Latest news with #Sichuanese
Sydney Morning Herald
11-08-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
Adam Liaw's Sichuan beef
Sichuan chilli bean paste, doubanjiang, is savoury, a little spicy, and a perfect way to give stir-fries a Sichuanese bent. Method Step 1 Combine the beef with all the marinade ingredients and set aside for 10 minutes. Heat a wok over high heat and add 2 tbsp of the vegetable oil. Stir-fry the beef in 2 batches until browned, then remove. Rinse out the wok and return it to the heat. Step 2 Add the remaining oil to the hot wok along with the garlic and ginger. Fry for a few seconds, then add the chilli bean paste and fry for about 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the onions, capsicum and celery and stir-fry for 2 minutes until just softened. Return the beef to the wok and add the soy sauce and sugar. Stir-fry for another minute, then add a little of the cornstarch mixture and toss to thicken the sauce.
The Age
11-08-2025
- General
- The Age
Adam Liaw's Sichuan beef
Sichuan chilli bean paste, doubanjiang, is savoury, a little spicy, and a perfect way to give stir-fries a Sichuanese bent. Method Step 1 Combine the beef with all the marinade ingredients and set aside for 10 minutes. Heat a wok over high heat and add 2 tbsp of the vegetable oil. Stir-fry the beef in 2 batches until browned, then remove. Rinse out the wok and return it to the heat. Step 2 Add the remaining oil to the hot wok along with the garlic and ginger. Fry for a few seconds, then add the chilli bean paste and fry for about 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the onions, capsicum and celery and stir-fry for 2 minutes until just softened. Return the beef to the wok and add the soy sauce and sugar. Stir-fry for another minute, then add a little of the cornstarch mixture and toss to thicken the sauce.
Boston Globe
15-07-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Chinese students flocked to Central Illinois. Their food followed.
For the more than 6,000 students from China in Urbana and Champaign, the wealth of products and dishes from back home can make the two cities seem like a mirage rising from the plains of central Illinois. Surrounded by miles of flat, green fields of soy and grain corn, the cities have a combined population of about 127,000 people and a skyline that rarely pokes above 15 stories. The area isn't anybody's idea of a major metropolitan center. It certainly isn't the first place you'd think to look when you are in the mood for serious Chinese food. Get Winter Soup Club A six-week series featuring soup recipes and cozy vibes, plus side dishes and toppings, to get us all through the winter. Enter Email Sign Up After a quick walk from the university's main quad, though, you can sit down to a faithful rendition of spicy bullfrog hot pot in a Sichuanese broth studded with green peppercorns. A nearby restaurant serves yangrou paomo, a Shaanxi lamb soup with floating scraps of flatbread that is a favorite in Xi'an. If you are struck by a late-night craving for stinky tofu in the style of Changsha, you can get it after 8:30 p.m. from a chef who dresses fried black cubes of fermented bean curd in a glistening orange chile oil, the way vendors do on the streets of Hunan's capital city. Advertisement You'd have to hunt to find these dishes in a major city like Chicago, 135 miles away, but they have become a fixture of life in Champaign and Urbana. At least two dozen Chinese restaurants, bakeries, bubble-tea shops and Asian grocery stores are clustered close to the campus. Along a five-block stretch of Green Street, the main commercial strip in the part of Champaign known as Campustown, window posters and sidewalk sandwich boards advertise dumplings, noodles and stir-fries in larger-than-life color photographs captioned in Chinese and usually, but not always, English. Advertisement The Golden Harbor restaurant, which has more than 1,000 items on the menu, in Champaign. Like many college towns, the area around the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been transformed by a surge of foreign students, but visa clampdowns could threaten that. ANJALI PINTO/NYT Most of these places are quite new. Almost all have opened in the past 15 years. Dai Shi, a local pastry chef originally from Fuzhou, first visited Champaign in 2010, when her parents owned a Chinese restaurant in town. They had only a handful of competitors, she said. At the time, about 1,100 students from China attended the university. Now there are more than five times as many, and the campus area has become a little Chinatown on the prairie. New York University enrolls more Chinese students than any other school in the United States. But the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is in a virtual tie for second place with the University of Southern California, according a New York Times analysis of 2023 visa data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Related : Urbana and Champaign are not the only places where the surge in international students has changed the local culture and economy. But the area's rural isolation and unusually large population of Chinese students make it a striking example of that change. Advertisement In the coming months or years, they may also make it something of a laboratory for the effects of the Trump administration's cuts to research budgets and clampdowns on visas for international students, especially those from China. Feast in a cornfield College-age students in China have a nickname for the University of Illinois: yu mi de . It means the