One of my favorite if not most favorite salads. I eat it with steak or fish or just about everything. Make sure the avocado is nice and soft and the tomatoes have as much flavor as possible.

For the salad:
200g (cherry) tomatoes
1 avocado
1/2 red onion
3 T chopped coriander

For the dressing:
juice of 1 lime
1 T light soysauce
1 T fishsauce
1 T olive oil (optional)
1 t sugar

Mix the ingredients for the dressing in a salad bowl. Taste and adjust if necessary. Dice the onion pretty finely, the cilantro roughly, add to the bowl and mix. Cut the tomatoes and avocado in smaller but similar pieces and add to the bowl. You might want to mix everything without the avocado first, to keep it neater.

Rinse a tablespoon of fermented black beans (tausi) and set aside.

Scrub the oysters if they’re still sandy. Open them, cut the oyster loose, but leave them in the half shell. Arrange them an a plate that will fit in your steamer. For stability you could take some tinfoil and mould them into little circles on which you strongly put the oysters. Put about 5 little black beans on each oyster, then pour it with the sauce and steam for about 3-5 minutes until they’re warm and firm up a little, but aren’t completely cooked. Sprinkle with some finely chopped spring onion and serve.

NB Dit recept kun je ook in het Nederlands lezen op: Aziatische-ingrediënten.nl

RECIPE

600g pointed, red peppers (any color or size will do)
1 onion, thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 dl passata
handful of basil, sliced
2 eggs
4 t cream
pinch cayenne pepper

Wash the peppers. Cut off the head and slice lengthwise in half.
If you have a stovetop smoker, smoke the peppers (skin sides up) for about 10-15 minutes. But don’t worry, without smoking them the result will be worthwhile too. Or maybe you could add some Spanish smoked paprika.
Take peppers out and slice in 5mm thin slices.
Slowly saute the onion and garlic in some oil for about 5 minutes until translucent.
Add the sliced peppers and saute for another 5-10 minutes.
Add the passata, season with salt & pepper (or chickenstock powder) and simmer for 5 minutes.
Divide the mixture in 1 or 2 oven dishes.
Push a hole/ditch in the middle and carefully break an egg in it.
Add 1 or 2 teaspoons of cream and a dash of cayennepepper.
Put in a 180°C oven for about 12-15 minutes.
If the mixture was prepared before and cold I would heat it up (in the oven) before adding the egg. But that’s because I like my egg to be runny.

Serve with bread or pasta.

Different from what the name suggests, this is a very typical dutch sandwich spread. I know that in France and Belgium they mean something else with “filet américain”, something the rest of the world calls “steak tartare”, but I’m dutch and this is what dutch people call filet américain. When I was young this was a luxurious treat for special days, nowadays it’s a cheap, day-to-day spread from the supermarket. Their recipe “degraded” so much over the years I decided to start making my own. After all, it’s dead simple, anybody with a blender can do it. I like it with finely chopped raw onions on top and lots of freshly ground black pepper. Spread on a sandwich or going back to the seventies and spread it on some celery sticks!


RECIPE

225 gr lean beef
3 T Kewpie mayonnaise
2 t mustard
1 t paprika powder
½ t salt
½ t ground black pepper
⅛ t curry powder
pinch of cayenne-pepper
10 drops of Worcestershire sauce

Dice the beef and add with all other ingredients to your blender. Blend for quite some time, it really has to become a smooth paste. Taste it and see if you need to add some more spices or salt. Eat the same day, I wouldn’t keep it for longer than 24 hours. Refrigerated of course.

Any lean beef will do. You just don’t want any strings of fat in it because that won’t blend. It doesn’t need to be the most expensive cut, flank steak (bavette) will do just fine. I recommend Kewpie mayonnaise because it’s nice and sour. You can use raw egg yolks instead or a sweeter brand of mayonnaise, but then you might want to add some lemonjuice or vinegar. I use wholegrain mustard from Limburg and “Kerry Djawa” currypowder.

