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tribal
Mon, Mar-19-07, 03:18
I've been cooking heaps of sichuan food lately, my boyfriend is from there and he's been teaching me. Surprisingly a lot of it is low carb. This dish is quite famous, but most westernised chinese restaurants make it really dodgy. This is more traditional.

This is kinda rough, and you can change the amounts to suit your taste:

makes 4-6 servings

500g block of fresh tofu (the soft chinese type)
150g ground pork
100ml chicken stock
4 spring onions chopped
2 cloves finely chopped garlic
chunk of finely chopped ginger
2 tsp of sichuan pepper(sometimes called red pepper)
1 tbsp of sichuan chilli bean paste (not totally necessary, but it adds a great colour/spiceyness)
1 tbsp of crushed dried chillies (more if you aren't using the bean paste)
1-2 tbsp of light soy sauce
1 tbsp Shaoxing cooking wine (apparently dry sherry is a good substitute)
3 tbs sichuan preserved vegetable, You can use tianjin preserved vegetable as a substitute as it's much easier to get. Chop it finely.
2-3 tbsp of oil


First of all, cut up the tofu into bite sized chunks and soak in hot salted water for 10-20mins.

In a saucepan dry fry the sichuan pepper until it starts to get fragrant, be careful not to burn it, then remove it from the heat and grind in a spice mill.

In a wok or big saucepan stir fry the pork in oil over high heat, add the shaoxing wine and the soy sauce. Cook until pork browns a little and add the garlic, ginger,chilli bean paste, dried chilli and preserved vegetable.

Cook for a few minutes until the garlic is cooked, then add the chiken stock and simmer for 5 minutes. Then drain and add the beancurd and spring onions and gently stir trying not to break up the beancurd (this is where having a wok comes in handy) Simmer for another 5 minutes, remove from heat, serve in a deep bowl and sprinkle with ground sichuan pepper.



Now i'm not sure about the carb count, i think it would mostly depend on your tofu and the chilli bean paste you use, as some of these have extra carbs.

After reading all the labels on my ingredients i would estimate at 8-10 carbs per serve.

I love this dish, the only problem is it makes me miss rice :(

i'll post some more sichuan recipes soon.

Enjoy!

LukeA
Mon, Mar-19-07, 23:24
I made this tonight. Turned out excellent, thanks for the recipe!

I did make an alteration since I didnt have ground pork on hand so I used ground turkey, and I did end up using the dry sherry instead of that cooking wine. Oh and I used 4 tsp of the sichuan pepper instead of 2.
I often miss rice too, but I made "Cauliflied rice" from karen barnaby's cookbook the low carb gourmet to use instead to serve this over and it was great. :yum:

tribal
Fri, Mar-23-07, 22:05
Yeah, I find the strength of sichuan pepper varies a lot, apparently the redder, the better.