In the cooking of Sichuan cuisine, I like to use pickled foods very much. For example, kimchi is the soul and foundation of Sichuan cuisine cooking, and almost every family has a kimchi jar. Therefore, on this basis, the pickled food of the Sichuan people is really ever-changing and amazing. This may be the fact that the Sichuan people have been rich in products since ancient times, plus Sichuan itself produces a lot of salt. Therefore, the food that cannot be eaten is salted and salted, and through the fermentation of time, it gets another delicious taste!
Winter is about to enter, and Sichuanese people are busy with many food pickling work. Therefore, Xiaobian sorted out 10 very classic pickled foods of Sichuan people to feed everyone, or ranked in no particular order.
Sichuan kimchi
A typical Sichuan meal always comes with a bowl of rice at the end, and the rice is always accompanied by a small plate of kimchi under the rice. In the eyes of Sichuan people, in addition to tomatoes and the like can not be soaked, most of the vegetables are inevitably "soaked" fate. After the kimchi comes out of the altar, drizzle with a little red oil, or add nothing, directly on the table, it is a good meal, and it can also be used for cooking, such as stir-fried minced meat with pickled cowpea.
The most in line with the practice of Sichuan's home-style kimchi is to eat it often, put a small plate on each meal, and often add some fresh vegetables to the jar. Kimchi jars can be passed on forever, as long as brine, wine and spices are often added to them. Over time, the flavor of the kimchi that comes out of it will get better and better. You can take a little bit out of the "mother water" of the old jar and start a new one. The taste of such a family is distributed to the new family through these kimchi jars, and the kimchi in Xiaobian's home is completely transplanted from grandma.
Bacon
Now the city doesn't let bacon go. However, the rural areas of Sichuan still maintain the habit of self-smoking bacon, which is dried after being pickled and smoked. According to tradition, the time of bacon is in the waxing moon, so it is called "bacon". Sichuan bacon has a strong flavor, just cutting a little and putting it into a simple stir-fry dish can add a lot of color, such as garlic stir-fried bacon, as well as green pepper stir-fried bacon and so on.
There are some big mountains in the northeast of Chengdu, the most famous of which is the scenic Taoist mountain Qingcheng Mountain, where people must smoke bacon black and be recognizable at a glance in the market. In the Bamboo Sea of Southern Shu, Xiaobian has eaten bacon smoked with bamboo leaves, the taste is too good, and the aroma is still unforgettable. The most popular bacon must be "earthen bacon", using domestic free-range pigs, and the tall term is organic pork. Nowadays, good earth and bacon, the countryside itself is not enough to eat, occasionally there are relatives and friends, send a piece, that is really a great thanks.
Enema sausages
Pork in the waxing moon, in addition to making bacon, but also made into sausages, every winter, a bunch of red sausages hang on the balcony or in front of the butcher shop, red is lean red, but also the red of peppers. There are also light types of Sichuan flavors without chili peppers, commonly called "home-cooked tastes" – but for authentic Sichuan people, if there are no peppercorns in the sausage, they always feel that something is missing. Even if the meat quality is good, it does not feel perfect.
Nowadays, in the city, they buy ready-made meat to the wet market, and find a shop that specializes in making sausages, which can be customized according to taste. But I always feel that it is not as good as the sausage aroma in the countryside of Sichuan, which is hand-infused. The sausages can be steamed and sliced as the first cold dish, or directly under the wine, or cut into small cubes of fried rice and stir-fried vegetables. Many family sausages can be eaten from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. Therefore, sausages, like kimchi, are common pickled foods in Sichuan families.
Mustard
Although Fuling now belongs to Chongqing, but the Sichuan-Chongqing family is pro, Xiaobian feels that in terms of eating, the difference is not big, Sichuan cuisine includes Chongqing. Therefore, the Fuling squeezed vegetables produced in Chongqing should also have a place. After all, when Chongqing was not directly under its jurisdiction, among the four major pickled vegetables in Sichuan, squeezed vegetables were the first. Together with French sour cucumber and German sweet and sour cabbage, it is called the world's three famous pickles, and it is also one of the three famous dishes exported by China (squeezed vegetables, wei cai, bamboo shoots). Its traditional craftsmanship was included in the second batch of national intangible cultural heritage list.
In the past, when Xiaobian traveled abroad, as long as he saw the Fuling squeezed vegetables in the supermarket, he felt very kind, the taste was salty and sour, very appetizing, the surface of the squeezed vegetables was knotty, wrapped in peppers, the taste was soft and crisp, very delicious.
kohlrabi
Kohlrabi, which tastes a bit like a radish and is processed in a similar way to squeezed vegetables, is usually eaten directly as a side dish or sprinkled on noodles or tofu. After being pickled, kohlrabi is golden in color, salty and slightly sweet, crisp and delicious, fragrant and very resistant to storage, which can be maintained for more than a year without oxidation and deterioration.