Another classic from Sichuan. There’s no fish or fragrance of fish in there, it’s just a reference to the sauce that originally was used in a famous fish recipe. Like most classics there are hundreds of variations on the dish, with or without meat. I use Ken Hom’s recipe but I skip the deep-frying part, which makes it a easier, quicker and lighter. Maybe not as buttery and velvety, but still very delicious. We eat this regularly.

RECIPE

Stir-fry for 3 minutes or until nicely browned:
400 gr minced pork (or beef)

Add and stir-fry for another minute or two:
2 T chopped garlic
2 T chopped ginger
3 T chopped (spring) onion (no need for spring onion)

Add and bring to the boil:
1,25 dl water or chicken stock
2 T dark soy sauce
3 T Shaoxing rice wine
3 T Chinese black vinegar (sweet black vinegar is nice too)
2 T sugar (or less when you used sweetened black vinegar)
1 T Sichuan pepper (roasted and ground)
2 t chili-beanpaste (toban jiang)
1/2 t grounded black pepper

Add and simmer until soft and tender:
500 gr Asian eggplant (in pieces)

Just before serving, add a little cornflour mixed with some cold water to thicken the sauce. Finally add:
2 t sesame oil
spring onion for garnish

Simply serve with white rice.

Tomato, cucumber, red onion and beef sounds a bit boring for a salad. That’s probably why we only eat this salad about once a year. But every time we do I’m pleasantly surprised, thinking: “We should eat this more often!”. And what better way to remember than blogging about it?

RECIPE

For the salad:
250g cherry tomatoes, quartered
250g little cucumbers, sliced thinly
½ red onion, sliced thinly
big handful of chopped coriander
2 T toasted sesame seeds
300g steak, grilled and sliced (duck breast is also nice)

For the dressing:
1 T hoisin sauce
1 T light soy sauce (like Kikoman)
2 T sesame oil
½ T honey
½ lime, juiced
1 t chopped fresh chilli

Carefully mix the salad ingredients together, then add the well-mixed dressing. That’s it.

From: Crisp (Crispy) by Marie Claire.

Another “classic” in our home. Quick, easy but still very, very tasty. I really recommend the thinner, lighther purple Asian eggplant, but regular eggplant works too. You could pan fry the slices of eggplant before you add them to the sauce, but I don’t see the need in that.

RECIPE

450 eggplant, sliced in 1 cm slices
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
½ t fresh ginger, grated
1½ t clear rice vinegar
1 T fine chili sauce (or sambal oelek)
2 T fish sauce
4 dl coconut milk (tinned, unsweetened)
1 t (palm)sugar
1 lime, juiced
4 spring onions, thinly sliced

Serve with white rice and simply stir-fried chicken to which you add a little Shaoxing rice-wine in the end. Fish or shrimp could work too. Slices of duck breast didn’t work, in my opinion.

From: A Passion for Vegetables (Wereldse Groenten) by Paul Gayler.

If you don’t want to spent thousands of euro on a professional waterbath (Roner) or even a hundred or two on a temperature controller (SousVideMagic) for your ricecooker or crockpot, then this might be something for you too: an electrical canner. The one on the photo is used to be regularly on sale at Lidl for just 30 to 40 euro.

Okay, it’s not to the 0.1°C precise like a real Roner, but the 3°C or 4°C fluctuation up and down is good enough for me. You don’t have to keep an eye on it and it’s save to leave the house or go to sleep. The only real drawback might be the size, it’s rather big for an average kitchen.

To use it, set the temperature you want and fill it with hot water from the tap, measure the temperature with an external kitchen thermometer and add boiling (or cold) water to reach the desired temperature. Leave it for a bit to see if the temperature is stable and then throw in your vacuum sealed food. Easy as that. I’ve been using it for quite some time now. Not that often, but I’m still pleased with it. This is my latest favorite:

RECIPE

500g white asparagus
3 T (clarified) butter
pinch of salt
pinch of sugar

Peel the asparagus and trim 2 cm or more of the ends.
Line the asparagus in a single layer in a bag.
Heads up, towards the opening.
Add butter, salt and sugar.
Seal the bag and cook for 30 minutes at 85°C.