Cornfield. The university is better known there for its surrounding farmland and its strengths in STEM fields like engineering and computer science than for its proximity to crunchy Northern-style stir-fried pork intestines. Each August, hundreds of new Chinese students show up with no inkling that the Cornfield is full of foods they grew up on. More than 270,000 students from China attended American colleges and universities last year. Restaurants catering to them represent a new wave in Chinese dining in the United States. In Manhattan, the blocks around NYU and Columbia, which 20 years ago held little appeal to fans of Chinese food, have become troves of Shanghai drunken crab and Hong Kong-style barbecue pork buns. You can find high-level Chinese cooking near campuses in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Iowa City, Iowa. They are more cosmopolitan than the linoleum-floored joints in the old urban Chinatowns that started out feeding home-style cooking to villagers from Guangdong in the early 20th century. They are more up-to-date than the palaces of aristocratic Chinese cuisine overseen by highly trained chefs who fled the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s. Aimed at younger customers whose memories of China are still fresh, they tend to be informal, fairly inexpensive if not rock-bottom cheap, and faithful in recreating true regional cuisines. Advertisement Dishes at Northern Cuisine include crispy pork in sweet and sour glaze, stewed pork belly in a toasted bun and wok-fried crispy pork intestine with dry chili, in Champaign. ANJALI PINTO/NYT Students in Urbana and Champaign trade intel on regional dishes in group texts in Chinese on the social-media apps RedNote and WeChat. The most useful sources for exploring menus around the Cornfield are the Asian-food-delivery apps Hungry Panda and Fantuan, whose vehicles, bearing a logo of an anthropomorphic dumpling, are as common on the streets as red-and-blue Domino's cars are in other American college towns. The drivers 'are all Chinese people,' Qian said. 'When they reach my apartment, they call me and speak Mandarin right away.' 'Everyone is buckled up' A year ago on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump proposed that all international students who graduated from U.S. colleges be granted green cards 'automatically.' After taking office in January, Trump chose a different path. His administration froze applications for student visas in May. When the process started up again a month later, the State Department put out new orders for stricter vetting of applicants' 'online presence' — looking for, among other things, signs of 'hostility' toward the United States. Consulates were told to give priority to applicants bound for schools where international students make up less than 15% of the total. That statistic at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is above 20%. Chinese nationals, who made up more than a quarter of the 1.1 million international students in the United States last year, face extra scrutiny. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the government would 'aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.' Whether tighter screening and delays will cut into the number of international students at the University of Illinois in the coming academic year won't be clear until September, said Robin Kaler, an associate chancellor. Advertisement Until then, faculty, administrators and local businesses are bracing for the impact. A significant drop could have a major economic effect on college towns like Urbana and Champaign. International students in Illinois spend $2.4 billion a year and support more than 23,000 jobs in the state, according to a 2024 analysis by NAFSA, a professional association for international educators. Tuition is the biggest expenditure, but real estate, car dealerships and other businesses also benefit. Diners at Northern Cuisine in Champaign. New York University enrolls more Chinese students than any other school in the US, but the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is in a virtual tie for second place with the University of Southern California. ANJALI PINTO/NYT As more Asian businesses crowd in, the struggle for survival becomes increasingly Darwinian. Restaurants along Green Street can come and go in the span of a year. Now, their owners are anticipating fewer students from other countries, especially China, said Tim Chao, who owns three cafes with his wife, Shi. Until recently, Chao said, many restaurateurs aimed their offerings squarely at those students. If significant numbers of them aren't allowed into the United States, or decide to study in a country that feels more welcoming, 'the general consensus is that they'll need to change the flavors, change the menu and how they present themselves,' he said. For instance, the noodle shop that sells Changsha stinky tofu just added grilled meat skewers and other, more entry-level items to its late-night menu. 'Everyone is buckled up right now,' Chao said. Many long-term residents are hoping that their favorite restaurants stick around and stay interesting. 'This cultural richness enhances us all,' said Leslie Cooperband, a retired cheesemaker who lives in Champaign, after we shared some very good three-cup chicken at Golden Harbor, a Taiwanese and Chinese landmark so celebrated that an indie-rock band wrote a song about it. Advertisement 'It's like, wow, look at what we have here in this town of 100,000 people,' she said. 'And we're all better for it.' This article originally appeared in .
