Crisp, fresh green beans play well with salty, tangy pickled Chinese long beans. Add a spicy punch from dried red er jing tiao peppers and crispy, smoky mushroom bits for a colorful dish that pleases the eye and palate. This beautiful dish paired just as well with a Chinese dinner of mapo tofu and General Tso’s cauliflower/tofu as it did with an creamy, rich pan of Mac and cheese made with extra sharp cheddar and flowerlike campanelle pasta.
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| Ingredients for pickled & fresh green beans. |
After discovering how easy it was to make Sichuan-style dry fried green beans at home, with a shortcut modification that made use of my broiler, I had stopped exploring new green bean recipes. I was content, as were my family and friends, with the perfect green beans that tasted just as good at room temperature or even cold as they did hot. The perfect potluck dish used extensively at Thanksgiving and other family gatherings.
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| Sichuan-style green beans, vegan |
Then I saw that the Mala Market had a new offering, pickled Chinese long beans. The fresh version of these beans only come into season once a year, with beans up to a yard long. I cooked these once, following a recipe in Grace Young’s Stir-frying to the Sky’s Edge. As a member of the Wok Wednesdays Facebook group, we had been cooking our way through that cookbook. Of course, my kids made fun of mom, for “finding the longest beans she could possibly find and immediately cutting them up into short pieces.”
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| Spicy long beans with Chinese bacon and mushrooms |
I also suspected that these pickled yard-long beans might be a key ingredient in a well-liked dish from Hunan Bar (sautéed sour long bean with pork #136), one of our favorite restaurants near the university. So I mail-ordered them and resolved to try the recipe from the Mala Market blog called Fresh & Pickled Long Bean Stirfry, which looked colorful and easy.
Adapting a new side dish for Veguary
For the past several years, my daughter has challenged us to eat vegetarian for the shortest month of the year. This has resulted in the discovery of new favorite vegetarian dishes that have entered our general cooking repertoire, as well as the realization that I preferred handling tofu or beans to raw meat.
For a family meal for 6, I decided to make mapo tofu, this new green bean dish and both General Tso’s tofu and General Tso’s cauliflower, as I wanted to know which recipe I liked better. I served it all with basmati rice and black lentils, mixed 2/3 to 1/3, cooked for 6 minutes at high pressure in the Instant Pot. I have discovered that black or green lentils can be substituted for rice at a 1:1 ratio, using the same amount of water (1 cup water to 1 cup of lentil-rice mix), to add a bit of protein to our rice.
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| Black lentil rice. If you don't want the lentils to bleed into the rice, simply open the IP and stir after a 10-min NPR. If you leave it in the pot unstirred for an hour to keep warm, then it looks like this. |
Prepping the green beans
There were no green beans in the produce section except for these pre-bagged ready to microwave green beans. I bought two 12-oz bags, but only used one.
After cutting these into 2-inch long segments, I opened the pickled green beans and uncoiled them.
I cut these into slightly shorter segments, and tasted a few. Salty, but good.
Then it was onto the dried er jing tiao peppers. These are long, aromatic and only mildly spicy peppers. The first time I made this dish, I presoacked the cut up peppers in the rice wine intended for the pork, which I omitted as we wanted this to be vegetarian.
Instead, I chopped up a large king oyster mushroom into little bits and stir fried them until dried and slightly crispy in the Campfire salt by Beautiful Briny Sea. This is a useful blend of sea salt, sumac, chili, cumin, smoked paprika that I put on lots of different roasted vegetables.
To cook the dish was simple. Stirfy the green beans until some of them are starting to blister. In contrast to the Sichuan style beans, where you want most of them wrinkled and blistered so they could soak up the black vinegar sauce, this dish leaves the green beans softened, but with some retained crispness.
Then toss in the chopped garlic and red pepper segments.
Finally, add the pickled beans. Having tasted them, I did not want to add too much to make the dish too salty. So I tossed them in until the ratio looked good, and found I had used roughly half of the pickled beans.
