**The Art of Cooking Sichuan Kongfan**

Rice cooking liquid is a really nice drink before the meal, I really enjoy it. But for this time, we’ll also use it as the cooking liquid for our next step. And now, we can start our one wok rice.

To begin with long yau, we need to get your wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in 3 tbsp oil, lard preferably, and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Then heat on medium, add in the larou dices, now let’s render out some fat. After five minutes, the larou has shrunk a bit and turned nicely golden brown, just like this. Pancetta would also fry it on medium for 5 minutes till some oil renders out and it turns beautifully golden.

And at this time, we can add in the diced scallion whites from 25 grams of scallion. Give them a quick fry then we can add in the potato. Fry till the edge of the potato chunks is kinda translucent, then it’s time for green beans. Fry till the green beans’ turned into a darker green color, we can add in the seasoning of 1 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp five spice, and 1/4 tsp white pepper.

We need to go a bit heavier on the seasoning because we need to flavor the whole wok of rice. Now give them a final mix, and we can add in the cooking liquid. So you can straight up use water here, but personally I prefer using the rice cooking liquid from before because I don’t want to waste that “rice essence”. So just add in some water until it reaches about halfway through the potato.

Now, I cannot give you an exact quantity of how much water to use because it all depends on your utensil and how much stuff you’re cooking with, but halfway through is a good reference point. Rice in. Just take the rice, evenly lay it over the other ingredients, break up any clumps so that the rice stays loose. Then, poke a few holes in the rice for steam to come through, and now we can cover and let it steam on medium low for about 14 minutes.

After that time, come back, listen to it and you should be able to hear that oil frying sizzling sound coming out from the wok. At this time, we can start the “toasting” process. Take your wok, tilt it halfway so that the sides also gets some heat, cook it like this for a minute, then move the wok to cook along the sides. How long you want to do this step is totally up to you, because the rice is cooked by now. So if you just want some flavored rice, just do it for a couple minutes and start eating; but if you want some golden brown bottom, you can do it for longer.

For us, I like to do this step for about 10-15 minutes for some lightly brown potato at the bottom. And 15 minutes’ “toasting” later, uncover, sprinkle some scallion greens over the rice, give it nice mix, and now this very delicious and rustic Sichuan kongfan is done! You can eat it alongside with some other dishes, or some simple pickles, or just by itself.

This dish that you don’t really see outside at restaurants, especially out of Sichuan. Like in Shunde, our Malatang lady, who’s from Guangyuan, she’d often wax poetic about this rice dish, and her favorite version is made using some pumpkin and some douchi fermented black beans.

