Global Grub: Szechwan Pork and Chiles

Chinese food is one of those cooking mysteries where I always suspected that I wasn't getting the whole story. I've browsed cookbooks, watched a ton of shows, and surfed the internet trying to find out how the restaurants can get their food to taste just so. Until yesterday, I uncovered (and spread) two commonly held beliefs, and one theory:

The beliefs:

The reason restaurant Chinese food tastes so good is because of the high-powered burners they use, which we don't have access to at home.
The reason restaurant Chinese food tastes so good is the massive amount of MSG they use.

Is this the secret to great Chinese food?

My alternate theory:

The reason restaurant Chinese food tastes so good is that there are ingredients that nobody ever talks about, like some kind of closely guarded Buddhist secret that you may one day find in a fortune cookie, or learn on top of a very tall mountain. Like the place Bruce Wayne went to in Batman Begins.

So after years of hard searching, I finally was able to make an awesome Szechwan dish. The secret: I got insider help at the store and in the kitchen. And it turns out my theory was right: we used ingredients and methods I've not seen in any of my searches. Now, as to whether those other beliefs are true or not, I can't say, but all I know is that this dish is phenomenal, and I didn't have to crack into that 100 pound drum of MSG.

There's an adage that says "China is the place for food, but Sichuan is the place for flavor." And they're right - Szechwan food has crazy ingredients, heat levels, and flavor combinations unlike any of the bland Cantonese food I was used to, so naturally I have developed a healthy addiction to it. But in searching for Szechwan recipes I came up with little of substance; ingredient lists typically consisted of soy sauce, hoisin, oyster sauce, and other things that I didn't think were quite on the mark. All I knew is that there are these crazy Szechwan peppercorns which produce a numbing sensation, which I promptly bought the first time I saw them but couldn't figure out how to use.

The mystery remained until I met a friend who said she could help me. We met at a large Asian grocery store and wandered around, and while I tried to grab at ingredients I knew, she was steering me towards all of those aisles that I've never figured out. If you've ever been in an Asian grocery store (this is mostly for non-Asian people), you might agree that there are vegetables you've never seen and jars of sauces and liquids with poor English labeling, both of which you tend to breeze right past. And it turns out that these are the secret to good Chinese food, right under our noses but hidden in a sea of Chinese characters.

The dish (and the following one) presented here are both 'home-cooked' Chinese dishes; this one is Szechwan, the other one I have no idea. It is basically pork with chiles in a chile sauce, similarly named to a dish which killed all of my taste buds for two weeks at a Thai restaurant in Sydney. I was having flashbacks about the heat level, but excited to give it a go. The ingredient list is short, but if you don't know what to look for you won't find it. So I will try to help. And as always, if anyone reading this has good suggestions, additions, or substitutions, post them so we can all see.

Szechwan Pork and Chiles

By my friend Julia (last name removed in case the Chinese food mafia comes to find her for telling me all this)

6-8 Fushimi peppers
6 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
2 tbsp Shaoxing or rice wine
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp cornstarch
3 tbsp Szechwan spicy sauce
½ tsp Szechwan peppercorns, ground (optional)
½ - ¾ pound pork loin
1-2 tbsp water
2 tbsp canola oil
½ tsp salt, if needed

So right off the bat, you're looking at this thinking: what the heck are those peppers? What is spicy sauce? Where do I get Shaoxing wine? Can I substitute green peppercorns? First of all, no you can't. Second, keep your shirt on, we'll start with an ingredient primer.

First, for the peppers, let's have a look at what we're talking about here:

The 'Fushimi' pepper

This is a Fushimi pepper. I had to look it up. I have often referred to this pepper as "the green pepper from the Asian store". It turns out that's a fairly accurate description of it, because I can't find it anywhere else. It's a long, narrow pepper that is sweet and low in heat, somewhere around a jalapeno. I couldn't find it on the Scoville chart for some reason. The closest looking peppers I saw were Hatch, Pasilla, and green Tabasco chiles, but I don't think this is any of them - this is fairly specific to Asian cooking, and fairly common in the Asian grocery stores. But if you can't find them, I would recommend something like a Cubanelle or a Hungarian wax, both of which are fairly mild and can be found in most stores. DO NOT graduate up to Serrano peppers for this, even if they look about the same. For a list of peppers and their heat levels, check here or here.

Next, and probably most important, the 'spicy sauce'. What the #*%@ is that? It is the stuff of legend - that mystery sauce the cookbooks won't tell you about. My friend referred to it as 'Szechwan sauce', so I knew it was going to be a winner, and it didn't disappoint. It is basically a mix of chiles and spice in oil that you use to flavor your dish, and is similar in concept to the cans of Thai curry paste which have become ubiquitous in Asian stores, and which even I have found. But this product is so poorly labeled that no random novice cook who can't read Chinese will ever find. Here it is:

Spicy sauce?!

I believe that the first two characters on the lid of the jar (looks like the letter "I" with a bunch of jazz superimposed, and a dude holding a cane) say that this was made in Szechwan province. What else to look for? Well, it looks like a paste with a small layer of dark oil on top.

Finally, the peppercorns. They look like little red/purple Pac Men, the same size as peppercorns but not at all similar in flavor. They create a numbing sensation referred to as má, leading to the dish Ma La Tang, which is a numbing and spicy soup called 'hot pot' served in Szechwan cuisine. Here are the peppercorns, which I found at a Penzey's in Pittsburgh once, but which are probably readily available at Asian grocery stores as well:

Szechwan peppercorns, from Wikipedia

Okay, feel better about the ingredients? Good, let's get started. It's actually pretty simple from here. Cut peppers into 1” long sections, removing seeds if desired. Thinly slice pork into 1/8” slices, then cut the slices into 1/8” julienne and place in a medium bowl. Toss to coat with cornstarch, rice wine, and soy sauce, and set aside.

There are a whole boatload of peppers in this dish, but they're not so spicy that they will kill you. Take some of the seeds out, though

Cut the pork into thin, julienne-like strips for fast cooking

Heat wok until smoking over high heat. Now here's another new one for me and Chinese food - add the canola oil, then fry Szechwan peppercorns and Szechwan spicy sauce for 5-10 seconds to infuse oil. This is very much like how I do Thai curry, where I stir-fry the curry paste in the oil first to get the flavors going. Add garlic and pork, and stir-fry until cooked through, 1-2 minutes. Remove pork and garlic to a plate.