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Beef with Sa Cha Sauce Clay Pot (沙茶牛肉粉絲煲) This is a Cantonese clay pot dish that is very easy to make at home. Picture of the finished dish: Serving Suggestion: 2 to 3 Preparations: Main ingredients: (From upper-right, clockwise) - Beef (flank steak), about 3/4 lb - Garlic, about 5-6 cloves - Shallot, 4 cloves - 2 bundles of mung bean threads - 1 chili pepper (jalapeno) - 2 small egg plants - "Sa Cha" Sauce (Chinese Barbeque Sauce - named by Bullhead brand) Cut the flank steak into thin slices (across the grain). To marinate the beef: Use a mixing bowl. Add the beef slices. Add 1/2 tsp of ground white pepper, 1 tsp of sesame oil, 2 tsp of ShaoHsing cooking wine, 1 tsp of light soy sauce, 1-2 tsp of oyster sauce, and a pinch of salt (suggest: 1/4 tsp). (Not shown in picture): add 1-2 tsp of corn starch. Mix all the ingredients. Set aside for 30 minutes to 1 hour before cooking. Trim off the ends of the egg plants. Cut into long and slender wedges. Peel and mince the garlic. Peel and finely chop the shallots. Cut the jalapeno pepper into thin slices. Soak the mung bean threads in a bowl of warm water for at least 30 minutes before cooking. Cooking Instructions: Use a medium size Chinese clay pot, pre-heat it over medium high heat for 5 minutes. Add 1 - 1.5 tblsp of cooking oil. Add the minced garlic, chopped shallots, and sliced jalapeno pepper. Add 1/4 of salt (or to taste). Add 2 to 3 tblsp of "Sa Cha" sauce (or called "Chinese Barbeque Sauce" by the Bullhead brand). Note: This is the main feature of this dish. Dash in 2 tsp of ShaoHsing cooking wine. Stir well. Add 1/2 cup of chicken broth and 1/8 cup of water. Add the wedged egg plants. Bring the mixture to a boil (may take about 5 minutes), then reduce heat to medium-slow. Cook with lid on for another 10 minutes or so until egg plants turn soft. After 10 minutes or so has passed, use a second stove to heat up a pan/wok. Add 2 tblsp of cooking oil. Sear the marinated beef slices for a few minutes. Remove the beef from pan when it is still slightly pink. Drain off excess oil. This is how it looks when the egg plants have turned soft. Drain off the water from the soaked mung bean threads. Add mung bean threads to the pot. Cook for about 3-4 minutes until the threads turn soft and transparent. Test the sauce. If the sauce is too runny, add corn starch slurry (e.g. 1-2 tsp corn starch dissolved in 3 tsp of water) to thicken the sauce. Usually the mung bean threads are quite long and difficult to scoop at the dinner table. Use a pair of kitchen sears to cut up the mung bean threads. Give it about 3 to 4 cuts. Return the beef to the pot. Mix well with the egg plants and mung bean thread. Bring the whole pot to server at the dinner table. Picture of the finished dish.

Thank you for your kind words, msphoebe. Tomatoes are quite commonly stocked in Chinese restaurants, or at least I thought so. I am surprised that they might "run out" of tomatoes. Are they not readily available across the US? "Dry fried green beans"? Are you thinking of the green beans that are stir-fried with chili slices, garlic and bits of Sichuan preserved vegetable (Zha Choy [Cantonese])?

This step is done very quickly, just within 1 to 2 seconds. One can follow the steps outline in this pictorial, and then do it the other way and taste the difference.

Nearly. Cantonese does also use some extra characters which do not exist in Mandarin. ← Well... sort of. I don't mean to turn this into a linguistic discussion on the Cantonese dialect/language. In Cantonese there are verbal expressions and terms that cannot be committed into the written form. Unless for illiterates, most know how to translate the verbal expressions or "street" terms into the official, written form of Chinese. You might have seen Cantonese speakers write/type in non-standard Chinese characters. Those are made-ups but might have been commonly accepted. Heck we even use English alphabets to make up our words (e.g. "D"). 行快D La (walk quicker) instead of 快走. In dish naming, most Cantonese dishes follow the official Chinese language.

