Last night I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Sichuan-Style Blistered Green Beans from his The Wok cookbook.

The only new-to-me and hard-to-find ingredient was the ya cai, which is a kind of pickled mustard. I had stockpiled some zha cai for a tofu recipe which is also a kind of pickled mustard, but they’re different in some way that I’m too much of a novice to know. This is not the kind of ingredient that YDFM would have, and it turns out my local Asian store didn’t have it either, but they pointed me to a can of “Szechuen Preserved Vegetable” as a substitute. I wonder if it is also zha cai.

Fortunately I happened to be meeting a friend in Norcross for beers and was able to run into the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market, which is where I had originally obtained the packet of zha cai. Sure enough, right next to the zha cai were packets of “Sichuan Yibin SuiMiYaCai.” Jackpot. The ya cai is very salty on its own, but in a way where I kept coming back for some nibbles, but a bite would be too much.

The recipe offers two preparation methods: dry-frying and broiling. I have tried the broiler method for this dish before from a Lopez-Alt recipe on Serious Eats so I figured I’d dry-fry this time. Especially since Lopez-Alt’s reasoning for including the alternative broiler method is because it leaves you with a bit of leftover oil. We regularly save and reuse our oil, so that was not a problem for us.

The dish turned out great, much better than his version on Serious Eats. I don’t if it’s the dry-frying, the ya cai, or something else, but I give it 5 stars. The chewiness of the pork and ya cai, the numbing from the Sichuan peppercorns, the heat from the chilis, it all combines into something delicious. My wife wasn’t as ecstatic about it, only giving it 4 stars, but thought it was still very good. My son tried a bit of pork and commented that he was surprised it was spicy (he’s trying to increase his spice tolerance so that he can better enjoy Takis). My daughter opted not to try it.

I will definitely make this dish again.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.