David’s Long Bean Tofu Dish

Here comes the long awaited recipe — David’s Long Bean Tofu Dish! It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is David’s signature Chinese dish (although I’ve never seen it in any Chinese restaurants), because we have it at least once a week. Today I’ll reveal David’s secret, so you can reproduce it at home and modify it as you see fit.

As the name suggests, you’ll need some Chinese long beans and five spice tofu to start with. If you live around the SF Bay Area, you can get all the ingredients from your local 99 Ranch Market. You might even find them at Safeway, but we’ve found that they tend to charge more.

David parboils the beans (四季豆) and then cools them under running water. You don’t want to complete cook them, because they’ll be cooked again with other ingredients later.

Now we’ll focus on the non-liquid ingredients first:

	You need a package of five spice tofu (五香豆干), a small can of Chinese lettuce core pickles (金蘭小菜心), and some amount of garlic. What you want to do is to mince the garlic, dice the pickles, and slice the tofu.
	This is what five spice tofu looks like, and you can replace it with the brand you like.
	This is what Chinese lettuce core pickles look like. Unlike the Western pickles, those are sweet with a tint of saltiness. They are crunchy, adding the interesting texture and extra flavor to the final dish.

It’s time to mix David’s secret sauce:

	To give the dish a complex flavor, you need the four sauces. From the left to right: sesame oil (芝麻油), Hoisin sauce (海鮮醬), oyster sauce (蠔油醬), and chili bean sauce (辣豆瓣醬).
	Depending on your taste, you place the appropriate amount in a small mixing bowl.
	Place your sliced tofu in the mixing bowl and try to cover each slice with a layer of the yummy sauce.

What we have so far:

Clockwise from top right: parboiled long beans, minced garlic, diced pickles, and sliced tofu.

You can use a wok or a sauté pan to cook the dish. David uses a 12″ non-stick pan to do the job. He cooks the minced garlic in the sizzling hot pan first and then add the rest in. The goal is to get all the beans coated with the sauce while not overcooking them.

And, voilà, the happy dinner with the cooked short grain rice underneath!

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這是石頭的發明, 中餐館倒是從來沒見過這道<<中菜>>. 因為是他的招牌菜 (不是很花工, 好吃又夠味), 所以我們每個禮拜至少會吃一次.