Authentic Sichuan cooking — “labor intensive”

At Grand Sichuan Chinese restaurants, we serve mainly the authentic (real, original or genuine) Sichuan food.

Sichuan food originated from Sichuan province in China and has a long history of more than 2,000 years.  Sichuan is an inland province in the Southwest of China and far away from the sea.  Geographically, it is a huge basin surrounded by high mountains.  The subtropical climate is hot and humid.  For thousands years, agriculture was a major part of life.  Under these circumstances, Sichuan food was formed.

1.Sichuan food is famous for its “ Ma” and “La”. “ Ma” is one kind of peppery taste from the wild pepper growing only in Sichuan.  “La” means spicy in Chinese.  Most of the famous Sichuan dishes have the taste of “Ma” or “la” or both.  Including Ma and La, Sichuan cooking has 22 different kinds of basic tastes. On the other hand, Shanghai cooking or Canton cooking has only about six kinds of tastes.

2.Sichuan food has strong and heavy flavors.  As a result, the strong flavor comes from the heavy use of salt, spices and oil and also a lot of cooking.  The heavy cooking ushers the salt, spicy or oil to get into the foods deeply, not just covering the surface of the food.  Chinese thought this type of food was very hard to be accepted directly by westerners.  This is why you never saw a real Sichuan restaurant before in the USA.

3.Sichuan is an inland agricultural region and has standard food structure: pork, chicken, duck, beef, fish and so on.  These are more popular with Americans.  However, there are still some differences: Chinese enjoy eating animal fat, skin, head, foot, internal organs and so on.  Americans never eat them.  This is a cultural difference of food.

4.Because of the humid weather, they often dry and cure food to preserve them.  As a result, they are good at cooking dry and preserved food dishes.  On the other hand, even today, many Sichuan cooks still look awkward cooking fresh food such as fresh seafood.  You have to remember that the Sichuanese are far away from the ocean and have had very few chances of learning how to do such things.

There are Sichuan, Shanghai, Canton, Beijing and other cooking style in China.  All of them use such techniques as sauteed (stir-fry), steam, bake, stew, boil, preserve and others to cook food.  However, the most important cooking technique, or core technique, is sauteed, or called stir-fry. This technique differentiates Chinese cooking from other cooking in the world.  Sichuan cooking takes stir-frying as its symbol.  In other words, Sichuan cooking is in the number one position in stir-frying techniques in China.  The Sichuanese call the technique: small fry and small sautéed.   For doing this, first they heat the wok, then add oil and seasonings to cook.  Then they add raw foods to stir in instantly until everything is 100 percent cooked.  There are three basic steps:

First:  marinated or non-marinated food.  If marinated, doing it just right before cooking.

Second:  hot oil soaking or maybe not.  If doing it, just frying the raw food until it is about 50 % cooked.  Never 100 % cooked.

Third:  stir-fry.  Stirring the raw food without stopping so that the food can be heated evenly and sauce ingredients can be absorbed into the food.  When the food is completely cooked, it will achieve the best combination of food color, aroma and taste.

At the same time the oil protects the food from being burned and makes the food more tasty.