I would love to know where one can find dried conpoys for USD$20/lb (within the USA I assumed, or else all bets are off). I have searched through San Francisco China Town and the best I could find was something like USD$34/lb. In Sacramento they are selling at about $40+/lb. I have tried adding dried abalone in congee. I could not seem to notice *any* difference. I don't think it's worth the money to put in dried abalone. If you add century egg early on to make congee, the century egg will dissolved into the liquid and make your congee slightly darker. I could not taste the flavor, nor the texture. I prefer to add wedged centry eggs at serving time. And most dim sum places do the same.

This pictorial recipe may be what you are looking for: Soy Sauce Chow Mein with Chicken (豉油王鸡丝抄麺 ) The smokey flavor is from dashing in ShaoHsing cooking wine in a hot work with fuming cooking oil, which induces a flame. When cooking in this style, I pour the dark soy sauce onto the flaming wok/pan before I add the noodles, not pour the dark soy sauce onto the noodles. That's how they make it in restaurants.

Jenny: Welcome to eGullet! Yes Sichuan Peppercorn being addictive has been discussed before. Check out this post: Sichuan Peppercorn, The Thread The whole thread was on Sichuan Peppercorn, the key ingredient to the "ma" sensation.

It is not in any of my dictionaries, either ----- and NJStar just gives me a box when I copy/paste it there. How were you able to print it? ← NJStar does not seem to have a complete Chinese character set. I have seen that happened before.

I believe, from my understanding of studying Chinese history, the First Emporer (Qinshihuang, 秦始皇), Qin Dynasty, had unified the Chinese language - the written portion. Though different regions maintain their local dialects, the written language remained one. However, Mao had advocated the Simplified Chinese character set. That's the character set you see used throughout Mainland China today. Hong Kong and Taiwan, on the other hand because they are under different rulings, continue to use the Traditional Chinese character set. Cantonese and Mandarin are 2 different dialects, with different pronouniciations of the same Chinese character. This word, 焗 jú [Mandarin], means baking, not braising. But... some Chinese dishes were named 焗 but may not necessarily be baking in an oven. For example: 上湯焗龍蝦 (Lobster "baked" with superior broth). The lobster is not really baked in a dry oven, but more like "steamed" with lid on over a wok.

The problem with eating Chinese food in San Francisco, I found, is that most of the restaurants are actually run by cooks from Hong Kong. That included the restaurants I tried during this trip: Spice!, Shanghai Dumpling King and House of Nanking. (How do I know that? The waiters/waitress all speak fluent Cantonese (not Mandarin-based Chinese trying to speak Cantonese). And I overheard them relaying the orders to the cooks in the kitchen, who also speak fluent Cantonese. If a Cantonese/Hong Konger cook can make decent (hopefully authentic) regional style such as Sichuan, Shanghai or Nanking, no issue there. But something it's hard for us who are non-native to those tyles to tell. But overall I have happy experience with House of Nanking and Shanghai Dumpling King. Spice! or Spice!II need to be seen in future trips.

Ben Sook: Thanks for pointing that out. I mis-translated it. It is pea shoot. In Cantonese, it is "dou miu". Dou usually translates to "bean". It can be "pea" too. Miu is the young growth of any vegetation. It could be sprout, or shoot by translation. Anyway, pea shoot is the ingredient for that dish. I have corrected the original post. Bean sprout means the sprout for mung bean or soya bean.

The Nanking Sesame Chicken and Dumpling Soup were definitely on the menu. I am not sure about the minced dried shrimp/minced pork with pea shoots. Maybe it is but I have a tendency to skip over something that I didn't think it's interesting just by the name. I usually ask restaurants for a take out version of their menus to take home so I can review the offers later. But House of Nanking is one of the fews who do not believe in take out menus.

You had it right! Niece duck! "Yerng lat gew" is the Cantonese pronounciation. Yes it is a generic term for "stuffed peppers", which could be bell pepper or something like anaheim pepper or jalapeno pepper.

Jo-mel Ma Ma: Shrimp stuffed Bell Peppers should be 虾肉酿辣椒. 虾 = Shrimpt 鱼 = fish For Fish paste stuffed bell peppers, that would be 鱼肉酿辣椒.

