Sichuan preserved mustard stem, salted, pressed, and fermented with chilli and Sichuan pepper
Origin: Fuling, Chongqing & Sichuan, China
From the journey of Mustard.
China took the mustard plant and bred it for a part nobody else wanted. Brassica juncea var. tumida has been selected until the base of its stem swells into a knobbled green fist, and that stem, not the leaf and not the seed, is what becomes zha cai. It comes from Fuling on the Yangtze, upriver from Chongqing, where it has been made commercially since the very end of the nineteenth century; the usual account credits a merchant named Qiu Shouan with beginning production in 1898. Fuling still produces the overwhelming bulk of it, and zha cai is now one of the most widely eaten preserved vegetables on earth, sold in vacuum sachets from Chengdu to every Chinese supermarket in the world. The process has three stages and the name records the third. The stems are trimmed and dried in the sun or the wind until they lose much of their water; they are then salted heavily and pressed under weights, which is where the zha comes from, meaning pressed; and finally they are rubbed with chilli powder, salt, and Sichuan pepper and left to ferment in sealed jars. What comes out is crunchy, deeply salty, sour, faintly numbing, and umami in a way that seems out of proportion to what went in. It is almost never eaten alone and almost never absent. Shredded into a bowl of rice porridge at breakfast, scattered over cold noodles, stir-fried with pork slivers into zha cai rou si, dropped into a clear soup, it functions as salt, acid, and texture at once. It belongs to a large family of Chinese preserved mustards, each a different cultivar treated a different way: xue cai, mei gan cai, suan cai, and the ya cai of Yibin without which a dan dan mian is incomplete.
Fresh swollen mustard stems are sold by Chinese grocers in season and are worth looking for. Kohlrabi is the closest widely available substitute: it has the right density and crunch, though it lacks the mustardy edge of the real thing. Broccoli stems, thickly peeled, also work. The classic use is zha cai rou si: shred it fine, stir-fry with slivered pork, ginger, and spring onion, and eat with rice. It also goes into clear pork and zha cai soup, over cold noodles, and into breakfast congee. It keeps for six months refrigerated and gets progressively softer and more sour. Use a dry spoon. Bought zha cai from Fuling is excellent and cheap and there is no shame in it. This recipe is here because the process explains the ingredient, and because kohlrabi treated this way is a genuinely good pickle in its own right.
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