Tag Archives: Sichuan peppercorns

Cacio E Pepe Goes Sichuanese

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Cacio e pepe goes Asian with Sichuan pepper.
Cacio e pepe goes Asian with Sichuan pepper.

Fly By Jing’s chili crisp and Zhong dumpling sauces are mainstays in my fridge because they are the perfect finish to so many dishes.

So when founder Jing Gao debuted her cookbook, “The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp” (Ten Speed Press),” I couldn’t wait to leaf through it.

The book, of which I received a review copy, takes its title from the delicious “fly” (hole-in-the-wall) street-food eateries that Gao and her parents would grab a bite to eat at in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan region.

Her father, a nuclear physics professor with a Chinese visa, moved the family around annually for his job. Sichuan food became the one constant in Gao’s life. And it became her calling after she left the corporate business world to start Baoism, her own restaurant in Shanghai that operated for two years. All the while, she kept refining the condiments that were her cooking touchstones.

After traveling to a natural foods trade show in California, and discovering the dearth of Asian food brands that existed, she launched Fly by Jing in 2018 through a Kickstarter campaign. Today, these popular products are sold in Whole Foods, Target, and Costco.

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What To Cook With Half A Pound of Ground Lamb …

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Better than takeout: Ma po tofu, made with ground lamb instead.
Better than takeout: Ma po tofu, made with ground lamb instead.

As cookbook writer Andrea Nguyen learned on a trip to Chengdu, there is no one way to make the classic dish of ma po tofu.

As she writes in her seminal cookbook, “Asian Tofu: Discover the Best, Make Your Own, and Cook It at Home” (Ten Speed Press, 2012), this home-style, saucy dish is sometimes made with ground beef; other times, ground pork. And sometimes chile bean sauce; or other times, a heap of Sichuan peppercorns.

So hopefully, she won’t consider it sacrilege that I actually made it with ground lamb instead.

But when I had a half a pound of ground lamb left over from another recipe, and was looking for a home for it, I found it ideally in this recipe of hers.

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