The Sinosphere · Volume 33, The Mala Basin
Dry-fried green beans / Ganbian sijidou (干煸四季豆)
Sichuan
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 96 sources in the brief
A Sichuan dish that spread nationally in the 1980s alongside the broader national popularity of the cuisine; no source in this research found a contested city of origin for it, unlike most of the other dishes here.
As tradition built it
No serving count or time given.
Ingredients
The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.
Main
- green beans
- minced pork
Supporting
- cooking wine
- suimi yacai
- 3 cloves garlic, chopped
- ginger, chopped
- dried chillies
- spring onion, chopped
- sugar
- MSG
- to taste salt
- sesame oil
For frying
- 720 ml (3 cups) oil
Method
- String the beans and snap them by hand into lengths of about 6 cm. Wash and drain them well.
- Heat the 3 cups of oil in a wok. Fry the beans over a high heat until the skins wrinkle slightly. Lift out and drain.
- Leave 1 tablespoon of oil in the wok. Stir-fry the pork until it separates.
- Add the cooking wine, yacai, garlic and ginger and stir-fry until the pork is dry and crisp.
- Add the beans and the remaining seasonings: the dried chillies, spring onion, sugar, MSG, salt and sesame oil. Toss briefly and plate.
- Fry the beans right through, because undercooked beans are poisonous, but toss them only briefly at the end or they turn dark.
Notes
Chinese recipe sources are specific that undercooking the beans is a real food-safety risk, not just a texture failing, so frying them through properly is not optional.
The method is Dai Chaobo's, for the Chengdu New Oriental Cooking School (28 May 2014); it gives no weights. The previous 250 g of beans and 3 tbsp of yacai came from a Meishichina user recipe, not read this round and not used. A 39 Health recipe, reprinted by Tibet News Network and not a Sichuan source, fries the beans slowly at medium heat and adds light and dark soy.
What a modern chef changes
A more thoroughly dried bean and a cured-sausage depth
Rung 4
Method
- Blanch the beans for ninety seconds before frying, shock in ice water, and dry completely in a dehydrator at 60°C for twenty minutes, which drives off far more surface moisture than air-drying alone and produces a more even, more thoroughly blistered skin at the frying stage.
- Grind the Sichuan pepper fresh in the spice grinder immediately before use, as in the kung pao elevation.
- Finish with a small amount of preserved Sichuan sausage, diced fine and rendered briefly in the same pan before the beans go back in, adding a smoked, cured depth this simple vegetable dish does not traditionally carry but which sits comfortably within the cuisine's own logic of building savoury depth from cured and fermented pantry staples.