Straits Times
10-06-2025
- Straits Times
Food Picks: Chengdu Bowl's flagship at Changi Airport offers Sichuan dishes with a speakeasy concept
SINGAPORE – Chengdu Bowl, a new self-styled speakeasy at Changi Airport Terminal 3, makes a half-hearted attempt at secrecy, disguised as it is behind a suspiciously flat vending machine stamped with the label 'pull'. Too bad the set-up is undermined by the fact that you can turn the corner and walk right into the restaurant anyway. Its gaping side – presumably meant to be concealed by an as-yet-underutilised curtain – beckons the trickle of diners who find themselves ambling around this corner of Terminal 3. Then again, no one seeks out Sichuan food for the intrigue. What diners come for is flavour – vivid, bold and bright. Crammed with enough spice to consign one to the toilet for the next half hour. And that it indeed delivers. Chengdu Bowl, which has three branches in the Central Business District, has swopped out its grain bowls for sharing dishes like la zi ji ($22.80). Mala xiao la (small spice) orderers, beware: This is not for the heat-shy. It pinches, it numbs. It parts to reveal pillows of cheesy rice cake, which offer some textual variety but do little to slow the burn. On the less potent side of the spice spectrum, assorted skewers are steeped in a piquant red chilli oil ($14.80), chicken is soaked in a bold mala broth and served with ramen noodles ($16.80) and beef sizzles on a hotplate ($23.80), its caramelised fat rendering into kailan and oyster mushrooms. But Chengdu Bowl does not want to be defined by firepower alone. As its menu proves, there is more to Sichuanese cuisine than la zi ji and mapo tofu. The silky prawn with luffa in golden broth ($26.80), for example, is a masterclass in how to deliver flavour without resorting to violence. Mom's homemade rice pot from Chengdu Bowl. PHOTO: CHENGDU BOWL Mom's homemade rice pot ($32.80) – a stodgy porridge of abalone, prawns and diced vegetables that is good for four or five diners – dabbles in similar flavours, but leans slightly towards the sweeter side. All in all, it is a hearty upgrade from Chengdu Bowl's usual offerings and a welcome addition to Changi Airport's culinary roster – with or without the clandestine thrill. Where: Changi Airport Terminal 3 Departure Hall, 03-21, 65 Airport Boulevard MRT: Changi Airport Open: 11am to 9.30pm daily Info: Check out ST's Food Guide for the latest foodie recommendations in Singapore.
