Look, things evolve
Okay, so Sichuan peppercorns. I have been working with these for 25 years and have never really gone hard on understanding how they function. This is because an actual Chinese person once told me some rules 20 years ago, and I ingrained them in the back of my brain and then never questioned anything.
I should keep questioning things. I have been cooking central Chinese food for a quarter century, and remain convinced that I know nothing about Chinese food. So I looked up things.
This all came about because my partner made a mapo tofu recipe that called for adding the peppercorns in the middle of the make. That felt deeply off to me. I’ve historically chopped them and added them at the end.
I could wax poetic for hours on Sichuan peppercorns. They smell like clementines, taste like raspberries, and mess with your palate in a way that borders on the psychedelic. The ostensible goal is to numb your mouth enough that you can take more heat, but you can’t ignore what it does to the flavor. Water, of all things, tastes different for a while after. And above all, Sichuan peppercorn flavor is delicate & fragile. They are known for many things, one of which is having a pungent aroma, and another of which is going stale.
When I think of ingredients that have bright, complex, highly concentrated citrus flavors with pungent aroma that go bad in short order, I think about handling them carefully when I’m cooking. Years of working with finishing olive oils have burned this one into me. Ditto tropical fruits. You really don’t want to do much to those, you know?
For the record, all Sichuan peppercorns imported into the states have to be heated to 160º in order to kill a bacteria that could infect our citrus. Not nothing, of course, but 160º isn’t a very high temperature in the pantheon of cooking. I’m more concerned about aggressively boiling or sautéing them – which might burn them or dull the flavor.
So first, let’s focus on mapo tofu. Fuchsia Dunlop adds peppercorns both at the beginning and the end, and she is about as reliable a source as they come in the west. I have based my own mapo recipe off of hers for 20 years and plain forgot the first addition for that entire time.
The original recipe for mapo tofu from 1958 puts them not in the recipe proper, but in the stock you make beforehand. Okay, weird, fine. A lot changed. But still.
Looking outside of mapo, sometimes you do in fact want to add heat to Sichuan peppercorns. Toasting them is extremely common – but that’s a dry, low heat, usually done in a bare wok. You can toast peppercorns, keep them in your pantry, and grind them as needed. They possess a different flavor profile. Toasting can burn them.
I’m not wrong on some of the fronts that really matter in my own cooking routine, though. Whitefish stew (as found in this book) involves peppercorns exclusively as a finishing agent. Cumin lamb adds peppercorns in the final spice mixture, and very little heat is applied at the very end.
Some stocks call for peppercorns, but I’ve always operated under the belief that they got added towards the end. (Infusions are another matter.) I checked a few soups that call for them and they do in fact need to be added late – with the heat turned down to medium immediately after adding.
So I’m, like, 80% wrong on the mapo front, and maybe (charitably) 40% wrong when it comes to the literal entire rest of this region’s food system. I’m grateful I looked this up and sorry that I made the wrong call, but mostly I remain boggled that I learned something so wholly new about this thing for which I’m mildly known for being good at. Maybe “good” is not the right word, though – maybe it’s less bad.