**Recipe Information**

For those interested in trying their hand at cooking Sichuan kongfan, the recipe information can be found in the description box below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enIn China, we love to eat plain, white rice. It’s a great canvas for a lot of dishes,  and even just the rice itself, sometimes it can be a very simple but soothing and satisfying thing.But if you look outside of East Asia, the rest of the world cooks  their rice a little differently. There’re often seasonings and other ingredients,  and the rice itself it’s flavorful and sometimes even a centerpiece. It may be the various Plovs in Central Asia, the Biryanis of the subcontinent,  or Paella in Spain… these dishes cook the rice with a bunch of other ingredients instead.So why doesn’t Chinese cooking have the same? Well, the answer mostly lies in rice itself:  as for Basmati or, Bomba… they are really forgiving when it comes to water absorption. But for many Chinese or Thai or Japanese rice, you need to be a lot more exact with  how much water you use, if you cook them with method preparing basmati or bomba,  it’ll easily lead to mushy or undercooked rice.But that doesn’t mean we don’t like to flavor our rice! You can of course use cooked rice to  make some fried rice; or you can mix your rice with some kind of stir fry like Toisan yaufan,  or you can just the flavor in liquid form like Hainan Chicken Rice.But there’s also this one-wok-rice approach in Southwest China,  it keeps everything in one wok, incorporates other ingredients,  flavors the rice, , and it does so by using the boil-and-steam method.So boiling and steaming rice it’s one of the most foolproof ways of cooking rice that we talked a  lot of on this channel. Basically, you parboil the rice, and steam it in a steamer till it’s  done. Or with a western-kitchen-friendly hack in our most recent fried rice video,  you can even steam it with a strainer.But with this kind of Chinese one wok rice,  you don’t even need a steamer and strainer to cook with steam, basically you just use other  ingredients to “lift up” the rice, and let the steam go through. So what you do is basically  make a stir fry, and then put the rice over the stir fry ingredient, and let the steam  come through to cook it, this way it controls the water level and flavors the rice at the same time. So because kong fan is a very quick process, let’s prep everything first. This kind of one-wok-rice belongs more to a village or home cooking style, and as always  there’re variations. The one we’re making today is a Sichuan style called kong fan, which uses  potato as root vegetable, green beans as greens, and larou smoked pork belly as the meat component. The ratio I used here is 1 part rice, 1 part long bean, 2 part potato, and 1/3 part larou. So in Sichuan, people like to use this kind of smoked pork belly in this kind of kongfan. This  kind of pork belly is called larou, it’s quite hard and smoked for quite some time resulting  in a beautiful aged smokiness. But I think it’s probably impossible for people in the west to get  this kind of ingredient, so we also tested with pancetta, which works excellently in this context.First, let’s dice 80g larou or pancetta into 1 cm dices. Then cut 500g potato into 1 inch  slices then 1 inch-ish cubes. And lastly, cut 250g beans at an angle into 1 inchish sections. And now let’s prep our rice. Here we have 250g jasmine rice, give it a rinse first,  then cook it in some boiling water on medium for 3 minutes. Then strain the rice into a strainer and  you can reserve the rice cooking liquid.So traditionally, this rice cooking liquid  is a really nice drink before the meal, I really enjoy it. But for this time, we’ll also use it  as the cooking liquid for our next step.And now, we can start our one wok rice. First, long yau. Get your wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in 3 tbsp oil, lard preferably,  give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface.Then heat on medium, add in the larou dices,  now let’s render out some fat. After five minutes, the larou has shrunk a bit and  turned nicely golden brown, just like this.For pancetta, you would also fry it on medium  for 5 minutes till some oil renders out and it turns beautifully golden. And at this time, we can add in the diced scallion whites from 25 grams of scallion. Give them a quick fry then we can add in the potato. Fry till the edge of the potato chunks is  kinda translucent, then it’s time for green beans.Fry till the green beans’ turned into a darker  green color, we can add in the seasoning of 1 tsp salt,  1/4 tsp five spice, and 1/4 tsp white pepper.We need to go a bit heavier on the seasoning  because we need to flavor the whole wok of rice.Now give them a final mix,  and we can add in the cooking liquid.So you can straight up use water here,  but personally I prefer using the rice cooking liquid from before because I don’t  want to waste that “rice essence”.So just add in some water until it  reaches about half way through the potato.Now, I can’t give you an exact quantity of how  much water to use because it all depends on your utensil and how much stuff you’re cooking with,  but half way through is a good reference point.Now rice in. Just take the rice, evenly lay  it over the other ingredients, break up any clumps so that the rice stays loose. Then, poke a few holes in the rice for steam to come through, and now, we can cover and  let it steam on medium low for about 14 minutes.After that time, come back, listen to it and you  should be able to hear that oil frying sizzling sound coming out from the wok.  At this time, we can start the “toasting” process.So take your wok, tilt it half way so that the  sides also gets some heat, cook it like this for a minute, then move the wok to cook along the sides. How long you want to do this step is totally up to you,  because the rice is cooked by now. So if you just want some flavored rice,  just do it for a couple minutes and start eating; but if you want some golden brown  bottom, you can do it for longer.For us, I like to do this step  for about 10-15 minutes for some lightly brown potato at the bottom.And 15 minutes’ “toasting” later, uncover, sprinkle some scallion greens over the rice,  give it nice mix, and now this very delicious and rustic Sichuan kongfan is done! You can  eat it alongside with some other dishes, or some simple pickles, or just by itself.So this is the kind of dishes that you don’t really see outside at restaurants,  especially out of Sichuan. Like in Shunde, our Malatang lady,  who’s from Guangyuan, she’d often wax poetic about this rice dish,  and her favorite version is made using some pumpkin and some douchi fermented black beans.So right, check out the recipe in the description box. A big thank you for  everyone that’s supporting us on Patreon. And of course, subscribe for more Chinese cooking videos.\n"