Why scalp-tingling Sichuan food is Melbourne’s hottest cuisine
Melbourne has fully fallen under the hot, numbing and scalp-tingling spell of Sichuan cooking. But it’s not just homesick expats sweating up a storm, here’s why spice-loving locals are eating the fire.
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When Tina Li opened her first restaurant on Smith St, Collingwood, in 2003 only her fellow countrymen knew what they were in for when such dishes as mapo tofu and kung pao chicken hit their tables.
Fast forward to today and Melbourne has fully fallen under the hot, numbing and scalp-tingling spell of Sichuan cooking. Li’s original Dainty Sichuan restaurant long since grew out of its Collingwood den, and now her famous hot pots and “mouth-watering chicken” are served to hundreds of diners in the flagship South Yarra restaurant and siblings in Box Hill and the CBD each week.
Over the years, such famous food faces as Anthony Bourdain and Ugly Delicious’s David Chang have sweated up a storm and pronounced Dainty Sichuan some of the best Chinese food in the country.
But it’s homesick expats and spice-loving locals embracing the unique characteristics of Sichuan pepper – that isn’t actually pepper at all but the dried red berry from a prickly ash tree – that has seen that original store expand to 20 outlets and 10 brands under the Dainty Sichuan umbrella.
“Sichuan food was very rare in Melbourne in early 2000, (but) because of the diversity of culture, diners in Melbourne are very interested in food from all over the world, especially Chinese food,” Li says.
“As I first opened the restaurant, most of my customers were Chinese because they miss and enjoy the food from their home. After that, more and more local people were aware of my restaurant as Sichuan food became more and more popular.”
Around the same time Li was introducing Sichuan style to Melbourne, an English cookery writer published The Food of Sichuan, which would go on to become the seminal, encyclopaedic text explaining the food of southwestern China to the western world.
Fuchsia Dunlop is now considered the world’s leading English speaking authority on Chinese cuisine, who has dedicated 25 years to uncovering the intricate wonders of regional Chinese cooking and helping the world discover dishes beyond sweet and sour pork.
“It’s funny, more than half my life now, I’ve been speaking Chinese, involved in China. But back then, to even think that an English woman could have something of a career writing about Chinese food, it would have seemed insane,” she says.
“China is so present in people’s minds today, it’s almost hard to remember what it was like 25 years ago, China seemed quite remote. And it wasn’t a place that many Westerners went on holiday. It was very unusual to learn Mandarin. My friends thought I was crazy.”
A post high school backpacking trip started Dunlop’s lifelong fascination with China, leading to Mandarin classes in London and, in turn, and a British Council scholarship to study in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu.
And while the language, people and countryside drew her in, it was the food that stole her heart and brought her back.
“I remember this lunch in Chengdu in 1993, it was a modest little restaurant but the food was dazzlingly fresh and unlike any Chinese food I’d had before. It was that meal that got me interested in Sichuan food. It wasn’t like I thought I was going to write books about Chinese food or anything like that, it was just that, ‘this food is amazing, this seems like a good place to live to eat this food!’”
Dunlop will be in town this month as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival to headline the Sichuan Snack Fair, a day devoted to all things hot and numbing at the Queen Victoria Market. She’ll be serving her signature ma po tofu alongside some of Melbourne’s coolest Sichuan pepper purveyors, including Dainty Sichuan, Spice Temple, Super Ling and Sun Kitchen.
“The street food fair will be a lot of fun, I look forward to spreading the word of Sichuanese food at the festival,” Dunlop says.
GIVE US A TINGLE
“Looking for a new adventure for your tongue? You must try Sichuan food. You will not forget the feeling of numbness,” Tina Li says.
Unlike traditional Chinese cookery, which recognises five fundamental tastes – salty (han), sweet (tian), sour (suan), bitter (ku) and hot or pungent (la) - Sichuan cuisine uses a balance of seven flavours, adding numbing – ma – and umami (xian), thoughthere are 23 “official” complex flavours in the Sichuanese culinary canon.
