Sweet-and-Sour Pickled Garlic

Meet Georgia
 

Georgia’s work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Food & Wine, the Wall Street Journal, Saveur, Afar and Simply Recipes. She has also edited for Afar, Epicurious, TripAdvisor and other food- and travel-focused publications and companies and has authored or co-authored four cookbooks.

As further introduction, check out the interview I did with her upon the book's publication and her recipe for Yunnan-style suancai, spicy pickled mustard greens. Georgia shares a little tutorial on Yunnan food, its similarities to and differences from Sichuan food, how she went about collecting the recipes for her cookbook and travel tips for Yunnan.
 

Hui-Style Beef With Pickles and Chives

You're going to need the Yunnan suancai recipe linked just above as the star of this simple ground-beef stir-fry. This recipe and travel story are a wonderful introduction to the homey recipes Georgia collected during her years immersed in Yunnan's wildly diverse cuisines.

"The foods of Yunnan Province vary wildly from place to place. In the north you’ll find Tibetan specialties like momos and butter tea, while in the south there’s green papaya salad and fried river weed crackers. But everywhere you go, there’s one cuisine you’ll find in pretty much every region: the beef-centric dishes of the Hui, a Muslim minority that has lived all across the province ever since the group first came to Yunnan with Kublai Khan’s army in the 13th century. 

While most Yunnan restaurants serve a lot of pork and fish and chicken, Hui restaurants are usually known for their beef dishes. These can range from stews filled with black cardamom and vegetables to noodle soups to deep-fried strips of beef with chilies. But my favorite Hui dish is also one of the simplest I’ve ever had: stir-fried beef with pickles (suāncài chǎo niúròu; 酸菜炒牛肉). This is the dish I turn to when I need something fast and delicious to feed my family, and everyone loves it so much that it’s rarely out of our cooking rotation for more than a couple weeks."

And here we are at the three-story Paocai Museum in Meishan, a city that takes great pride in being the pickle capital of Sichuan and the largest pickle producer in China. This mural depicting local pickle-making history was exquisite. 

This exhibit panel at the Paocai Museum pretty much sums it up! (Zanthoxylum is the genus of Sichuan pepper.)

The Paocai Museum is inclusive not only of brine pickles but also of salted vegetables (like zhacai and yacai) and fermented-vegetable sauces such as doubanjiang (fermented broad/fava beans and chilies). While the Sichuanese have been making ferments for centuries, this fascinating history shows that those flavors have become increasingly popular in Sichuan dishes over the past few decades.