02.19.07
Another Revolutionary Dinner
Back to Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cooking tonight, for a fine trifecta. We decied to revisit the smoked tofu and bacon with chiles, because we had some smoked tofu that wanted using up, and to accompany it I made stir-fried peppers with black beans (p. 201) and spicy coriander salad (p. 59).
Together, the three dishes make a smashing combination. The heat and unctuousness of the bacon and tofu dish are balanced out by the crisp, clean vegetal and vinegary flavors of the coriander salad, and they are both countered by the sweetness and pungency of the peppers and black beans. Texture-wise, they also play well together, with the leafy, tender salad, the oily, meaty bacon and tofu, and the just-barely-the-other-side-of-crunchy peppers.
The coriander salad is gorgeous visually as well as being tasty, and, if you are fortunate enough to have a bunch of friends who happily eat quite hot dishes, would make a dynamite summertime contribution to a potluck or dinner party.
What makes it so hot is not just the salted chopped chiles, of which there is only a moderate amount, but also that the light dressing for the greens uses a liberal quantity of hot chili sesame oil. Less flaming tastebuds might halve the hot chili sesame oil or leave it out altogether, relying on only the salted chopped chiles.
The peppers recipe calls for both red and green bell peppers, but we had only green ones. Nonetheless, it is an appealing and delicious dish, and I suspect it will reheat nicely too.
And then of course there was the bacon and tofu, which I think I really nailed this time (last time I overcooked the bacon a bit in the wok, this time I was more sparing because I realized it really didn’t want to be treated to quite so much heat for quite as long as I had done before). The textures were outstanding and the flavor superb. I used more chiles this time, as well, as I had slightly wimped out on the number requested in the previous iteration out of conservatism occasioned by having just bought a new bag of dried Tientsin chiles and not really knowing how hot they were. Now that I know, though, we used the full complement and it was perfection itself. (So much so that my Belovedary has just scarfed one of the the last remaining bits of bacon out of the bowl… we haven’t quite gotten around to putting the leftovers away yet.)