Erik: The "Chile with Salted Black Bean" sounds like the sauce for Cantonese dishes. For this "La zi ji" (Sichuan Hot Pepper Chicken) dish, you don't need that. Take a look at the link I provided for the ingredients. That recipe used dried hot chiles, ginger, garlic, Sichuan peppercorn, plus some cooking wine, sugar, dark soy sauce and MSG. You may use some chile bean sauce if you like. Let me know if you want that pictorial pages translated. And this may be what you were looking for: Chile Bean Sauce 99 Ranch Market has a pretty good selection for Asian ingredients. Where you are, the closet one would probably be the one in Daly City: Daly City Store 250 Skyline Plaza Daly City, CA 94015 There is also another one in Richmond, and one in Foster City.

Nanking (present name: Nanjing) used to be China's capital. I have been to Nanking a couple of times. The Observatory, The Yangtze River Bridge, Mr. Sun Yatsen's Memorial, etc.. My most memorial moment in Nanking was that one day I rented a bicycle from the hotel for RMB$5.00 (roughly US$0.80) for a day, and I rode around the ancient city and blended in with the locals. I don't recall a whole lot about the local cuisine, except that I remember drinking some local beer, which they sold by the bowl, at room temperature. Sweet and sour dishes were quite common, and mostly on fish, chicken and pork. I visited a Chinese restaurant named "House of Nanking" in China Town, San Francisco last week. (Kearny and Columbus) I remember passing by this "hole in the wall" restaurant for many years ever since they were a small restaurant with very limited seats and long lines. They have expanded to twice as big now, but still have very limited seats and long lines. I must say that I was very skeptical when we first walked in to this restaurant. We were the only "non round-eye" customer there. The menu was printed in English and scribbled with hand-written Chinese translations. A gentleman, who looked like the manager there, came over and prepared to take our order. I wasn't quite sure what to get so I asked for some recommendations. "First time here?" he asked. "Yes..." I said gingerly. "I am the main chef. Okay, I'll take care of you..." he said as he scribbled something on the bill and walked away. (Wait... why is the main chef not cooking in the kitchen?) Unsure of what we were going to get, my wife and I just traded anxious looks for the next 10 minutes. And this night, we had a pleasant surprise... The owner ordered 2 items for us, and we ended up ordering a third item (the chicken) since the food tasted really good! See if you recognize these as Nanking specialities: Dumpling Soup. The dumpling was filled with minced chicken. There were also chunks of fish, pork, and shrimp in the soup. The broth tasted fairly close to Vietnamese Pho soup, and the taste leaned heavily to Thai Basil. Very delicious. US$8.95. Pea shoots stir-fried with minced dried shrimp and minced pork. This was the first time we had tasted something like this. Very interesting. The way they made this dish was a bit overly salty. But overall it's good. US$9.00 (something like that?) Nanking Sesame Chicken. This one we really liked. It's sweet and sour sauce with boneless chicken breast. The sweet and sour taste was just perfect, - not overly sweet, not overly sour, and definitely not something like a big blob of bright and artificially red-color sweet and sour sauce that you see in many Americanized Chinese restaurants. In fact you wouldn't even find any bell pepper, onion or pineapple that you might be accustomed to. Right in the middle were some shredded cucumber (not pickled). On the right: deep-fried yam (sweet potato) slices coated with the same sweet and sour sauce. US$8.95. This dish was perfectly done. We had really good experience, food-wise, with House of Nanking. The only drawback was that the place was too small. Customers were rubbing elbows with each other (I am not kidding). Not a place for total relaxation. We will definitely look forward to going back to sample more Nanking specialties.

Congratulations! Happy 1000th post, Irwin! I have seen many restuarants use a 3-star system to rate hotness of their dishes. In one Thai restaurant I have seen it uses a 5-star system. I have not seen one that uses as many as 10.

Taste is one form of sensation. I wonder how they can achieve that numbing effect. At home I have chewed on Sichuan peppercorns before, but didn't experience that numbing effect. Perhaps the peppercorns need to be fresh? Perhaps they need to be ground first? Perhaps they need to be mixed with oil? Perhaps they must be used together with the dried hot chilies? I would love to learn how to switch on the magic of "ma" in "ma la" dishes.

The following dishes are examples of the "Yang" food: Sichuan Hot Pepper Chicken (La Zi Ji). Braised Mutton with Beer. After consuming these dishes, almost instant sore throat!

