How to Make Authentic MaPo Tofu | 麻婆豆腐 | 10 Minute Recipe | Sichuan Chinese Cooking

Okay more Chinese food this week and today we're making what is probably the most famous dish of Sichuan cuisine. Now there are a lot of let's say variations around but this is the one true and only authentic version of mapo tofu. Mapo tofu is is often kind of euphemistically translated as grandma's tofu but it doesn't actually really mean that. The ma po, po is grandmother but the ma refers to sort of pockmarks or acne scars on the face and it goes back to the the first people who actually made this dish popular and apparently the wife of the people that ran this shop had very bad complexion so it's quite a rude name I guess you could call it but it's a delicious dish all the same. It starts with some tofu. This is just some firm fresh tofu. I just want to cut that into some small cubes. I think each one of these I'll probably cut into just into quarters. You know I don't mind it a bit larger for mapo tofu because it's quite a nice dish when you get big chunks of almost cooling tofu. Now I've done the tofu first because I want to get that onto the stove while I'm preparing the rest of these ingredients so this just goes into some very very lightly heated salted water not boiling not even simmering but just heating through slowly in some salted water for about 15 minutes. Now while the tofu slowly kind of warms through which which kind of readies the tofu for receiving all the rest of these flavours that we would put in there in the wok we can look at what else we're going to be dealing with. So a lot of variations mapo tofu some very heavy on the Sichuan pepper. We've got some Sichuan pepper here this is actually green Sichuan pepper but that's going to go on just at the end. The main ingredient for mapo tofu is Pixian Doubanjiang. It's a fermented broad bean paste from the Pixian area of Chengdu and this has been aged for a little bit more than three years. It looks pretty brutal it's just the the very famous Sichuan Erjintao chilies and broad beans that have been salted and fermented so I need a really good whack of that you know about that much I guess will work for our purposes and if you look at the texture of it it's very thick you can see whole broad beans in there you can see bits of chili in there as well big chunks in there so we actually have to chop this up. Now this is the real deal I picked this up when I was last in Chengdu. If you're buying Doubanjiang from a supermarket or something you've probably got it already ground or already in a paste form so you don't need to go through this process but if you're getting the real deal Doubanjiang you need to chop it up. Now I've got some minced beef here as well slightly fatty beef mince you don't need a lot of it there's probably 200 odd grams here and that's absolutely plenty you could do with even about half of that 150 100 grams would be totally fine for a dish like this. Now beef is traditional for mapo tofu you see some variations with pork you can do that obviously as well but if you want to make the traditional Chengdu style you do need beef and I think ground beef is okay but you do want a little bit more fine than that as well it's almost like a granules of beef throughout the dish rather than pieces of beef so like the bean paste I'm going to chop the beef too. Now the last thing I want to chop is just a little bit of garlic some purple skinned garlic that's favoured in China just lightly crush a few cloves and roughly chop them I'll put the garlic together with the ginger because I'm going to use those at the same time now for the rest of the ingredients we're using just some salted black beans I've got a little bit of chili powder here I don't think I'm going to need it but you can add some if you would like to some sugar for seasoning a bit of cornflour to thicken it at the end oh I forgot my spring onions these spring onions are going to go in there as well so I just want to cut those into five centimetre lengths so let's move all of this over to the wok so first things first I just want to fry the beef till it's well browned a bit of oil into the wok just the beef going in nothing else no seasoning nicely browned come straight out of the wok put that to the side touch more oil in and then in with the doubanjiang that bean paste as soon as that goes in it's so incredibly fragrant it's really really lovely when the bean paste is really fragrant and the oil is turning red now in with the garlic and ginger the salted black beans and mix that until you can start to smell the garlic fragrance coming through now in with a bit of water just to cool the wok down a bit so it doesn't over fry now start to move in this tofu you can see the tofu having gone into the water it's more tender and it's like cooked tofu it's not like raw tofu anymore and then back in with the browned beef and also these spring onions here too so now I'll taste it because the seasoning really depends on the type of doubanjiang and also the salted black beans that you're using because the dish should be quite salty if it's not salty enough obviously add a bit more salt but yeah this is pretty good this is it needs just a touch of sugar to knock back some of that saltiness and balance it and round it out because Sichuanese food it's actually really quite about sweetness people talk about the numbingness of the Sichuan peppercorn or the spice of the chili but Sichuan food always has kind of a back palette of sweetness behind almost any dish now that everything's in and it tastes good I need to thicken it I'm using a corn flour slurry for that now it's just corn flour mixed with cold water but you add it into the wok in three separate times you don't dump it all in because that can give you a really gluggy mixture adding it three times as my friend Fuchsia Dunlop tells me allows you to adjust the texture and I guess the silkiness of that gravy to be exactly right you want it to be pourable and still luxurious but not too watery and sippid and certainly not too thick now that looks fantastic already but I'll get it into a bowl a sprinkling of green Sichuan pepper and that's an authentic Mapo Tofu