“It’s important to make a distinction between chillies, which are hot and Sichuan pepper, which is tingling. There’s no heat in Sichuan pepper,” Dunlop says. “The two, the chilli and Sichuan pepper, together gives you the “mala” – the numbing and hot taste – that’s so famous.”
FLAVOUR SAVOUR
“Sichuan’s signature is the enormous variety of flavours, and having this electrifying, tingling spice is part of that. They have a liking for audaciously flavoured food,” Dunlop says.
“For centuries, they’ve been known for their liking for bold and interesting and spicy flavours. That’s partly to do with the climate because it’s very muggy and humid, and according to traditional Chinese medicine you have to eat dry heating spices to drive out that sluggish dampness. And so people were eating Sichuan pepper and ginger, for centuries, millennia, before they actually had chillies, which have only been widely cultivated for the past couple of hundred years.”
REGIONAL EXPRESS
Home-style flavour (jianchang wei) is a uniquely Sichuanese flavour based on the hearty tastes of domestic cooking: salty, umami, and hot. Typically, Sichuan chilli bean paste, fermented black beans, salt and soy sauce are used to achieve this, Dunlop says. Also uniquely Sichuanese, strange flavour “guaiwei” is based on the harmonious mixing of salty, sweet, numbing,spicy-hot, sour, umami and fragrant notes. “No individual flavour should clamour for the attention at the expense of any other; each should be equally stressed,” she says.
DISH IT UP
“Heart-warming, homely and utterly delicious, ma po tofu is the most famous Sichuanese dish and epitomises the spicy generosity of the cooking of the region,” Dunlop says. It is, of course, one of the most popular dishes at Dainty Sichuan, second only to the hot pot – one of the most popular dishes in Chengdu. Literally “fire pot”, a wok or saucepan is filled with a rich, oily, chilli broth in which various ingredients – from bamboo shoots and mushrooms to esoteric cuts of offal – are cooked.
“The Sichuanese love to spend whole days or evenings eating hotpot, sitting around the simmering wok for hours on end,” Dunlop says.
Other must-try Sichuan dishes include Chonqing spicy chicken, cumin lamb and boiling fish in chilli oil.
GREEEN IS GOLD
While Sichuan cuisine is steeped in tradition, Dunlop says there’s a fresh vibrancy to the cooking culture in Chengdu today,with dishes evolving and chefs unafraid to offer new versions of old dishes.
“One thing that’s changed since I was first there has been the discovery of green Sichuan pepper, which was formerly a wildvariety which was domesticated and started really appearing in the late ’90s,” Dunlop says. “It has a fresh citrusy lime flavour, like lime zest, and then that tingling sensation on your lips. There are lots of dishes, particularly fish dishes, made with green Sichuan pepper, so that’s something that’s given chefs pretty much a new ingredient to play with.”
BALANCING ACT
While “mala” takes the headlines, Dunlop says the beauty of Sichuan cuisine – indeed that of the whole country – is that eating is as much about health and balance as it is about deliciousness.
“It appeals to me tremendously, the traditional Chinese way of eating. Because you eat spectacular food, but you feel greatbecause as well as the strong and salty and heavy dishes you always have light soups, steamed rice, plain vegetables,” shesays. “I just find it a very lovely way to eat, and that impresses me more and more as time goes on, as I’ve understood moredeeply this, the way to eat to eat Chinese food for health and for balance.”
ORDER IN THE HOUSE
In order to achieve this balance when next dining at a Chinese restaurant, Dunlop suggests discarding the usual practice of opening ordering up to the table.
“It doesn’t work if you have a group of people and everyone orders their favourite dish, because it will be unbalanced meal. You’ll have more than one chicken dish, everything will be deep fried, or whatever. You need to have a plan.”
To achieve variety and balance, if you have a strongly flavoured dish – something hot and spicy – then counter this with somethingcool and fresh. “It may seem less interesting on its own, but it’s a nice contrast to that strong, spicy dish.”
Likewise, if you have a dry dish, balance this with something lightly sauced, and try not to repeat ingredients.
