02.24.07
Hunan Pickled Cabbage, and sequelae
I’m a fool for pickles. Always have been. Pickled anything, pretty much — green beans, carrots, onions, mushrooms, beets, radishes, peppers, peaches, cabbage, cauliflower, garlic, limes — whatever you got. As long as it’s not mango (all mango tastes roughly like gasoline to me, and not in a pleasant aftertastey way but in an oh my god I’ve just eaten something toxic help help way), I’ll probably try it and like it.
It will thus come as little surprise to anyone that one of my favorite homestyle dishes at a little strip-mall Chinese/Taiwanese restaurant we sometimes go to down near where my Belovedary has been working lately, in Rockville, MD, is pickled cabbage with pork. (The restaurant is called Chopstix, and despite the horrible name, is really very nice, particularly if you order from the “home style” menu. Also, you can get the same pickled cabbage dish with chicken if you prefer. I don’t, though it is also good, the pork is better.) It is spicy, crisp, tart, salty, savory, and generally just a big ol’ festival of umami.
So I was thrilled to find, in the back of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, a recipe of sorts (more a set of rough guidelines really) for Hunan-style pickled vegetables. I made up a batch about 2 weeks ago and have been happily noshing off of it ever since, culminating in two nights in a row, last night and tonight, of stir-frying it with leftover cha siu, with a little bit of garlic, some sesame oil, and some dark soy sauce, making a lovely simple homey dinner for my Belovedary and me. But of course I could not bring myself to eat up all the remaining pickled cabbage before I had made more. MUCH more.
So. Today when we were at the Asian supermarket, I bought a pickle crock. And just about the biggest Napa-type cabbage I have ever seen. Voila:
For size comparison, note that the white thing you can barely see the top of behind the crock is my large Brita filter pitcher, and the cheesecloth bundle in the foreground — which contains a variety of flavoring ingredients like scallion, ginger, dried Tien Tsin chiles, Sichuan flower pepper, star anise, fennel seed, cinnamon bark, garlic cloves, and green cardamom pods — is somewhere between the sizes of a baseball and a softball. That is a big honkin’ cabbage, in other words.
I took a photo of the inside leaves of the cabbage because it was so pretty.
Not all of it fit in my crock… as may be obvious from the photo. I had to cook up some with dinner tonight, and stash some of the rest back in the fridge, in hope that tomorrow, after the brine has made the cabbage that did make it into the crock a little softer, I’ll be able to pack the rest into the crock. Here’s what the crock looked like before I put the clay lid on top (a loose-fitting lid that lets the pickles breathe but keeps foreign objects and dust from getting in)… with some of my incredibly disorganized tea collection on the counter behind it.
Packed to the brim with cabbage, the spice bundle from the previous picture, some pickled jalapenos (called for by Dunlop’s recipe, though I imagine not 100% mandatory) and nearly 6 quarts of the appropriate brine.
And, in case you were wondering, yes, I also took a photo of the pickled cabbage and pork dish we had for dinner. Rice bowls, old tatty stained tablecloth I’ve had for 15 years, and all.
Tell you what, photographing your dinners and blogging the pictures sure does make you realize that you really do need to get off your arse and tidy the kitchen and think about buying a new tablecloth or two. Heh.