I travel the world in my kitchen every week, often visiting Italy, Mexico, southern India, Indonesia and the Middle East. Until recently, I’d rarely looked to China. While I love Chinese cooking, rich with Sichuan peppercorns and dried chillies, the takeaways of my youth have lessened my affection for Chinese food. That changed when a friend gave me a book by Fuchsia Dunlop called Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking. Now I stop at my local Chinese shop each week, filling my basket with exotic jars, noodles and vegetables.
Tofu splits opinion. Treated right, it’s a thing of beauty. It comes in every incarnation, from silky, soft curds, like a ricotta, to dense, deeply savoury smoked stuff, which slices perfectly. If you’re new to tofu, a good place to start is with the smoked variety.
Tofu is made from soya beans, one of the most intensively farmed crops in the world, so where I can, I try to buy organic. There are also a few British artisan tofu producers; my favourite goes by the name Clean Bean Tofu.
The Laoganma black-bean sauce I use here is available in Chinese shops and online, and is full of deep, dark umami flavour. Made from fermented black beans, it’s a world away from the supermarket black-bean sauce. I really do encourage you to search it out — it’s a jar full of incredible flavour.
Advertisement
I use jasmine rice here as it works so well with this sticky tofu. If you wanted something heartier, with more nutritional punch, brown rice would work well, too.
Flash-fried sticky smoked tofu, with black beans
Serves: 4
500g jasmine rice
2 tbsp of a neutral cooking oil, such as groundnut
6 tbsp Laoganma black-bean sauce
A good pinch of dried chilli flakes
½ tsp of Sichuan peppercorns, ground
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely sliced
A small thumb of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
1 red onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1 red pepper, peeled, deseeded and cut into 1cm slices
1 stick of celery, stringy bits peeled off and cut into 1cm lengths
4 spring onions, chopped into 2cm pieces
2 big handfuls of spring greens or Chinese greens
A squeeze of honey
Light soy sauce or tamari
250g firm smoked tofu, cut into 1cm-thick strips
Drizzle of sesame oil
1. Place the rice in a sieve and rinse well under cold water until it runs clear. Put the washed rice in a pan with 1 litre of boiling water and bring to the boil over a high heat. Once boiling, give it a quick stir to make sure that no grains are stuck to the bottom.
Advertisement
2. Once the surface of the rice is dry and a few breathing holes have appeared, put a lid on top and turn the heat down to very low. Cook for a further 12-15 minutes, or until fluffy.
3. When your rice is nearly ready, heat 2 tbsp of oil in a wok over a medium heat. Add the black-bean paste, chillies and Sichuan ground pepper and fry until fragrant.
4. Add the garlic and ginger and sizzle for a couple of moments before adding the onion, red pepper, celery, spring onions and greens. Turn up the heat and cook until everything is fragrant and hot throughout.
5. Add the honey, soy and tofu, then cook until the tofu has warmed through and everything is coated. Remove from the heat and stir in the sesame oil. Serve with big piles of the rice.
Follow Anna Jones @we_are_food