sichuan water poached beef 四川麻辣水煮牛肉 - part 3

Practice makes perfect. As I have plenty of ingredients left I made another pot of Sichuan water poached beef. This time I went and bought a bag of soy bean spouts which is required for the traditional recipe of this dish.


I stopped by a Korean store and picked up a bag of soy bean spouts

this time I use this higher quality broad bean paste

Chinese celery is a must for preparing this dish

you must also have some rice cooking wine

 wok in progress

note that the celery leaves are to be added later as well as the fermented broad bean paste and the rice wine, and followed with water before transferring to the clay pot

with practice I now can whip up this dish in very little time and least of fuss

As I have built my heat tolerance, I made this quite hot. One thing about the Sichuan pepper corn is they are something to get used to as they are like bits of sand in your mouth when you chew onto a few. I now realize one technique to alleviate this gritty mouth feel that some find unpleasant is to extract the essence of them with oil and discard the expended pepper corns. This is a technique that I will try next time.

the authentic version of this dish uses plenty of soy bean spouts to under the top layer of thinly sliced beef as shown here brought to the surface