They might seem too crunchy at first sight, but they’re just perfectly soft and tender. Simply serve with boiled egg, ham and the butter it’s cooked in. Or better, make a hollandaise sauce!

PS Thomas Keller uses a splash of milk instead of the butter, but my vacuum sealer can’t handle liquids. I’ll try freezing some milk next time, but I guess when you serve your asparagus with a buttery sauce anyway, it won’t make much difference, butter might even be better.

RECIPE

For the cake
250g butter, chopped
200g dark chocolate, chopped
375g caster sugar
250ml whiskey (or 125ml whiskey + 125ml water)
1 T instant coffee granules
185g plain flour
60g self-raising flour
40g unsweetened cocoa powder
2 eggs, beaten until fluffy
3 tablespoons whiskey, extra for sprinkling

For the chocolate glaze
80ml cream
90g dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 160ºC. Grease a 20cm square tin and line the base and sides with baking paper.

Dissolve the instant coffee powder in a few heated/hot tablespoons of the 250 ml whiskey and put with the butter, chocolate, sugar and whisky in a saucepan that you can hang in another pan with boiling water to heat au bain marie. Just be patient for everything to melt. It will melt by itself and it will become a beautifully consistent, thick sauce.

Sieve the plain flour, self-raising flour and cocoa into a large bowl. Pour the butter mixture onto the flour mixture and whisk until just combined. Whisk in the eggs. Pour into the prepared tin.

Bake for about 1 hour 15 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean when inserted in the centre of the cake. It all depends a bit on size of the tin you use, I guess. I’m not an experienced baker, so just keep an eye on it. When ready, pour the extra whiskey over the hot cake. (I pinched it all over with a toothpick before pouring the whiskey) Leave in the tin for 20 minutes, then transfer onto a wire rack placed over a baking tray to cool completely.

For the chocolate glaze, put the cream and the chocolate in the small saucepan and heat over another pan with boiling water au-bain-marie. Again, just be patient it will melt by itself. Stir until a nice, consistent chocolate sauce. Then set aside to cool and thicken a little. Spread the glaze over the cake, allowing it to drizzle over the sides. Leave to set. Or do what I did, I sliced the cake it cubes/brownies and dipped those into the glaze.

Tip 1: you can freeze the (unglazed) cubes individually and just take out one or two for coffee.
Tip 2: I used Famous Grouse, but if you want an expert opinion on what whiskey to use, check out the suggestions on this blog: Aaron’s Food and Wine Musings

I love the bold flavors of the spices with the soft and smokey flavors of the vegetables in this dish. It’s a bit of a hassle to grill all the slices if you just have the one griddle pan, but the advantage is that you can do it well in advance. No stress involved. Could be a great side dish for a BBQ. We often eat it with duck breast.

RECIPE

1 courgette
1 aubergine
1 bulb of fennel
1 red bell pepper
1 red onion
8 cherry tomatoes

Slice the vegetables, except the tomatoes, in 1 cm thick slices and/or wedges. Drizzle with vegetable oil to coat the vegetables. Or how I like to do it: pour a tablespoon of oil in your hands, rub palm to palm, then rub the vegetables with your greasy hands. Yes, you get your hands dirty, but I think the vegetables get more evenly coated, using less oil, getting a better result. So that’s how I do it. Sprinkle with a little salt.

Then grill the vegetables, except the tomatoes in a hot grill pan for about 1-2 minutes each side or until charred. You probably have to do it in batches. Collect the grilled vegetables in an oven dish. When all vegetables, except the tomatoes are grilled, mix it with the marinade (“Tabil”) of:

1 T coriander seeds (grind a little in mortar and pestle)
1 t caraway seeds (grind a little in mortar and pestle)
2 cloves of garlic, grated or pressed
1/8 t cayennepepper
1/8 t currypowder (hot madras)
½ t ground cumin
3-10 T olive oil (depending on your oil-phobia)

Let the warm vegetables marinate with this “Tabil” for at least an hour. Before serving, transfer the dish to a 180°C oven and roast for about 30 minutes. Just before the end, add the cherry tomatoes.

