Understanding Sichuan Food: The Flavours Behind the Heat

Sichuan food is the most popular regional cuisine in China and the best known abroad. Its reputation is for heat. That is true as far as it goes, and it hides what cooks in the province consider the point. Their saying is that a hundred dishes have a hundred flavours. Chilli is only one instrument.

Two kinds of heat

The first is the Sichuan pepper, which is not a pepper but the dried husk of the fruit of a prickly ash tree. It is native to the region and has been used for more than two thousand years. It is not hot. It produces a tingling numbness on the lips and tongue, with a scent like citrus.

The second is the chilli, which came from the Americas. It reached Sichuan only in the reign of the Kangxi emperor, around the end of the seventeenth century, probably by way of the coast, and historians of the cuisine treat its arrival as the line between the old cooking of the province and the new. The combination of the two, numbing and hot, is called mala, and is found nowhere else.

The flavours

Sichuan cooks classify dishes by compound flavour. The traditional count is 24. The most important are these.

Mala. Numbing and hot, as in mapo tofu and in hotpot.

Yuxiang. Fish-fragrant, which contains no fish. It is a balance of pickled chilli, garlic, ginger, spring onion, sugar and vinegar, originally the seasonings used for fish. It is applied to shredded pork and to aubergine.

Guaiwei. Strange flavour: salty, sweet, numbing, hot, sour and nutty all at once, with sesame paste. It is used on cold chicken.

Suanla. Hot and sour, from vinegar and white or red pepper.

Hongyou. Red oil, chilli oil mellowed with sugar and soy, on cold dishes and dumplings.

Lychee flavour. Sweet and sour, with the heat of scorched dried chillies in the background. This is the flavour of kung pao chicken.

Others are not hot at all. They include the garlic paste flavour, the ginger juice flavour, the smoky tea-scented flavour of smoked duck and the plain salt-savoury flavour of clear soups. A well-ordered meal moves between them.

The larder

The foundation of the cooking is doubanjiang, a paste of broad beans and chillies fermented for a year or more. The best comes from Pixian, on the edge of Chengdu. Fermented black beans, pickled mustard tuber, pickled chillies and sweet fermented flour paste are the other preserved seasonings, with garlic, ginger and star anise.

What to order

Mapo tofu. Soft bean curd with minced beef in a red sauce, finished with ground Sichuan pepper.

Twice-cooked pork. Belly pork boiled, sliced and fried with bean paste and garlic leaves. Locals regard it as the test of a home cook.

Kung pao chicken. Diced chicken with peanuts and dried chillies.

Fuqi feipian. Cold sliced beef and offal in red oil.

Dan dan noodles. A small bowl of noodles with minced pork, preserved vegetable and chilli oil, once sold from a shoulder pole.

Hotpot. A pot of bubbling oil and stock in which diners cook their own food.

Chengdu and Chongqing

The cuisine has schools. That of Chengdu is the more refined and relies on bean paste and balance. That of Chongqing, downstream, is rougher and hotter, and is the home of the beef-fat hotpot. The salt town of Zigong has a third style, known for fresh chillies and ginger. UNESCO named Chengdu a City of Gastronomy, the first in Asia.

For the top of the range, the Michelin Guide Chengdu lists Yu Zhi Lan, where the classic flavours are served in the manner of a banquet. For a base in the city, The Temple House stands beside the lanes of Taikoo Li, where many of the well-known restaurants have branches.