Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Sichaun Pao Cai



I loved the little dish of pickled radish we ate with meals in Chongqing, so I made some. I got the recipe from Fuschia Dunlop's Sichuan cook book. (I think these would be more accurately called salted, fermented vegetables, not pickled vegetables, but they translate as pickled.)

In China they use large ceramic pickling jars but the ones I could find are super expensive here (over $100 on Amazon) so I went with this clear glass jar I got for $6 at Target and sterilized with boiling water. (It needs to have a tight lid.) The recipe is salted water (I used kosher salt), Sichuan peppercorns, fresh ginger, a small piece of cinnamon stick, rice wine, a little bit of brown sugar (those last two are for fermentation), dried chilis and a little bit of star anise. I couldn't find whole star anise so I use liquid drops, just 2 or 3. I put in western radishes, Chinese radish (daikon), cabbage and lotus. (Lotus root is one of my favorite new veggies I learned about in China. I can't find it fresh here, but I can get it cut up and packaged. Better than nothing.)



You can keep adding to the brine, turning into a sort of 'mother' brine that gets more flavorful over time.  The veggies are considered 'done' after about a week and in China you just keep adding veggies to the brine as you eat them. My host mom had a huge pickling jar in her kitchen and she threw veggies in it every day. However, they cut them into cubes so you can eat them with chopsticks and I am far too lazy to do that, so I just sliced them.

My students told me that pickled veggies help regulate your blood sugar, which is why you should eat a small amount of them at every meal. I loved this part of a Chinese meal, but I've never seen it at a Chinese American restaurant.