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Sichuan Restaurants Though many Seattle-area restaurants serve Mandarin and Cantonese fare, it can be harder to find true Sichuanese food. Here are a few restaurants that specialize in the spicy cuisine of China’s Sichuan region. Bamboo Garden Restaurant 202 106th Place N.E., Bellevue, (425) 688-7991 Sichuanese Cuisine Restaurant 1048 S. Jackson St., (206) 720-1690 Szechuan Bean Flower 10005 Aurora Ave. N., (206) 525-1380 Szechuan Bistro 212 N. 85th St., (206) 781-1818 Szechuan Chef 15015 Main St., Bellevue, (425) 746-9008

Recipes: Dry-Fried Green Beans Tea Smoked Duck Spicy Sesame Noodles

“China is the place for food, but Sichuan is the place for flavor,” declares Fuchsia Dunlop in her cookbook The Land of Plenty (Norton, 2003). Dunlop, a Brit who studied cooking at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, China, has devoted her entire fabulous cookbook solely to Sichuan cuisine. And am I ever glad she did. I love Chinese food, but I adore Sichuan dishes.

My first exposure to Sichuan cuisine (sometimes spelled Szechuan or Szechwan) was at a no-frills restaurant in New York’s Chinatown, sometime in the 1970s. I remember tasting for the first time dishes such as hot and sour soup, cold sesame noodles and dry-fried string beans. It was revelatory. After knowing only Cantonese and Mandarin food, I found these dishes distinct: full of salty, robust, complex flavors. And the food was spicy—remarkably so.

This Sichuan fire comes in part from large doses of red Sichuan chilis (Capsicum annuum), either pickled or dried and ground into powder and mixed into chili pastes and oils. Introduced to Asia from the Americas in the 16th century, the peppers are still known in Sichuan as hai jiao, or “sea peppers,” alluding to their arrival from foreign lands. 

But chilis are not the sole source of heat in Sichuan dishes. Some responsibility goes to the world-famous Sichuan peppercorns, or Zanthoxylum piperitum. These peppercorns—no relation to black peppercorns—are native to China, Japan and Korea. A cousin to Japanese sansho pepper, dried Sichuan peppercorns are rosy-rust-colored berries with wrinkled husks and hair-thin stems. With their unique scent of floral, camphor and citrus, Sichuan peppercorns produce a tingling, numbing sensation on the palate, a desirable attribute to the Chinese that is called ma in Sichuanese. Banned in the United States for almost 40 years because they are thought to carry a citrus canker virus, Sichuan peppercorns are now heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, killing any and all viruses before importation and are available here once more.

Although the Sichuanese rely on typical Chinese cooking techniques, such as stir-frying and deep-frying, they pride themselves on having a vast array of culinary skills. According to Dunlop, the Sichuanese employ 56 “official” cooking methods, including dry-frying, pickling, dry-braising, smoking, roasting and something enticingly named “frying-fragrant.”

Sichuan chefs also wield a large variety of slicing and cutting combinations to differentiate textures and appearance and to feature 23 “official” Sichuanese flavor combinations. These combinations are all compelling, ranging from the “fish-fragrant flavor,” which features pickled red chilis, garlic, ginger and scallions—but no fish—and is used as a topping for cold chicken or eggplant, to the “strange-flavor,” a balanced mixture of salty, numbing, hot, sour, fresh and fragrant flavors. Who can resist a cuisine that wholeheartedly embraces something called “strange-flavor”?

Dry-fried green beans is a well-known Sichuan recipe that exemplifies the robust flavors of this cuisine. Contrary to its name, the beans are not the least bit dry. Traditional dry-fried bean recipes cook the beans in a generous amount of oil or even deep-fry them, until they are wrinkled and tender, then season them with ground pork, soy sauce, preserved vegetables, rice wine and sesame oil. Sometimes the beans are sprinkled with a bit of ground Sichuan peppercorn as well. (For a vegetarian version of dry-fried green beans, see recipe.)

On a plate, dry-fried green beans appear to lounge in a bath of fiery dark red oil. Though this can appear terrifyingly spicy to American eyes, much of the spiciness will be left on the plate in the oil. Breathe deeply, have faith and dig in; you will taste an amazing dish of intensely salty, crunchy, yet not overly spicy beans—balanced, flavorful and unforgettably Sichuan. 

Jean Galton is a Seattle-based food writer, stylist and recipe tester.

Click here for tips on pairing wine with spicy food.