From : A passion for Vegetables by Paul Gayler.

If you’re an oyster purist and only ever want to eat them naked, then please go away. If you’re less rigid and also enjoy them with a splash of red wine vinegar and some chopped shallots, this might be something for you. When I first read about the idea of serving fresh oysters with kimchi consommé (on Momofuku for 2) I knew I had to try it. It just sounds brilliant and besides that, dead-easy to make at home. I was already familiar with the process of clarifying through ice filtration, so when we were having left-over kimchi the other day I knew what to do.

I couldn’t find the exact recipe online and because I read somebody (Ulterior Epicure) was disappointed by the weakness of the brine I decided to add as little water as possible. Just enough to dissolve the gelatin. So this is what I did (before I discovered Chang uses more like a chickenstock than just plain kimchi, ha! But I’m not sorry, because I think it works anyway):

RECIPE

400g mat kimchi
gelatin
1T clear rice vinegar (or white wine vinegar)
1t sugar

Combine the kimchi, rice wine vinegar and sugar into a liquidizer. Puree as smooth as possible. Measure to see how much milliliter of liquid you have. Take about half of the required gelatin sheets needed to make a pudding/jelly of this amount of liquid. (half is enough because you don’t need it to really set like a pudding) Soak the gelatin sheets in cold water, squeeze them and dissolve into a tiny bit of hot water (50ml?) in a small saucepan. Whisk this into the kimchi-liquid. Freeze it.

Then about 2 days before you need the consommé, take it out of the freezer. Hang a colander/sieve in a bowl and line it with cheesecloth/muslin. (a clean handkerchief will do too) Add the frozen kimchi and place it in your refrigerator or a cool place. Wait for a day or two and voilà: perfectly clear, beautiful consommé. (not much though! I think I ended up with about 100ml or 150ml)

The consommé tasted really lovely, like the essence of kimchi. And it does go really well with fresh oyster, like red wine vinegar. I think it’s a brilliant idea, but now I discovered another dish using this kimchi consommé: a bowl of warm kimchi consommé with braised pork belly, oyster and wilted greens. That’s next on my list and I expect it to be even better!

People regularly ask me about my photos or my camera. I don’t have a fancy camera, it’s just a Fuji Finepix S5700 with 7.1 megapixels. And although I’m quite happy with it, it has one major drawback over the camera I had before: when it’s dark, the camera will adjust the ISO! I hate that! And there is no easy way to stop my camera from doing that and trusting me I will keep it steady. I should learn to operate it manually. But I still haven’t. I think photoshop is easier. So, my camera is always on automatic, macro and no-flash. That’s it.

The best photos, I make in my window sill on a cloudy day. With an old piece of linoleum glued on two pieces of multiplex for a background. When the sun is shining I close the blinds. And when the sun has set, I use this little photo studio I created in a corner of my kitchen closet with three 150 Watt halogen lights with one switch. Not as nice as natural light of course, but most of the time its quite acceptable.

The window sill photos are often too blue, the closet studio photos are often to yellow or reddish. Nothing a little photoshop can’t fix. And oh, I like extending the plate with the clone pencil. So it looks like I have huge, trendy dinnerplates. :-)

RECIPE

500g very ripe tomatoes
4 cloves of garlic, peeled
4 red chillies (or more or less)
2 t finely chopped ginger
30ml fish sauce
300g caster sugar
100ml red wine vinegar (I used Chinese red vinegar)

• Blend the skinned, whole tomatoes in a food processor along with the garlic, chillies, ginger and fish sauce until the mixture reaches a puree consistency. I blended it for about 2 minutes. (because you need the pits in the tomatoes for their pectin, we won’t sieve the mixture and that’s why I prefer to skin the tomatoes. If you’re less fussy, then don’t bother)

• Pour the mixture into a pan together with the sugar and vinegar. Bring to the boil and slowly stir. Once the mixture has reached boiling point, reduce to a simmer and cook for 30-40 minutes, stirring from time to time to prevent sticking. But in the meanwhile, taste to see if your chillies were hot enough or whether you need some more fish sauce of vinegar. I added a Madame Jeanette, cause my chillies lacked heat.

