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Boiled pork slices with sizzling chilli oil（水煮肉片）

This version of a classic Sichuan dish is easy to make at home and excitingly sizzly.
When Sichuanese cuisine began to blaze a trail across the culinary scene in China in the late 1990s, dishes that were riotous with chillies, Sichuan pepper and fizzing oil claimed centre stage.No dish summed up the new craze for Sichuan better than shui zhu yu, a sizzling basinful of poached fish, oil and spices with the laughably misleading name of “water-boiled fish”.
You weren't actually meant to eat all that oil, of course, but rather remove the slices of fish and crunchy vegetables from it with your chopsticks or the little wire strainers many restaurants provided.The fish was delicately textured, with a fiery kick from the extravagant quantities of dried chillies and Sichuan pepper that lent their flavours to the oil.More sophisticated restaurants would begin by heating their base oil with fragrant spices before it even met the chillies; cheaper places would reuse it.
That flamboyant dish is just one of a whole genre of Sichuanese recipes involving spicy, sizzling oil.Apart from the famously numbing-hot Chongqing ox-tripe hotpot, said to have been invented by Yangtze River labourers, the best-loved is perhaps the “water-boiled beef” of the southern Sichuanese city of Zigong.
The people of Zigong dropped slices of beef into a spicy broth, tipped everything into a bowl, sprinkled over some chillies and pepper and then finished with a hissing libation of oil. The following is a pork version of this classic dish that's easy to make at home and excitingly sizzly, but not unreasonably extravagant with the oil.If you make it with Korean ground chillies, the kind used in kimchi, it will have a gorgeous warmth and tingle but won't make your hair stand on end.If you'd like to ratchet the heat up a notch, use fierier chilli flakes for the final garnish.Move fast in the final stages of cooking, so the dish will still be fizzing noisily when presented at the table.

INGREDIENTS

200g lean pork
For the marinade
½ tsp light soy sauce
½ tsp Shaoxing wine
1 tbs potato starch
1 tbs water

For the base vegetables

Half (250g) Chinese leaf cabbage
Leek (optional)
2 Sichuanese dried chillies, snipped in half, seeds discarded
½ tsp whole Sichuan pepper

Other ingredients

2½ tbs Sichuan chilli-bean paste
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
A piece of ginger (about the size of the garlic cloves, peeled and sliced)
300ml stock or water
1 tsp light soy sauce
⅛ tsp sugar
1½ tsp potato starch mixed with 1 tbs cold water
1 tbs coarsely ground chillies
¼ tsp ground roasted Sichuan pepper
1 tbs finely sliced spring onion greens
About 120ml cooking oil

STEPS

1. Slice the pork as evenly as possible into thin, bite-sized pieces.Add the marinade ingredients and set aside.Cut the cabbage and leek (if using) lengthwise into finger-thick sections, and then into 6cm-7cm lengths.
2. Bring some water to the boil in a saucepan or wok and blanch the vegetables for about 30 seconds, to “break their rawness”.Shake dry in a colander.
3. Add 1 tbs oil and the dried chillies and Sichuan pepper to a seasoned wok over a high flame, and sizzle very briefly until they are fragrant.Add the blanched vegetables and stir-fry until they are cooked, adding salt to taste and then pile them in the bottom of your serving bowl.
4. Clean the wok with a wok brush or kitchen paper, and reheat over a medium flame.Add 3 tbs of fresh oil, followed by the chilli-bean paste, and stir-fry until the oil is red and fragrant.
5. Add the garlic and ginger and fry briefly until they smell wonderful, then add the stock or water, soy sauce and sugar.Bring to the boil.
6. Sprinkle the meat slices in the boiling liquid, separating them as you go.Nudge them gently with your ladle or wok scoop so that they don't stick together.When they are just cooked, give the potato starch mixture a stir and add to the centre of the wok, stirring to thicken the sauce.Pour the meat and the sauce over the waiting vegetables and rinse the wok.
7. Return the wok to a high flame with 4 tbs oil and heat until the wok is beginning to smoke.Scatter the ground chillies and ground Sichuan pepper over the centre of the meat dish and use a ladle to pour over the hot oil.The spices will sizzle dramatically as you do this.(To check that the oil is hot enough, first drip over a few drops and listen for the sizzle …)
8. Scatter over the spring onions and bring the dish to the table before the sizzling stops.