Kohlrabi has only been commercially produced for more than two hundred years, but it is said to have originated from the 6th century AD method of pickling radish. In some areas of Sichuan, this dish is also known as "Zhuge Cai", and it is said that zhuge Liang, a wise man during the Three Kingdoms period, in order to solve the food problem, asked soldiers to widely plant this plant because it was convenient for preservation and was made into military food.
Winter vegetables
Because its production and processing are in winter, winter vegetables are called "winter vegetables". The most famous thing in Sichuan Province is nanchong winter vegetables. Winter vegetables are semi-dry, non-fermented pickles that are mostly used as soups or stir-fried foods, and have a delicious flavor. The tender tip of a certain mustard leaf is dried and half dried, mixed with salt and spices such as star anise, fennel seeds and tangerine peel, and fermented in the altar for two or three years, and the finished product is particularly delicious for stir-frying or steaming meat.
The "Nanchong County Chronicle" has such a record: "During the Qing Jiaqing period (1796 to 1820), there were winter vegetables for sale in Shunqing. "During the Daoguang period (1821 to 1850), the old shop in Qingju Town made winter dishes and was quite famous." In 1981, Nanchong winter vegetables won the "Four Dishes" appraisal meeting in Sichuan Province with lustrous oil, crisp and tender flavor, and was rated as the first place in the province.
Sprouts
No one could have imagined that the crumpled dark sprouts were the secret recipe for the delicious sichuan cuisine such as Dan Dan noodles, burning noodles, and dried sautéed beans. Sprouts are salty and sweet, and sweet and spicy are more famous. To make so-called salty white sprouts, the tender stems of the mustard are cut into long strips, dried in the sun, salted, and then placed in clay pots to ferment for several months. To turn white sprouts into famous beets, add a brown syrup and spices such as peppercorns and star anise on the basis of the above, seal the jar for secondary fermentation, it takes about a year or so, and there is a characteristic delicious and deep color of sprouts.
It is said that this special technique was born in Nanxi in the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was further optimized and developed by the picklers in nearby Yibin. In the ancient towns around Yibin, you can also meet people selling homemade sprouts, and the shops are placed on high clay pots, and the lid is opened, and the unique sweet and spicy aroma comes to the face.
Pixian Douban
Legend has it that this delicious seasoning was born out of a pleasant accident. At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, during the period when the lake was filling Sichuan, a Fujian immigrant named Chen Yixian went to Sichuan and brought a bag of broad beans as rations on the road. Two days of rain, his beans were moldy, but he was reluctant to waste, so he dried and mixed some fresh peppers to eat. As a result, the taste of the beans was surprisingly good, so after settling down in Sichuan, he began to continue to ferment the beans and followed the same way of eating. Later, he opened a factory in PiXian County, and the vinegar and fermentation sauces produced were well known.
Chen Yixian's descendants say he invented the watercress sauce in 1666. There is a bit of a discrepancy here, as far as I know, it was not until the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century that there was a record of peppers being planted in Sichuan. Anyway, since then, Pixian douban has taken root in Sichuan, and has become an indispensable magical seasoning in Sichuan cuisine, and it is also a must-have in the kitchen of Sichuan people
Lumps of tempeh
In the recipes of the Sichuan people, there are many uses of tempeh, dried tempeh and water tempeh. Xiaobian specially chose a kind of lump tempeh, which has a history of more than several hundred years. In the past, many Chengdu markets sold them, but in recent years they have become less and less. Xiaobian feels that this kind of skilled tempeh should be well preserved.
It's a delicious seasoning that ferments soy beans into tempeh, mixes them with cooked mashed sweet potatoes, ginger, sea pepper noodles and pepper noodles, rolls them into round balls the size of golf balls, and dries them in the sun. The dried balls are usually coarsely chopped and added to stir-fry to add salty and umami flavor, especially in the pot meat.
Salt dish
Salt dishes cover a wide range, and any dish made with the salt pickling method can be called "salt (an) dish", and all kinds of fresh vegetables or wild vegetables can be used to make salt dishes. On the day of the sun, Sichuanese people will spread vegetables cut into strips or slices on bamboo grates and fill every corner of the cabbage leaves that can be exposed to the sun. When the leaves are half-dried, rub some salt and spices into them and put them in the jar for ripening.
Briefly speaking, the drier the leaves are dried and the more salt is added, the longer the shelf life. Sometimes the jar is placed upside down so that excess water is released during the fermentation process. The resulting pickles are served directly as appetizers, or they can be served as a meal or used in the cooking of dishes. There is a very popular Sichuan dish called "pickle back to the pot meat".
When it comes to the pickled food of Sichuan people, in addition to the long history, it is also very artistic, and almost every pickled food can be written into a book. Because it is really varied and varied. Xiaobian selected 10 samples, and they all felt that they were still unfinished. The rest is better to ask friends, leave a message in the discussion area, and see what other characteristic pickled foods sichuanese have?
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