Szechwan Green Beans with Pork
From The Chinese Cookbook, 1972, this is a delicious wok-cooked way to enjoy green beans anytime, even without preparation of other Chinese dishes.
This recipe came from a very obscure cookbook printed in 1972 with an unimaginative title called The Chinese Cookbook by Craig Clayborne and Virginia Lee. It was given to me by a family friend who collected cookbooks, but after becoming widowed and retired, no longer cooked. She gave me quite a number of obscure and probably out-of-print cookbooks that dot areas of my kitchen and book shelves today. Cookbooks from this era are interesting because they are so uninteresting: no photography, few graphics and nothing, really, that would distinguish it from a typical novel, save for the content and title. Today’s cookbooks, of course, are all about the photography and graphics, sometimes at the expense of providing good recipes for the serious culinary artist.
Peppercorn Chili Oil
You will need an Asian Chili Oil for this dish and Lee Kum Kee makes a nationally US distributed brand available online or in most grocery store Asian cuisine sections. You could, in a pinch, use a chili paste or sriracha sauce, but if you do, use it at the end of the cooking process, otherwise it will burn in the blistering heat of the wok. The advantage of using the chili oil, of course, is that you use it at the beginning of the cooking process and indeed, it blends with the peanut oil in which the green beans are cooked. This allows the flavor of the chilies to steep into the legumes for a deeper, mellower flavor.
This dish is otherwise easy to prepare but does require use of a wok. You cannot duplicate this dish in skillet or western-style cooking vessel.
American Green Beans, usually sold as the Blue Lake variety, work best for this dish. The French Green Bean, known as Haricots Verts, are too small and delicate to stand up to the blistering heat of the wok. Be sure you do not inadvertently buy something that looks like a Green Bean, but isn’t, called Pole Beans. That variety of legume is tough, with a fibrous strand that is inedible, and if not removed, is very unpleasant to eat.
Szechwan Gren Beans with Pork
Ingredients
- 1 cup peanut oil
- 2 tbsp hot chili pepper oil (like, Lee Kum Kee)
- 1 pound ground pork
- 1- ½ pound fresh green beans, rinsed, snapped and cut into 2-inch pieces
- 3 tbsp dark soy sauce (like, Pearl River Bridge)
- 1 tsp honey (dissolved in the soy sauce)
- 1 cup dry sherry wine
- 1 tsp salt (dissolved in the sherry)
- 1 tsp dried red pepper flakes
Instructions
- Drizzle 2-3 tbsp of the peanut oil into the wok and let it heat until smoking. Drop in the ground pork and stir-fry until all pink color is gone. Remove meat and keep warm on a platter.
- Return wok to the heat and add the remaining oil, including the chili pepper oil; heat until smoking. Carefully drop in the green beans.
- Stir-fry for 8-10 minutes just until the beans are showing a little blistering and brownness on their skins. When the green beans are cooked, remove from the wok and discard all but a couple of tablespoons of the oil.
- Return the green beans and the cooked ground pork to the wok and heat through.
- Add the dark soy sauce with honey, the sherry with salt and the pepper flakes, and stir thoroughly.
- Allow the sauce to simmer and thicken slightly for 1-2 minutes.
- Remove the dish to a serving bowl and hold in a 200°F oven until ready to serve.
Notes
- Like any good wok chef, prepare all your ingredients ahead of time so they are at the ready and within arms reach before you begin, known in French cooking terminology as Mis en Place.
