Eating Sichuanese Gan Bian Dry-Roasted Green Beans with Monterey County Shrimp from the Golden Star Restaurant in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget
Like many Americans I grew up eating stir-fried Chinese-American food that is inspired by the cuisine of Hong Kong and the southern Guandong Province of China. (Specifically, this is the type of food I ate as a child at the Ho-Ho Inn in Detroit, Michigan where my sister worked.)
When I moved to Chicago, Illinois to attend the University of Chicago, I was able to expand my cultural horizons by trying the food of two inland regions of China – Hunan (where Chairman Mao Zedong was born) and Szechuan (written as Sichuan in the Pinyin transliteration system adopted by the People’s Republic of China).
The House of Hunan on Michigan Avenue in Chicago is rather fancy with black lacquer tables and chairs and red silk seat cushions. I asked to dine there when my mother came to visit me in college. The food was mildly spicy and paired well with Burgundy wine according to the waiters.
The Szechuan House located along the Chicago River between Michigan Avenue and State Street was close to where I lived in the Marina Towers that look like two tall corncobs. The Szechuan House had a great buffet on Sundays with lots of seafood. I tried to eat there once a month when I worked at EY. The food was very spicy I noted, but I thought they just added extra pepper to their stir-fry dishes.
However, when I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s 2003 cookbook Land of Plenty: Authentic Sichuan Recipes Personally Gathered in the Chinese Province of Sichuan, I realized that the cooking techniques used in Sichuan are somewhat different from those used in Hong Kong.
Dunlop is the first Westerner to have attended and graduated from the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, China. As an introduction to her recipes, one of the cooking methods she describes is gan bian where food is cut into small sizes and fried in very little oil until the food is slightly dried out, fragrant, and even a little blistered.
One of the most famous recipes for the gan bian cooking method is made with green beans and pork. Golden Star Restaurant in Salinas, California modifies this recipe to use local shrimp in place of pork. The shrimp was probably marinated for several minutes in soy sauce to not sear and stick to the wok when dry-roasted.
At Golden Star, once the green beans are dry-roasted, the chef added a seasoning trio of minced fresh garlic, peeled and minced ginger, and crushed red Sichuan peppers to the green beans and tossed them.
In Golden Star's version, the green beans were set aside and shrimp added with very little oil to dry-roast. The high wok heat quickly cooks the shrimp. Shaoshing wine or sherry is added for flavoring before the green beans are added back to the work.
The shrimp and green beans are tossed till steam rises with sesame oil added just before serving.
I loved this meal. There were many fresh green beans, which may be due to the fact that southern Monterey County is warm and has a longer growing season for green beans. Green beans are a rich source of Vitamin C and fiber, making gan bian shrimp at Golden Star Restaurant in Salinas, California a great deal in addition to being delicious.
When this item is in season, I highly recommend it as a reasonably priced, healthy, and delicious meal.
Text and photo by Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France and developer of the Novgorod and Bento War Games