#49, Sesame Chicken Noodle Salad (凉伴手撕雞)

Sesame Chicken Noodle Salad (凉伴手撕雞) This shredded chicken salad dish is a cold dish. Primary ingredients are shredded chicken, cucumber and sesame paste. Picture of the finished dish: Serving Suggestion: 1 to 2 Preparations: Main ingredients: (From upper-right, clockwise) - 1 piece of chicken breast, about 1/2 to 3/4 lb - a handful of bean sprouts, about 1/4 lb - 1 cucumber - 3 lumps of wheat noodles (usually found in refrigerated section in Asian grocery store) - ginger, 1 inch in length - 2 cloves of garlic - 1 stalk of green onion Peel and finely chop 2 cloves of garlic (or press the garlic). Grate 1 inch of ginger. Trim end and finely chop 1 stalk of green onion. Peel the cucumber. Cut into small shreds. Cooking Instructions: Use a small pot. Boil 1/3 pot of water. Place the chicken breast in the pot. Add 1/2 tsp of salt. Boil for about 3 to 5 minutes until cooked (no more pink). Remove from pot. Use a large pot. Boil 1/2 pot of water. Add the noodles in the water when boiled. Cook the noodles until al dente. About 5 to 8 minutes depending on noodle types. Remove noodles from pot run cold water through. Put in a strainer and drain excess water. Boil another 1/4 pot of water. Quickly boil the bean sprouts, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove and drain excess water. Use a medium size mixing bowl. Add drained noodles. Add 2 to 3 tsp of sesame oil and use a spatula or a pair of chopsticks to mix in the sesame oil with the noodles. To make the sauce: Use a medium size bowl. Add the minced garlic, grated ginger and finely chopped green onion. Add 4 to 5 tsp of sesame paste, 2 tsp of sesame oil, 1 tsp of Sichuan peppercorn powder, 2 to 3 tsp of dark soy sauce, 2 to 3 tsp of Chinese red vinegar, 1/4 to 1/3 cup of chicken broth, 2 tsp of sugar, and 1/2 tsp of salt (or to taste). Mix ingredients well to form a dressing (sauce). Lay the cooked chicken breast on a plate. Cut into a few big chunks. Use a fork to aid you, tear the chicken pieces into fine shreds. Like this. To assemble this dish, use a flat serving plate. First lay the cooked bean sprouts at the bottom. Then add the layer of noodles (mixed with sesame oil earlier). Then add the layer of shredded chicken. Finally, lay the shredded cucumber on top. Ladle on the sesame/soy/vinegar sauce on top. Picture of the finished dish. Toss and mix the ingredients before serving. This dish is typically served at room temperature.

On Chinese menus, usually there are more descriptions on whether the chicken is a whole chicken, diced meat (ji ding), sliced meat (ji pan), or shredded meat (ji si or ji lau). This one at "Spice!" only said "chicken" (in both English and Chinese). It would be hard to argue. I did not realize they are ALL chicken joints (I thought only a few pieces were) until I was half way comsuming the dish.

More and more I feel that this dish of "La zi ji" (Sichuan Hot Pepper Chicken) offered at "Spice!" is out of the norm of Sichuan dishes. Whether the hundreds of chilies are for show or are space fillers, they already make a high profit margin by giving you chicken wing elbows instead of chicken breast or chicken thigh meats. What surprised me was the wonderful review by a local journal. A copy of that review was framed and hung on the wall inside the restaurant. If I based on this dish alone, it wouldn't make my mark. Or perhaps they baited and switched when the reviewers were in the dining room.

In the same "Spice!" restaurant in San Francisco, I ordered a cold dish named "Ma La Beef Tendon". (麻辣牛筋) This dish I like very much. Soft beef tendons bath in hot chili oil full of heat - the "La" (辣) sensation. And the Sichuan peppercorns would numb your tongue - the "Ma" (麻) sensation. This dish presents the right balance of heat and numbness. I enjoyed it immensely, with sweats dripping and all... After a while, my tongue really went numb and was not reactive. It felt as if I went to see the dentist to pull out my teeth. Have you experienced this numbness sensation from Sichuan food? Do you like it?

Yes, the serving "dish" is made of bamboo. And they use aluminum foil to line the bottom so the chili oil would not ruin the bamboo. But they didn't bother to trim the corners of the foil, so the dish looks a bit tacky. Yes, Ma Ma! I learned that from you... keep a food log. I like hot food. But not that hot!