Malay Mail
15-05-2025
- General
- Malay Mail
In Cheras, Fang Hong Curry Mee serves up a little bit of everything — from curry mee, to Hakka ‘zha yuk' and Sichuanese stir-fried pork and peppers
KUALA LUMPUR, May 15 — At a glance, Fang Hong Curry Mee looks exactly like what its name suggests: a curry mee joint. But it is also so much more. Housed in a quiet row of shops facing a residential area in Taman Sri Bahtera, Cheras, the first signs that there may be more than meets the eye are the large tables, some with lazy susans and tablecloths, and rows upon rows of laminated pictures on the walls depicting a repertoire far wider and deeper than just curry mee. There are steamed, fried or braised fish heads, slick with tauchu and bitter gourd; chicken steamed in a herbal, gingery broth; and large plates of braised pork belly, tofu, and curry fish head. Some dishes are old-school Malaysian-Chinese dai chow staples. Others are distinctly Chinese and lean Sichuanese in both spirit and heat, a reflection of the woman running front-of-house, who hails from the province. And yet, for all the variety, the curry mee remains the anchor. It's the name on the signboard, the default order, the thing that still draws first-timers and regulars alike through the door. There's the signature 'king' curry mee (RM16.80), loaded with hunks of chicken and taufu pok, then piled high with squid, prawns, fish cake and cockles. The regular curry mee comes with fried 'fu chuk' and 'siew yoke', though the curry broth is clearly based on chicken curry. — Picture by Ethan Lau The regular version (RM10) is more restrained but no less satisfying, topped with siew yoke and fried fu chuk alongside the usual chicken and taufu pok. What both share is the same rich, thick broth. It carries a mild, lingering heat and leans a little sweet, though it's not overly creamy or heavy with coconut milk. There's none of the shrimp-y savoury depth or herbaceous lift you'd expect from a typical curry laksa – in fact, this might be the furthest thing from curry laksa I've ever had, while still calling itself curry mee. What it almost certainly is, at heart, is chicken curry – potatoes and all – with noodles and toppings thrown in. But it's a very tasty chicken curry, and the jar of sambal on the table offers a quick savoury boost, curiously rich with the flavour of dried shrimps. Fang Hong is popular with regulars from the neighbourhood, all mostly old. — Picture by Ethan Lau On a recent afternoon, the air was thick with the rowdy cadence of Hakka, spoken by a crowd of regulars streaming in, the overwhelming majority of them seemingly over the age of 50. The chef emerged briefly, a short, balding man who spoke a mix of Cantonese and Hakka and seemed to be on a first-name basis with several of the regulars, before disappearing back into the kitchen. Soon, dishes began to appear. Sichuan-style 'xiao chao rou' is as fragrant as it is bold and delicious, and is a hit with the regulars. — Picture by Ethan Lau Some, like the Sichuan 小炒肉 (xiao chao rou, RM28), filled the room with a heady perfume of Sichuan peppercorns, red and green peppers, leeks and onions, wok-fried with thin slices of pork belly. It's the kind of dish made for rice – punchy, fragrant and deeply moreish – and it's easy to see why the regulars have embraced it. Other dishes are closer to home, like the Hakka zha yuk (RM25), a speciality of the chef and a triumphant balance of soft, jiggly pork belly and wood ear fungus, springy and slightly rubbery, in a savoury sauce boosted with nam yu, red fermented bean curd. The chef here specialises in a few Hakka dishes, including braised 'zha yuk'. — Picture by Ethan Lau Taking us home were a pair of tried and true classics: sweet and sour pork (RM22) and claypot kangkung (RM14). Serviceable versions of both are easy enough to find elsewhere, but they were especially good here. The craggy, crispy nuggets of pork were coated – not drenched – in a thick, tangy sauce, retaining their crunch to great effect. And the kangkung, while seemingly plain, was nothing to scoff at. Even plain old claypot 'kangkung' is well-executed here. — Picture by Ethan Lau Crunchy, juicy and packed with dried shrimp, it was a quiet winner. It's a curious one, for sure. A rather unique rendition of curry mee, the Sichuan stir-fries, Hakka stews, textbook sweet and sour pork – but the regulars don't seem to mind. If anything, they've taken it in stride, eating without missing a beat, as people do when the food is good, and they know they'll keep coming. Look for the plain but easily spotted yellow sign. — Picture by Ethan Lau Restoran Fang Hong Curry Mee 47, Jalan Jalak, Taman Sri Bahtera, Kuala Lumpur Open Friday to Wednesday, 7am-3pm and Friday to Sunday, 5.30-9pm Tel: 018-278 8699 * This is an independent review where the writer paid for the meal. * Follow us on Instagram @eatdrinkmm for more food gems. * Follow Ethan Lau on Instagram @eatenlau for more musings on food and mildly self-deprecating attempts at humour.