I also cut the soy sauce in half, down to one tablespoon, along with the teaspoon of sugar added at the end. This resulted in a perfectly flavored dish.
Everyone really enjoyed these green beans, although it did not disappear as fast as the mapo tofu — made using Mala Market’s Pixian doubanjiang, fragrant hot ground peppers and sichuan peppers.
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| Clockwise: Mapo tofu, made with chopped cauliflower leaves instead of peas; Pickled & fresh green beans; General Tso's cauliflower and General Tso's tofu; black lentil-basmatic rice. |
Click here for General Tso’s Tofu or the General Tso’s Cauliflower recipes.
Further improvements
So what to do with the second bag of green beans and the other half of the pickled long beans? Make another batch of vegan pickled & fresh green beans! This time to go with some creamy, rich, cheddar Mac and Cheese for a ski weekend. Years ago, we discovered the recipe for Ultimate Mac & Cheese from the former Horseradish Grill in Atlanta. We never got to eat there, but have a fond place for the unknown chef that developed this awesome nutmeg, mustard, cayenne, Worcestershire-enriched sauce.
After enjoying the er jing tiao chilies (yes, they a bit spicy but not unpleasant to eat), I went online to read more about these peppers, part of a four-pepper variety pack I had bought. They suggested rehydrating the chiles in a pickling jar, so I tossed 3 of these long peppers into a jar of pickled red onion that I had in the fridge a day before cooking.
I made them the same way as before, and this easy extra stepped kicked the dish up another notch! Everyone in the family ended up eating the pickled, rehydrated dried red pepper segments (after first pushing them aside until I mentioned they were also pickled).
As I forgot to bring the Campfire salt, I improvised by cooking the king mushroom bits with a bit of smoked Spanish paprika and chipotle powder from Penzeys, and some kosher salt.
These bits were delicious not only on the green beans, but also sprinkled on top of the Mac and cheese, made this time using the pretty flower-like campanelle pasta!
Click here for the Mac and Cheese recipe.
Love2Chow Pickled and fresh green beans with smoky king mushroom bits
Ingredients
Optional topping:
1 King oyster mushroom, chopped into small 1/4 inch cubes
Seasonings (Campfire salt or mix of smoked paprika/chipotle powder and kosher salt).
Ingredients:
Neutral cooking oil like expeller pressed canola
12 oz fresh green beans, tipped and tailed and cut into 2 inch segments
3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1/4 lb (1/2 of the 8 oz package) pickled long beans, cut into 1 inch segments
3 pickled erjingtiao chilies or three dried erjingtiao chilies soaked in pickling brine overnight
1 Tbs soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
1. Optional: In a wok or heavy pan, heat cooking oil. Add mushroom cubes, sprinkle with seasonings, and cook, stirring occasionally, until some are browned and crisp. Remove to a plate to cool and drain.
2. In the same wok or pan, heat 2 Tbs oil. Add fresh green beans and cooked for 1-2 minutes, then add garlic. Keep stir frying until some green beans are starting to wrinkle or blister but the beans remain bright green.
3. Add the pickled long beans and the erjingtiao chilies segments and toss until warm. Stir in soy sauce and sugar, and toss until combined. Turn off heat, plate and garnish with the mushroom bits.
🐾 I love ground pork, but feel that using the whole pack of pickled long beans with only 2/3 of these green beans (8 oz) as called for in the original recipe would have made the dish too salty, especially with 2 Tbs of soy sauce.
🍃 Green Tips. Many Chinese dishes that call for 4 oz or so of ground pork to add flavor can be made vegan by substituting one of many types of Chinese pickled vegetables. For many Sichuan dishes, suimiyacai is tastier than ground pork. In this case, I am subbing smoky, crispy king mushroom bits. King mushrooms are shaped to be easy to cut into small dice.
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