Smoked Bacon and Smoked Tofu

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From Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuschia Dunlop. p 94.

Ingredients:

  • 7 oz Chinese Smoked bacon, trimmed of rind
  • 5 oz smoked tofu
  • 10 - 15 Chinese leeks/garlic chives
  • 10 - 15 dried Tien Tsin peppers, ends snipped, seeds shaken out
  • 2 - 3 T peanut oil or other high smoke point vegetable oil (olive oil not a good idea)
  • dash of Imperial Dark soy or Double Black soy to taste (both are slightly sweet and strongly flavored)
  • salt to taste

Method:

  1. Trim rind off of smoked bacon. If in slices, cut into slabs, if your bacon is longer and more like a stick shape, cut cross-wise into thick slabs. Set up in steamer, steam for 5 - 10 minutes. Bacon is cooked when dark red flesh is pink and when fat is translucent. Remove from heat, cool, and if need be, cut up more to match other ingredients' shapes.
  2. Cut up smoked tofu to uniform and matching size with other ingredients, set aside. Wash garlic chives and cut into appropriate size, set aside. Cut ends off peppers and shake the seeds out of them (this makes them less spicy). Set these aside. Keep salt and soy around for final seasoning.
  3. Heat up wok, add oil. Fry bacon to release water and more oil (bacon oil!). Add smoke tofu and fry, constantly stirring, until golden brown.
  4. If your wok cooperates, push the bacon and tofu up the sides for cooking other ingredients in the center. If not, pull out the bacon and tofu from the wok and set aside, leaving the bacon flavored oil in the center.
  5. Cook the Tien Tsin peppers for a brief period (30 - 60 seconds).
  6. Add the garlic chives and stir-fry with peppers until the chives are cooked and get darker green.
  7. Add the tofu and bacon back into the mix and stir-fry briefly (30 seconds - 2 minutes).
  8. Season with soy and salt to taste.
  9. Serve on a LOT of rice.

Notes:

  • This is a rice-sending dish, which means it's meant to be eaten with a lot of rice. You'll get a fried/sauteed dish with a little (2 - 3 T) highly flavored peanut or vegetable oil at the bottom. Load up a big bowl of rice or grain or whatever your diet allows you to eat, and then put a layer of this dish on it, maybe season with a little more soy or salt, and dig in. Remember to put one morsel of the dish on your fork or chopsticks with the rest filled out with rice. You should not plan to eat a huge quantity of the actual dish as your course.
  • Prep cut up ingredients in a like for like way. If you are able to get square thin (1/8" to 1/4") slabs of bacon then do the same for the tofu and when you cut up the chines, trim them so they're as long as the slices are wide. If you have to do more matchsticky shapes, make everything that you can that shape. And if you can, cut so that the pieces will be easily picked up with chopsticks.
  • Come prepared to fight over the dish and leftovers with fellow diners, this one's a gold star that's hard to be generous about.

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