Beijing - It starts deceptively slowly, and at first it’s just a tingle on the tongue. But another bite and the tingle turns into a full-scale thermo-savoury storm inside my mouth.
But there’s more to Sichuan food than just heat. In Chengdu, Sichuan province’s capital city, there are plenty of dishes that will make your mouth, rather than your eyes, water.
With a population of 13 million, Chengdu is one of China’s fastest-developing cities, fuelled by its booming technology industry. Chengdu is also an authentically Chinese city, where tea houses rather than Starbucks thrive, and where hand-carts sit alongside motorbikes at traffic lights.
Beyond the city, rolling farmland and tea plantations give way to dense, mist-shrouded forests, where 80 percent of the world’s giant pandas live.
There is no such tranquillity as we inch through crowds in JinLi Street. Locals and Chinese tourists flock here for Sichuan street food.
Never mind pop-up restaurants and food trucks, this is the real deal: carts balance huge spitting woks, plastic bowls crammed with thick noodles, and chopping boards scattered with knives and knobbly roots.
I give the braised pig’s lungs and duck head a miss and plump for a mushroom skewer. But after two gulps, my mouth is melting down faster than a toddler at bedtime.
As a fire rages around my tonsils, I’m aware it’s more than just plain heat: there’s a numbness, and a strange oily-saltiness.
At the Museum of Sichuan Cuisine, the internationally renowned cookery school on the western fringes of Chengdu, chef Si Goll explains that this is the crux of Sichuan cooking: it’s not about ingredients, but flavours.
“There are about 24 base flavours, including salty, sweet, hot, spicy, sour and bitter,” he says.
“The most distinctive ingredient is the Sichuan peppercorn – it produces a numbing effect, which becomes addictive once you are used to it.”
And strangely, he’s right. Over the next few days, between strolling around the People’s Park, singing karaoke in bars and melting at the sight of newborn cubs at the Chengdu Panda Base, I feasted on the whole Sichuan cuisine scene.
My favourite was chuan chuan xiang, or skewers of fish and beef cooked theatrically in a spicy broth at the table. By now, I didn’t just recognise the numbing Sichuan peppercorns, but looked forward to them. Tongue tingling and lips buzzing, my mouth has never felt more alive. – Daily Mail