“There’s no hard and fast rule. The more contrast and variety of dishes the more interesting the meal will be. The more youbalance the heftier dishes with lighter ones, the more comfortable you’ll feel afterwards.”
KEEP YOUR COOL
And when that famous Sichuan fire keeps on burning and you want to quell the heat, Li says the best antidote is “cold soy milk or a plum drink when you consume a lot of chilli”.
BOILED FISH IN A SEETHING SEA OF CHILLIES
Recipe: Fuchsia Dunlop
“This dish, perhaps more than any other, embodies the dramatic numbing-and-hot (mala) excesses of chillies, Sichuan pepperand oil with which Sichuanese cuisine has taken China
and the world by storm.”
INGREDIENTS
1 whole sea bream, grass carp or sea bass (750–800g), scaled, cleaned and filleted
40g dried chillies
2 tbsp whole Sichuan pepper
1 tbsp cooking oil
200g bean sprouts
250ml clear spicy infused oil (make day before)
Salt and ground white pepper
For the marinade
½ tsp salt
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
1 tbsp egg white
1½ tbsp potato starch
For the broth
Head, tail and bones from the fish
1 spring onion, white part only
2 tbsp cooking oil
3 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
An equivalent amount of ginger, peeled and sliced
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
For the infused oil
6 spring onions
75g ginger, unpeeled
1 small onion (about 150g)
500ml cooking oil
2 star anise
A good handful of coriander stalks
METHOD
For the spicy infused oil, lightly smack the spring onions with the flat of a cleaver blade or a rolling pin to loosen them,then cut into lengths. Slice the ginger, and peel and slice the onion. Pour the oil into a wok and heat to 180–200C. Add thespring onions, ginger and onion and stir for 5 minutes, until they smell wonderful and are lightly browned. Add the star aniseand coriander stalks, turn the heat down low and fry for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Ladle into a heatproof containerand leave in a cool place to infuse for 24–48 hours before straining off the oil, discarding the solids.
Lay one of the fish fillets on a chopping board, skin side down. Holding your knife at an angle and cutting towards the tail,cut the fillet into slices 3–5mm thick. Repeat with the other fillet. Place the fish in a bowl, then add the marinade ingredientsand mix well.
Snip the chillies in half or into 2cm sections and shake out the seeds as far as possible, then place in a small saucepan,along with the Sichuan pepper.
Heat the cooking oil in a seasoned wok. Add the bean sprouts and stir-fry until piping hot, seasoning with salt to taste. Pile them up in a deep serving bowl.
Next make the broth. Use the corner of a cleaver blade or the tip of a sturdy knife to make a crack in the fish head. Cut the bones into a few chunks and set aside. Lightly smack the spring onion white with the flat of a cleaver blade or a rolling pin to loosen it. Put the kettle on to boil
Rinse and dry the wok if necessary and return to a high heat. Add the cooking oil and, when it is hot, add the spring onionwhite, garlic and ginger and stir-fry until they smell delicious. Pour in 900ml hot water from the kettle, along with theShaoxing wine and the fish head, tail and bones. Bring to the boil and then let it bubble away for about 7 minutes, until the liquid is milky and flavourful. Strain out and discard the solid ingredients, skim off any foam from the surface and thenseason with salt and white pepper to taste.
Drop the fish slices into the broth, separating them gently with long cooking chopsticks or tongs. When the slices are justcooked, which will take around a minute, scoop them out with a slotted spoon and pile them on top of the bean sprouts in theserving bowl. Pour over the broth.
Give the wok a quick rinse and dry, then return to a high heat. Add the infused oil and heat until a few drops dripped onto the dried chillies and Sichuan pepper in the saucepan produce a fizzing sound. Working quickly, pour the oil over the chilliesand Sichuan pepper. Let them fizz for a few seconds until they are darkening slightly, and then swiftly pour over the fish. Rush the dish to the table before the fizzing stops!
READ MORE:
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DON’T MISS: As part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Fuchsia Dunlop will headline the Sichuan Snack Fair. This familyfriendly celebration of Sichuan’s greatest dishes is on March 22 at the Queen Victoria Market. Entry is free. MFWF.com.au