• Pour the mixture into a warmed sterilized jars (about 2 x 250 ml). When cooled to room temperature, close the jars and refrigerate. You can keep this jam for quite some time. Weeks if not months.

From: The Sugar Club Cookbook by Peter Gordon.

I call this the spaghetti Bolognese from Sichuan: very popular around the world and everybody makes his own version. With less or more ingredients, sesame-paste or not, peanuts or not, lots of oil, spicy, not spicy, pork or beef and sometimes more like a soup than a bowl of noodles. This is my version, spicy and packed full of flavors:

RECIPE
serves 4-6

The order of assembling (not preparing) the dish is:

Noodles
400 g dried noodles
Udon is nice, but any noodle made from wheat will do. You could even use Italian pasta. Cook according the instructions on the package.

Cold sauce to mix with the noodles
2 T sesame paste or tahin
1 T sesame oil
1 T light soy sauce or Japanese Soy sauce
1 T Chinese black vinegar
½ T caster sugar (skip if you used the sweetened black vinegar)
1½ T or more chili oil
Just mix everything together, taste and increase any of the ingredients to your liking. You mix this with the cooked noodles, just enough to give it a light coating. Add a splash of water if it gets too sticky/starchy.

Meat sauce to put on top of noodles
400 g minced pork (or beef)
2 T chopped garlic
2 T chopped ginger
2 T chopped spring onion or shallot
1 T crushed/ground sichuanpepper
2 T Shaoxing ricewine
3 T chilibean sauce
Stock/water
Like any other meatsauce: panfry the minced meat until brown. Take it out of the pan or push to one side and panfry the garlic, ginger, onion and sichuanpeppers. When fragrant, mix with the minced meat and add the Shaoxing ricewine. Wait a few seconds to evaporate, then add the chilibeansauce. Fry for about 30 seconds, then add enough water/stock until the meat is just covered/moist. Simmer for half an hour or more. Season with soy sauce or salt if necessary, but be careful, somehow Dan Dan noodles can easily get too salty. If you like your sauce sticky like I do, you can thicken the sauce with a little cornstarch mixed with cold water.

Garnish on top
Chopped spring onion
Stirfried ya cai *)
Chopped coriander
Roasted and chopped peanuts

Assembling
Coat the warm noodles with the cold sesame based sauce and divide into individual serving bowls. Add 1 or 2 big spoonfuls of meatsauce on top of the noodles. Sprinkle with spring onion, yacai, coriander and peanuts. Serve with a simple vegetable dish like stirfried Chinese broccoli (gai lan) with garlic sauce.

*) Yacai is not easy or maybe I should say practically impossible to find. It’s pickled greens from a specific mustard cabbage (Brassica juncea, tsatsai). Other recipes say you can substitute it with zha cai (the pickled tuber/stem from the same plant) or Tianjin (preserved chinese cabbage), I wouldn’t, I’d just leave it out. But that’s because I’m not too keen on pickled stuff, yacai is an exception.

Okay, so that’s the soup.
Now you want to pimp it.
This is what I tried:

I blanched the samphire (zeekraal in dutch) by pouring boiling water over it in a sieve. Then dressed it with a little bit of olive oil and pepper. (never use salt with samphire) The shrimps I smoked for about 10 minutes on apple-wood in my stovetop smoker. I tried smoking them with and without their skin and decided that smoking them without is easier and just as good or maybe even better.

I’ve never been a big fan of pancakes, until I discovered the Asian way of making pancakes. First Okonomiyaki, this Japanese pancake stuffed with “whatever you like”, which is normally a combination of vegetables, meat and seafood (click here for my version) and now this Korean pancake, stuffed with kimchi. I like kimchi a lot, but somehow it never fits with the way we eat lunch or dinner, so we hardly ever eat it. But with this recipe I’m sure we will eat kimchi more often. Packed full of flavor, great for lunch, fingerfood or quick dinner (especially when you have leftover mashed potatoes).

