Beijing-based blogger and cooking instructor Diana Kuan, of Appetite for China, shares her recipe for Sichuan favorite laji jiding. Chicken pieces are shallow-fried for some serious crunch, before being stir-fried in a pungent sauce containing—yikes—eight to ten dried chilis and a handful of Sichuan peppercorns. Diana describes the crispy, spicy chicken dish as a "more sophisticated version of kung pao chicken"; my cohort Tam calls it "a lip-numbing form of popcorn chicken." Kung pao popcorn chicken—how can you go wrong? (KFC, take note.)...
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Crispy lamb filets with chili cumin from Szechuan Gourmet. Photograph taken by Kathryn Yu Wall Street Journal food writer Raymond Sokolov poses this very question as he decries the dearth of both high-quality, high-end Chinese restaurants in America and contemporary non-Chinese chefs in American kitchens who rarely look to China for inspiration. Is he right? I have an opinion, but I'm sure many other serious eaters do as well....
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Nobody I know of in the West understands more about food in China than Fuchsia Dunlop. The author of two remarkable Chinese cookbooks, Land of Plenty (about Sichuan food), and The Revolutionary Cookbook (about Hunanese cooking), Dunlop was not only the first Westerner to attend the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, she spent the better part of the last 14 years traveling through China to explore the food culture. So when her newest book, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, was published a few months ago, I knew it was going to be good. I just wasn't prepared for how good. The book is an evocative and emotionally resonant account of her visits to...
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