if you are not sure; you always can add more later.

Use the side of your Chinese knife to first crush the nuts before chopping them. You'll find that the nuts will be easier to corral that way. 

My favorite noodles: dandan mian

This is probably the one thing I could eat every day for a week and still want more: Dandan Noodles. A creamy, crunchy, soft, crisp, nutty, spice-flecked, tart, sweet, and savory sauce coats each strand with luscious flavor. It’s like a whole spectrum of things for the mouth to play with.

My gold standard for this dish was made at a small stand in Qing Guang Market, a warren of tiny dark alleys off of Chongqing North Road in Taipei. I’d get off at the bus stop there as often as I could manage and make a beeline for Caves Bookstore, which had shelves full of pirated English language books. They had classics, modern bestsellers, and shelves full of weird titles that always made me wonder who in their right mind would ever pick them up, much less write them. I still have my first hardback copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Claiborne's New York Times cookbook, and The Joy of Cooking more for sentimental reasons than anything else, as I read those so many times in those incarnations that I could never bear giving them up. In spite of that, those reproductions were really bad – just lousy photocopies that turned any illustrations into mud – but it was just about the only way to get anything to read in English at that time, so I was a regular customer.

Homemade chile sauce - always a great idea

One day I had the pleasure of squiring the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art around town as his interpreter, as he was the guest of the National Museum of History where I worked. I told the elegant Mr. Thomas Hoving how much I’d loved his books, particularly King of the Confessors, which had just come out. Bad idea. He asked me where I possibly could have gotten ahold of it in such a short period of time, and I joyfully admitted to having bought an illegal copy. I offered to give it to him as a sort of weird memento of his trip to the pirated book capital of the world, but Mr. Hoving looked determinedly out the window, the air in the cab dropped around 30 degrees, and we spent the rest of the ride in a strained silence. I shelved my idea of asking him for a job at the Met.

Sichuan hot bean sauce

Anyway, back to the noodles. This lady in the market made the best version I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve worked hard over the years to reproduce it. You of course can play with the ratios as much as you like, particularly since things like chile oil and goop, soy sauce, peanut butter, vinegar, and all the other condiments have a wide range of flavors, and also because our mouths are just so different. What this means in the short run is that what makes me thrilled to the core might seem less than perfect to you. And so you should feel free to make this dish your very own.

So here, without more ado, is my personal recipe for what I think are now the best Dandan Noodles in the world:

Dandan noodles

Dàndàn miàn 擔擔麵

Sichuan

Serves 2 to 4 as either a main meal or generous side dish

Meat:

2 tablespoons chile oil plus 1 tablespoon of the goop (if you like it spicy), or else use 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

8 ounces ground fatty meat (pork, beef, chicken, or turkey)

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons Sichuan fermented hot bean sauce (la doubanjiang)

¼ cup chopped Sichuan pickles (see Tips)

2 tablespoons mild rice wine (Taiwan Mijiu)

1 tablespoon regular soy sauce

1 teaspoon sugar

Sauce:

2 tablespoons toasted sesame paste

2 tablespoons nut butter (peanut butter, almond butter, etc.)

About 1/2 cup hot water

2 tablespoons black vinegar

The crunchy garnish

1 tablespoon sugar

Noodles:

2 quarts boiling water

1 pound dried noodles of some sort (thick or thin, wheat or rice, white or wholegrain, whatever); I prefer very thin wheat pasta here, like capellini

Garnish:

¼ cup chopped toasted peanuts

2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

Leaves of 2 green onions, thinly sliced

Blanched greens (like celtuce leaves or spinach), or shredded cucumber

1. This dish can be made ahead of time up through Step 2; refrigerate the meat and sauce if you are not using them right away. Place a wok over medium-high heat, and as soon as it is hot, swirl the oil around inside to coat the iron. Add the goop and ground meat to the oil and break it up with your spatula. As it starts to turn from pink to gray, sprinkle in the garlic and toss these together over the heat until the meat is about half browned. Scoot the meat and garlic up the sides of the wok so that the oil dribbles back down to the bottom before adding the bean sauce to the oil. Stir this around over the heat to cook it through, and then toss in the pickles, rice wine, soy sauce, and sugar. Quickly boil the seasonings down to a thick syrup, toss the meat with it, and then scrape it into a small work bowl.

2. To make the sauce, rinse out the wok and set it over medium heat. Mix the sesame paste and peanut butter in the wok with just enough hot water so that they smooth out and have the texture of sour cream. Add the rest of the sauce ingredients, bring it to a boil, and then toss in the meat mixture. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding whatever you think it needs, be it more peanut butter, chile oil or goop, vinegar, etc. Remove the wok from the heat.

3. About 10 minutes before serving, bring the pot of water to a full boil and add the dried noodles. Stir the noodles as the water comes back to a boil so that they do not stick together. Simmer the noodles according to package directions, or until done to your liking.

4. Toss the drained noodles (reserve a cup or so of the pasta water) in the wok with the hot sauce. Then, divide the noodles between two large soup bowls and reserve the pasta water. Add about ¼ cup of the boiling pasta water to each bowl (more if you like the noodles soupier), and sprinkle the tops of the bowls with the peanuts, sesame seeds, and green onions. Arrange some blanched greens or the cucumber on the edge of the noodles. Serve and eat immediately, adding more hot pasta water to your noodles if they start to get dry.

Yibin city's famous yacai

Tips

The traditional pickle for this dish is from Sichuan and is known as yácài 芽菜, which is yet another type of pickled mustard leaf. Because beansprouts are sometimes called yacai, most people refer to this pickle as Sìchuān yácài 四川芽菜 (after the province) or 宜賓芽菜 Yíbīn yácài (after the town most connected to this seasoning). Yacai has a nice crunch to it and, to my mouth at least, has a more delicate range of flavors to it that works especially well in dishes like this one. 

If you look at the last photo here, you can see another reason why this pickle is so tasty: it's bathed in a rich soy sauce that gives it all sorts of deep flavors.

A tangle of yacai

The other standby pickle is Sichuan pickled tuber (zhàcài 榨菜), which provides a relatively one-note saltiness. However, the tuber is much more common in markets (find it in sealed plastic bags, in cans, even in open bins at times), and so use what you have here.

My husband loves this topped with a fried egg or two. Just saying.