RECIPE
(for 2 small eaters, I’d double it next time)

1 potato
splash of milk
90 g mat kimchi (simply made from napa cabbage)
50 g firm tofu (as available in supermarkets)
25 g flour (I prefer the light bapao flour, but any kind will do)
1 egg
1 t grated garlic
1 T vegetable oil
salt & pepper

1. Boil the potato, then make mash with a little bit of milk.
2. Squeeze the kimchi to remove as much liquid as you can.
3. Squeeze the tofu, then crumble.
4. Combine in big bowl the mashed potato, kimchi, tofu, flour, egg, garlic, pepper and salt. Be careful with the salt though, the kimchi is already pretty salty.
5. The recipe I used said to combine it with your hands, but I’m sure a spoon will do fine as well. And although I didn’t have lumps, maybe next time I would mix the egg and flour first or dust the flour over the other ingredients. I use bapao flour, which is nice and fluffy. Be aware that the mixture is quite “wet”.
6. Heat a pan, add some vegetable oil and add big spoonfuls of the pancake mixture. Sculpture with your spoon into nice little, round pancakes (about 1 cm thick). Bake for about 2-3 minutes per side until more than golden.

The recipe said to serve it with a dip of 3T soy, 1t lemon juice and ½t sesame oil but I think there must be something better. My partner liked it with sweet chili, but I’m not convinced. So suggestions are welcome and I will come back on this. Maybe with something completely non-Asian like sour cream ;-).

From: Korean Cooking (De Koreaanse Keuken) by Young Jin Song

500 gr chicken livers
½ T cornstarch
2 T chopped ginger
5 T chopped onion
3 spring onions for sprinkling
1½ T Shaoxing ricewine

For the Marinade:
1½ t salt
1½ t brown sugar
2 T dark soy sauce
1 t freshly grounded black pepper
3 t Worcestershire sauce
3 t Shaoxing ricewine

For the sauce
½ T cornstarch
6 T water/stock
3½ t dark soy sauce
1½ t Worcestershire sauce

Clean the livers and cut in 2 or 3 pieces. Rinse and drain.
Put in a plastic bag with the marinade. Marinate for 1-2 hours.
Drain them just before you start cooking and dust them with ½ T cornstarch.

In a wok, stirfry the ginger and onion for a minute or so.
Add the livers, stirfry on high fire for 2 minutes.
(You might want to use a wok or pan with Teflon)
Add the 1½ T Shaoxing wine and when it stops sizzling, lower the heat and cover the wok.
Let it simmer on low heat for 2 minute.
Add the sauce, heat it through. (you can cut 1 liver to check if it’s pink/done to your liking)
Sprinkle with spring onions and serve immediately.

Great with white rice and green beans.

These are inspired by a dish I didn’t even like when living in China, Lion’s Head Meatballs, but I wanted to recreate anyway. The only thing I didn’t do was steaming them for an hour and a half and I didn’t serve them with the bokchoy that would represent the lion’s manes. I just panfried them and served them with boiled potatoes and vegetables. Surprise, surprise, they’re more suitable in a Dutch dish than a Chinese menu! At least, that’s what I think. ;-)

RECIPE

450g minced pork
1 egg-white
4 spring onions, chopped finely
1 T shaoxing ricewine
1 t grated ginger
1 T chinese light soy sauce (or kikoman)
2 t sugar
1 t sesame oil
1 t salt
¼ t white pepper

Mixing the eggwhite with the food processor will give the meat an extra velvetty structure. Just don’t overdo it. You could blend in the other ingredients at the same time, except for the spring onions. Add and mix those in by hand. Shape into meatballs, any size you like. Dust with some cornflour so they wont’ stick to the pan and slowly panfry them until they’re done. (That’s when the internal temperature is around 72-73° C)

I’m a little bit fussy about minced meat, so I like to grind my own. These meatballs shouldn’t be too lean, I used 80% of lean pork and 20% of fatty pork. Of course less fussy people just buy their minced from their butcher’s.

I really think they go best with boiled potatoes and something like common beans. (In this case cut into spaghetti-like strings, cooked in chickenstock, finished with some cream and a pinch of currypowder)

If you’re dutch, here’s some more information about the ingredients (in dutch): shaoxing ricewine, ginger, light soy sauce , sesame oil.

