More Than Just Spice

A Food-lover’s Insider Guide to the Mysterious Sichuan Cuisine

It’s in the middle of a freezing winter. You want to eat something warm, or something stimulating, to excite your stomach and fuel your mind to finish up the seemingly endless homework. You never lack food choices, but the hard thing for you is to decide what to get to fill the ravenous stomach. One idea jumps into your mind – “What about Japanese food? Nah, it’s too cold, and always just sushi and sashimi. What about Italian food then? Nuh-uh, it’s nothing stimulating.” - Yes, it’s time to go for something that’s more stomach-friendly - the Sichuan Cuisine.

Sichuan Cuisine, originating from Sichuan Province located in southwestern part of China, is the most popular Cuisine in China. Ranking the top of the four major cuisines in China, Sichuan Cuisine presents numerous famous dishes that are characterized by their hot-spicy taste along with the flavor of Sichuan pepper that is rare to be found in other regional Cuisines.

When and How Did It All Begin? - History of Sichuan Cuisine

Sichuan is colloquially known as the "heavenly country" due to its abundance of food and natural resources. While it does not have seafood as it’s located in the Sichuan basin, surrounded by sublime mountains, it breeds copious domesticated animals including poultry and duck, freshwater fish, as well as variety of crops.

Among all the gifts bestowed by nature, the chili pepper originated from Mexico, brought to China by Portuguese traders in the 16^th century, accustomed to the Sichuan weather fairly quickly and gradually replaced the spicy peppers of ancient times during Song dynasty, and ultimately complementing the Sichuan pepper to create a unique identity for the Sichuan Cuisine. The explanation for the dominant use of chili pepper along with pepper oftentimes is that the province's climate is brutally humid and steamy during the summer, while damp and chilly in the winter, so local people tend to eat peppers to facilitate the metabolism and to dispel dampness inside their bodies according to traditional Chinese medical science.

As a unique cooking style of food characterized by the spicy flavor, Sichuan Cuisine has been famous for more than eight hundred years since the Southern Song Dynasty marked by the opening of Sichuan restaurants in Lin’an, the capital city of its time, which is now called Hangzhou.

Hot and Spicy? - Flavors of Sichuan Cuisine

Do you think Sichuan food is just all about spice? You are the majority and you are wrong.

Don’t get frustrated though since a lot of food bloggers get this wrong as well. As a native who was born and raised in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province, I learned how to cook authentic Sichuan Cuisine in a professional cooking school for three months, and only through that experience I was able to advance my understanding of Sichuan Cuisine - and it turns out, the flavor of Sichuan Cuisine is far more complicated that it seems.

The experienced Sichuan Cuisine cook at the professional cooking school told me that people tend to have impressions that Sichuan Cuisine are spicy and hot, which held true until the 1970s, but nowadays it has evolved to satisfy more nitpicky stomachs.

Along with the spicy flavor, the numbing taste of Sichuan pepper also matters, and it’s the very special sense that differentiates Sichuan Cuisine from dishes that are simply spicy.

While chilies - fresh, dried and pickled, hold significant positions among all the flavors, Sichuan Cuisine is more than pure fieriness. What makes Sichuan Cuisine truly outstanding is its remarkable variety of flavors, where you can find every dish has its own style, and a hundred dishes have a hundred different tastes. This enormous diversity results from creative combinations of different ingredients and distinct ways of cooking methods.

What Are The Must-Eats? – The Most Famous Dishes of Sichuan Cuisine

While Sichuan Cuisine is famous thanks to its diversity and the unique identity, it also features some must-eats for the first-time eaters to create their memorable Sichuan Cuisine experience.

Rather than immersing my readers with pungent, hot, and fragrant homemade feasts, the must-eats I selected encompass a wide spectrum of flavors and I guarantee they are going to make your gourmand stomach fulfilled – their names are Mapo Tofu and Kungpao Chicken.

Mapo Tofu

Photo courtesy to nipic.com 

Mapo Tofu is bean curd served in a chili-and-bean-based sauce, which is a thin, oily, and bright red ingredient, stir-fried with minced meat, usually pork or beef.

Seasonings vary according to different households’ preferences, but oftentimes they include water chestnuts, onions, and other flaky vegetables. The taste of Mapo Tofu is exceptionally nuanced since it maintains a perfect mix of numbness, spice, and freshness along with a pungent aroma, which excites your taste buds to secrete saliva. It fully represents the typical taste of Sichuan Cuisine - spicy-hot and numbering. 

Click on Mapo Tofu to learn how to cook the dish at home.

Photo courtesy to visitbeijing.com.cn 

Kungpao Chicken

Kungpao Chicken is cooked by stir-frying diced chicken, dry red pepper and golden peanuts altogether at a strong heat. Kungpao Chicken is usually less spicy than Mapo Tofu, and you can even find it at Panda Express, although it doesn’t inherit the essence of traditional Sichuan Cuisine. However, click on Kungpao Chicken to learn to cook the authentic ones!

I Don’t Want To Cook! Where Can I Get a Bite? - Restaurants To Go To in Los Angeles

I understand you are a college student and you already have so much on your plate, so you probably don’t have time to cook yourself, but you still really want to try this amazing cuisine. Well, the good news is Sichuan Cuisine is exceptionally famous around the world, so you can easily find a Sichuan restaurant within 1-hour drive from wherever you are.  

Although the most authentic Sichuan food is still to be found in its hometown, you can still get a pretty decent bite of Sichuan Cuisine by going to these food places in Los Angeles because their owners are from Sichuan.

• Chengdu Lao Zao Hotpot
• Phone number: (626) 293-7099
• Address: 227 W Valley Blvd, San Gabriel, CA 91776
• Chengdu Taste
• Phone number: (626) 588-2284
• Address: 828 W Valley Blvd, Alhambra, CA 91803
• Szechuan Impression
• Phone number: (626) 283-4622
• Address: 1900 W Valley Blvd, Alhambra, CA 91803

After reading this post, I hope you have figured out what to get for today’s dinner.  

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