Braised Sichuan beef cheek with orange for Chinese New Year

Like most food lovers, I am a sucker for a food holiday. Whether it’s Christmas, Passover, or Tet, if I can learn about traditional celebrations and make splendid dishes, I’ll be a happy bunny. Hey, I said bunny! Yup, this week marks the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Rabbit and I’ve been busily shopping for oranges, black fungus, and all manner of other exciting ingredients. While I’m happy to celebrate most anything, I have a soft spot for Chinese New Year from my years of living in downtown Manhattan. Every year, I would go down to Mott St. to find the crowds and watch the dragon and lion dances. All the shops would be full of New Year decorations — and the bakeries full of moon cakes, which I have to confess I think are vile. I tended to go for celebratory pork buns which might not be traditional but are nonetheless delicious on a cold day.

According to the Chinese horoscope sites I’ve been reading, the year of the rabbit promises a relaxing, laid back year after the dynamic tiger last year. Calmness, leisure and an unhurried pace are promised, which sounds like a Very Good Thing to me. In that spirit, my first new year recipe is a leisurely braise, using oranges, which are a common ingredient in Chinese New Year cooking. It’s rich, meaty and spicy, and I’m going to complement it with a light and crunchy lucky vegetable dish in my next post.

Sichuan braised beef with orange

This dish has a lot of ingredients but you’re mostly chucking them in a pot and leaving for hours, so it’s not hard. It begins with a braise and then adds the braised meat into a final stir fry. However, if you felt especially laid back (it is the year of the rabbit, after all) you could simply stop there and serve the braised beef with some steamed or wok-fried greens.

for the braise:

• stick of cinnamon
• 5 garlic cloves
• 1 tsp Sichuan peppercorns
• 8 dried red chilies
• 3 star anise
• 2 pieces of dried mandarin peel
• 2 strips fresh orange peel
• 2 heaping tsp chili bean paste
• 1 tbsp light soy sauce
• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 1 beef cheek

Trim the cheek of any visible fat and season with salt and pepper. Brown in vegetable oil in an ovenproof casserole. Meanwhile, toast the peppercorns, cinnamon, star anise, chilies, and dried mandarin peel one at a time on a dry skillet until they release their scent. It will only take a few seconds per ingredient, so be careful not to burn them. Crush the garlic cloves roughly. When the meat is browned all over, take it out and put it on a plate for a moment. In the same pot, add the chili bean paste and fry. Add all the other ingredients, put the meat back in, and add 2 cups of water. Bring to the boil, then cover and put in a medium-low oven (gas mark 3, 325 F, 170 C). Cook for 3 hours, turning the meat occasionally.

for the stir fry:

• vegetable oil
• bunch of spring onions
• 1 red pepper
• 2 handfuls of sugar snap peas
• 1 tbsp chili bean paste
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 12–15 dried red chilies
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp Sichuan peppercorns
• the peel and juice of 1/2 orange

Towards the end of the braising time, prep the next stage. Cut the onions into 1/2 inch slices, slice the red pepper thinly, top and tail the sugar snaps, chop the garlic to a paste, and julienne the orange peel very finely. Juice the orange. Make the sauce by mixing bean paste, soy sauce, wine and a little orange juice. Taste for flavour balance.

Once the meat is cooked, let it sit for a few minutes then shred it with a fork. You want it to look like pulled pork. Heat a wok or large frying pan and, once it’s very hot, add a tbsp of oil. When the oil shimmers, fry the spring onions and peppers. Stir for a minute then add the dried chilies, sichuan peppercorns, and orange peel, then the sugar snaps, then the garlic. Stir until the garlic no longer looks raw, then add the meat. Mix well and pour in the sauce. Fry for another minute until everything is well-combined.

Serves 3-4

Sichuan happiness at Lucky Star

Sichuan food has become increasingly trendy in the UK since the opening of Bar Shu in London and  the publication of Fuschia Dunlop’s fantastic books Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper and Sichuan Cookery. But this fashion hasn’t translated rapidly into the high street. While other Asian cuisines benefitted from recent waves of foodie enthusiasm and ingredients such as lemongrass and coconut milk became commonplace in the supermarket, Chinese food in the UK until recently still languished in 1980s-style takeout hell. In large measure it still does, and I tend to ignore the existence of most dodgy-looking Chinese restaurants around town. Moreover, while I’ve eaten in Bar Shu and enjoyed it thoroughly, that type of expensive, hipster dining experience isn’t really my thing. This is where the miracle of Brighton’s Lucky Star comes in, and for once, I can claim a small part in the story.

A year or so ago, a good friend, knowing my love of Asian food, told me about an ordinary little Chinese restaurant he’d seen bustling with Chinese students. (Brighton’s full of language schools so we have a lot of young people from around the world.) Intrigued, he went in, only to be presented with a bog-standard Anglo-Chinese menu, full of chow mein and kung po chicken. He asked if he could have some of the noodles the kids were eating and, after he assured the waiter repeatedly he wouldn’t find it too spicy, they obliged. He was so excited he texted me four times during that bowl of noodles. Soon I went with a larger expedition. We again begged for some of the dishes on the Chinese-language menu – any dishes, we said, just bring us some of this amazing looking food! We received lamb, fragrant with cumin, green beans slick with chili oil and covered in ground pork, deeply gingery tofu and again the heavenly vermicelli soaking up a porky sauce dusted with Sichuan peppercorns. Everything was completely fresh and the flavours fairly sang.

Soon, our original group started bringing more friends. We befriended the owner, Hong, who was pleased and a little bemused to find a group of white folks so enthusiastic about her food. She told us the chef came from Sichuan province, as she does, and they both return regularly to research new dishes. The menu was still a bit of a challenge and the waiters, while lovely, had understandably limited patience for our interrogations. So I bought a book on reading Chinese food characters and started to order dishes I could at least partially decipher on the menu. I was so proud of my limited Chinese reading skills and recognising ma po tofu or twice-cooked pork led to more amazing food. While the Chinese-reading experiment was fun, Hong took pity on us and persuaded one of the waiters to translate the menu. It turns out, our proselytizing had brought in a regular customer base who weren’t Chinese but wanted to eat the Sichuan regional cuisine.

Now there’s a full English-language menu that includes both familar Sichuan dishes and more unusual ones. A classic dish like beef in chili oil is a real showcase for the Sichuan peppercorn and dried chili combination: smoky warm chilies and floral peppercorns combine with a reassuringly oily broth. The cold potato with chili is at least as good as Bar Shu’s rendition of the dish, amazingly light with enough garlic and chili to infuse the julienned potato with a rich tang. Hong will also steer you toward some Northern fare for a winter’s evening: braised beef with potato, redolent of wine and anise, or by contrast stir fried vinegar cabbage with black fungus, seared with a satisfying wok hei. Moreover, new dishes appear each time the chef comes back from China. This is really exciting regional cooking, balancing traditional dishes with an obvious love for where Sichuan food is now.

I still see people come in for the generic Chinese buffet menu, and I suppose the restaurant relies on those customers too, but Lucky Star’s Sichuan menu feels like a secret club that I’ve been lucky enough to have joined. If you’re ever in Brighton, stop by and say hi to Hong from me…

Lucky Star, 101 Trafalagar St, Brighton BN2 4ER (no website)