Most British eaters meet Chinese sour flavours through two doors. The first is Sichuan, where sourness arrives disguised as numbing heat; the second is Guizhou, where a tomato-and-fermented-chilli base does the talking. Both are wonderful and both have been written...
Everyone who writes about Guizhou sour soup talks about two colours. The red one, hong suan tang, made from fermented tomatoes and chilli, all rust and fire. The white one, bai suan tang, made from rice water, milky and gentle....
In the mountain province of Guizhou there is a hot pot that does not lead with chilli and does not lead with sour. It leads with a smell. The broth is a deep, glossy mahogany — almost opaque, closer to...
In Guiyang there is a hot pot that begins with no chilli, no tallow and no bubbling red oil. It begins with beans. Pale dried beans are soaked, then simmered for a long time until they break down and the...
There is a kind of sour that has nothing to do with vinegar. It is not the sharp bite of lemon or the thin acidity of rice wine. It is deeper, rounder, faintly sweet at the edges, and it warms...
The first time I understood Suan Cai Yu, I was sitting in a borrowed kitchen in south London, watching a friend lift a bundle of pickled greens out of a glass jar and drop it into hot oil. The sound...
In the Chengdu and Chongqing of today, there is no faster, humbler or more beloved plate of “quick hot pot” than a bowl of maocai. You point at what you want; a cook dips it into a vast pot of...
Ask most people to picture Sichuan food and they will describe a swimming red pot, steam curling into the air. But some of the province’s most bewitching dishes are served cold, and none more so than boboji — the skewers...
Most people picture hot pot as a lake of chilli-red oil. But the dish that taught me a different lesson about Southwest China was pale, cool and quietly green. On my first winter night in the mountains around Chongqing, an...
