Hunan, Fujian and Anhui.
A jar of Hunan chopped chillies keeps for months on a kitchen shelf. The salt in it has taken away the water that bacteria need.
Hunan (湘菜) cooks with more chilli than Sichuan and less Sichuan pepper, so its heat is 香辣 and 酸辣 — fragrant-hot and sour-hot — rather than 麻辣. Fresh chillies are chopped with salt and packed into jars to ferment (剁辣椒) and spooned over steamed fish heads (剁椒鱼头); vegetables are pickled; pork, fish and tofu are salted and hung over smouldering wood to become 腊肉 and 腊鱼, which keep through the year (XIII.5). 毛氏红烧肉, red-braised pork without soy sauce, is Hunan's version of the braise (XXVII.6).
Fujian (闽菜) cooking faces the sea: clams, oysters, fish balls, light soups in many courses, and 红糟, the red lees of rice wine fermented with red yeast rice, which colours and flavours pork and fish. Its banquet piece 佛跳墙, "Buddha jumps over the wall", simmers abalone, sea cucumber, scallops, chicken, pork and more in Shaoxing wine for hours. Anhui (徽菜), from the mountains of the south where 徽商 merchants came from, cooks bamboo shoots, mushrooms, wild herbs and ham, braises with dark soy, and ferments: 臭鳜鱼 is mandarin fish salted and left for days until it smells strongly and its flesh turns firm and flaky. Salt makes these traditions work, and the workshop measures how.
Below: the water activity of a chilli mash with the salt you choose (chillies about 88 % water; salt dissolved in that water, course salt-solution model), against the lowest water activities at which common pathogens can grow.
- Describe the Hunan, Fujian and Anhui cuisines.
- Make 剁辣椒 safely.
- Explain how salt preserves.
- Know 红糟 and 臭鳜鱼.
Salt and acid together
In the model a mash with 5 % salt has a water activity of about 0.966 — too high to stop most pathogens by itself — while 10 % brings it to about 0.925, below the 0.94 at which C. botulinum and Salmonella stop growing, and 15 % to about 0.875. Traditional 剁辣椒 is salted at roughly this level and then ferments: lactic acid bacteria, which tolerate salt, drop the pH below 4.6 within days (XIV.3), adding a second barrier. Less salt is safe only if the fermentation is quick, clean and acid; a low-salt mash should be kept in the fridge.
剁辣椒: wash and dry 1 kg fresh red chillies completely, remove stems, chop coarsely with 100 g garlic and 50 g ginger; weigh, and mix in salt at 10 % of the total (about 115 g) and a little high-proof baijiu; pack tightly into a clean jar, press out air, and cover with a film of oil or a water-sealed lid. Ferment at room temperature a week, then keep cool; use a clean dry spoon. 腊肉 follows the same logic with time: belly rubbed with salt and spices, cured a week, hung to dry in cold weather and smoked — salt and drying lower water activity until the meat keeps (XIII.5). 臭鳜鱼 relies on salt and cool weather; it must be made with skill and fully cooked.
Make a small jar of 剁辣椒 at 10 % salt and taste it after one day and after one week. Note the change from raw heat to a rounder, sour heat.
Terms
- 剁辣椒
- Hunan chopped salted chillies, fermented in a jar.
- 腊肉
- Salted, dried and smoked pork.
- 红糟
- Fujian red rice-wine lees: colour and flavour.
- 臭鳜鱼
- Anhui fermented mandarin fish.
Sources
- ICMSF, Microorganisms in Foods 5: Characteristics of Microbial Pathogens, Blackie, 1996 — growth limits (minimum temperature, pH and water activity) and typical heat resistance; the course rounds them.
- R. S. Norrish, "An equation for the activity coefficients and equilibrium relative humidities of water in confectionery syrups", J. Food Technol. 1, 1966 (K = −6.47 for sucrose).
- F. Dunlop, Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China (2016), The Food of Sichuan (2019) and Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food (2023).
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.