Hunan Harvest Sauté

Recipe from Lawrence C.C. Chu

In Hunan province, once harvest is over, farmers start smoking and curing meat. Smoked pork is a local speciality, and a consistent ingredient in many of the provincial dishes. Here's a simple stir-fry recipe that exemplifies such a dish.

Yields:

8 servings

Time Required:

• 5 mins. cooking time

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. (0.45 kg) smoked picnic-style ham, trimmed and sliced ¼" (6 mm) -thick
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
• 1 Tbsp.¹ (11 g) fermented black beans², smashed and mixed with 1 tsp. (5 mL) oil
• 2 leeks, washed and diagonally sliced ¼-inch thick

Sauce

• 1 Tbsp. (15 mL) soy sauce
• 1 tsp. (5 mL) dry sherry
• ½ (2 g) tsp. sugar
• ¼ tsp. (1.5 g) salt
• Cornstarch paste³
• 1 tsp. (5 mL) hot chilli oil

Preparation:

To stir-fry, heat wok (or wide frying pan) over high heat for 1 min. until hot. Add ham, stir to separate, and cook for 1 ½ mins. Drain off any fat. Add garlic and black bean mixture, and cook until fragrant. Stir in leeks and SAUCE, and toss gently. Before leeks become soggy (1 ½ to 2 mins.), thicken with 1 tsp. cornstarch paste. Add hot chilli oil, and serve immediately.

Author's Notes

Lean, slab bacon that has been smoked could be substituted. Cut it into 1 ½" (38 mm) pieces for stir-frying.

¹ Quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.

² Cornstarch paste is a thin paste made from equal parts of cold water and corn starch. It is essential in many Chinese dishes (but be careful not to over-thicken). Stir just before using. Store covered in the refrigerator for 1 or 2 days.

"CoEn starch" is powdered starch processed from the New World grain maize (from Spanish, orig. from Nahuatl), which grain the USA/Canada call "corn", unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, which reserves "corn" to mean cereal grains generically. This starch product, needed here in its customary role as a thickening agent, is called "corn starch" in the US/Canada, but "cornflour" in the UK and most other anglophone lands — not to be confused with whole maize grain: That product — not a thickening agent — is called "polenta", "corn meal", or "corn flour" in the US/Canada, depending on how finely milled, and called "maize flour" in the UK and most other places. Australians should beware that their "cornflour" is starch extracted from wheat kernel, sometimes more-helpfully labelled as "wheaten cornflour". As if that weren't confusing enough, the maize-based thickener may be labelled (in Australia) either as "corn flour" or as "corn starch", so beware. Further, the maize flour product, there, is labelled as "cornmeal".

Note that whole-maize grain is traditionally, in Meso-American cultures of origin, wisely soaked in alkaline solution ("nixtamalised") to increase bioavailability and thereby prevent niacin deficiency (pellagra), among other important benefits, yielding "masa" (lit. dough) aka "masa de maíz" (lit. maize dough), also available in dried & ground form as "masa harina" (lit. dough flour) aka "harina de maíz" (lit. maize flour), and in its unground form, hominy. As further complication, Americans distinguish "corn flour", meaning prepared from maize endosperm only, from "maize flour" for use of whole maize — the former, neutral-flavoured; the latter, much more nutritious.

Origin of the naming mess: Originally, North America shared with Mother England the language's original meaning of "corn" to mean cereal grains generically (from Old English "corn" meaning single seed of any cereal plant, orig. from Proto-Germanic "kurnam" meaning small seed). The colonists got the gift of maize from native peoples, therefore at first calling it "Indian corn". Later, in the USA and Canada, "Indian corn" got worn down to just "corn", while the original meaning of "corn" was lost, locally. "Maize" is thus now the least-ambiguous term in international contexts, though many Americans either don't know that word or reserve it for variants from Latin-American (and Spanish) cooking.

³ Fermented black beans ("dou chi" in Mandarin, "dul see" in Cantonese) are whole black soybeans that have been fermented with salt, adding a salty, savoury, umami flavour — not to be confused with regular (non-soy) black beans similarly treated. They are available in either plastic bags/pouches or cardboard canisters. Read ingredient labels carefully. As these beans are sold whole, and Chef Chu wants them "smashed", the latter's your job.

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Taken from: Lawrence C.C. Chu's classic cookbook Chef Chu's Distinctive Cuisine Of China, page 129, published 1980 by Harper and Row, which can be checked out in scanned format at Internet Archive. Thank you! (Chu's the chef / restaurateur of beloved local restaurant Chef Chu's, in Los Altos, California.)

Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/hunan-harvest-saute.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on xxx. xx, 2026. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2026 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)