Sichuan green beans

5.00

Spice up your green beans with this classic bit of Sichuan cooking. The beans are fried until blistering, then tossed with pork mince and classic Sichuan flavours of garlic, ginger, chilli and Sichuan peppercorns, resulting in a simple side dish that is packed full of flavour and numbing spice.

First published in 2019

This is a popular vegetable dish across China, and can easily be made vegetarian by switching the pork out for shitake mushrooms. The beans are cooked by ‘dry frying’ (gan bian), a popular technique throughout the Sichuan province, which entails frying the beans in oil for around 5 minutes or until they are wrinkled and blistered. They are then tossed with typical Sichuan flavours of chilli, ginger, garlic and of course Sichuan pepper.

Ingredients

Metric

Imperial

Method

1
Pour about 3cm deep of vegetable oil in a pan or wok and heat up. Once hot, fry the trimmed green beans until just starting to wrinkle – about 5 minutes. Do not overfill the pan, you can work in batches
2
Drain the beans on kitchen paper and pat down to remove some of the oil
3
Empty the wok of leftover oil, leaving about 1 tbsp in the pan. (You can reserve and re-use the oil for any future frying you may do.) Add the ginger and garlic and fry until soft but not coloured
4
Next add the chillies and sichuan peppercorns, followed by the pork mince then the soy sauce, Chinese rice wine and sugar
5
Cook on a medium-high heat, stirring all the time to evenly caramelise the pork
6
Once the pork is nice and caramelised, return the beans to the pan to reheat. Toss to combine with the pork
7
Taste and season with salt if needed, then serve hot

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