I don’t have many good memories of my grandmother’s cookery, but her rhubarb lemonade was something special. I’m sure I didn’t even like rhubarb in those days, but I loved this lemonade. Fruity, tangy, sweet and very refreshing on a hot summer day. Unfortunately it only keeps for a few days, so I decided to try and freeze it in some ice-cube-bags.  The syrup doesn’t really set solid though, it becomes like a thick, sticky paste. Geting a little bit messy when trying to squeeze out 2 cubes for a glass of lemonade, but I’m still happy it keeps longer now. Just use an extra bag.

RECIPE

500 gram rhubarb, cut into pieces
1 kg sugar
25 gram citric acid (citroenzuur in dutch)

Wash the rhubarb and cut into 3-cm pieces.
Softly boil without any extra water until the juices have come out.
Transfer the rhubarb to a fine sieve, hanging over a bowl.
Push and squeeze all the juice out of the rhubarb.
Add some water to make out 5 dl of juice.
Add the sugar and boil until sugar dissolves. Let it cool down. (preferably in a sink with cold water)
Let the citric acid dissolve in a little bit of hot water and let it cool down, then add it to the cold juice.
Pour in a clean bottle and keep in fridge for a couple of days.
Or pour in a plastic icecube-bag to keep in the freezer. 

Tip: just a little bit of this syrup in a glass of prosecco/cava/sekt will give it a nice twist. 

This is one of my most favourite dishes. Not just most favourite Chinese dishes, no, most favourite dishes ever. The spicy chili bean sauce, the numbing sichuanpeppers, the tasty garlic, ginger and onion and the soft tofu. It’s just perfect. And when using the right kind of tofu (not the old, firm supermarket tofu) I can’t imagine anybody not liking it.

RECIPE

750g soft, fresh tofu
250g mince meat (beef, pork or a combination)
2 T Chinese dark soy sauce
1,5 T Shaoxing rice wine
½ t sesame oil
1 T oil for stir frying
2 spring onion, chopped (shallot is fine too)
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
2 t finely chopped or grated ginger
1-2 T chili bean paste (or more!)
2,5 dl chicken-stock
1,5 t cornflour
1 spring onion for sprinkling
2 t Sichuan peppercorns

Preparations

• Mix the ground beef with
  2 t dark soy sauce
  2 t Shaoxing rice wine
  ½ t sesame oil
  Put in refrigerator to marinate while you prepare the rest.
• Dry roast the Sichuan peppercorns only just until fragrant. Be careful not to burn them. Let them cool down, then grind as coarse or fine as you prefer.
• Drain the tofu, cut into 1×1 cm cubes. You can blanch those in boiling water for about 1 minute and then drain them to improve the taste but you can easily skip this if you think it’s too much trouble.
• Cut and set aside (together)
  2 spring onions (or 1 shallot) chopped
  2 cloves of garlic, chopped
  2 t finely chopped or grated ginger
• Slice the spring onion for decoration (julienne).
• Make a mixture of
  2.5 dl (instant) chicken-stock
  1.5 T dark soy sauce
  1 T Shaoxing rice wine

Cooking

Stir-fry the mince meat until brown and loose/grainy.
Transfer to a sieve, hanging in a bowl and set aside.

In the same wok/pan let the juice evaporate or wipe it clean, then stir-fry the (spring)onion, garlic and ginger for about 30 seconds, add the 1 or 2 T chilibeanpaste, stir-fry for just 5 seconds, then add the chicken-stock mixture. Bring to the boil, add the tofu-cubes and add back the mince beef. Bring back to the boil, let it simmer for about 5 minutes. Be careful not to break the tofu while stirring occasionally.

Before serving, add a mixture of cornflour with cold water to thicken the sauce. When ready, sprinkle with spring onion and Sichuanpepper. (without the Sichuanpepper the dish will not come alive, really, you cannot omit it!)

Serve with white rice and simply boiled or stir-fried (long) green beans which go great with the sauce of the mapo tofu.
Enjoy!