Pickled String Beans with Ground Pork (rou mo jiang dou)

[dr_memory]

Comments

[r_ness]

I don't know if this helps you, particularly as you seem to have gotten some excellent results, but I thought I'd share the results of the research your post inspired me to do.

I think the characters for the dish are 肉末豇豆, which is literally "meat (which, if not specified, defaults to pork) ground, cowpea beans". An alternate name for this dish is apparently 酸豇豆肉末, which is "sour cowpea beans, meat ground", for which there are many hits. Most of these appear to assume you already have pickled string beans.

I've had to call off my search for recipes for pickling string beans because it's making me hungry. :)

[dr_memory]

Heh, you were one of the people I was hoping to troll with this post.

I am extremely interested in knowing what the Chinese-language pages/cookbooks say about the pickling/fermenting method for the beans. It's not very often that I'm inclined to think that I'm right and a professional cuisine researcher is wrong, and I'd like to get some confirmation one way or the other. (Not to mention that I'd love to be able to do a more faithful rendition of the dish.)

[whynotkay]

The dish, as listed on the menu, is 紹子紅豆 .

[r_ness]

Interesting! That translates to "shao4 zi5 hong2 dou4", which isn't anything like like "rou mo jiang dou". (It doesn't refer directly to ground pork at all, for one thing, although in the world of Chinese names for dishes that doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot.)

I have seen 紹子紅豆 translated as "Chinese salty string beans", which doesn't seem too far off as an idiomatic translation.

But that's helpful, if much rarer. Thanks for that.

Which restaurant menu are you referring to? I found it on the menu of a restaurant in San Mateo; it would be amusing if it were the same one:

Little Sichuan Restaurant
168 E. 4th Avenue, San Mateo, CA 94402
http://www.222.to/littlesichuan/menu.asp

[adania]

There is a style of Japanese pickles called "asa-zuke" which means "morning pickle." These are usually cucumbers which are soaked in a salt brine overnight. They are basically as you describe: salty and damp, as well as somewhat limp.
Perhaps something similarly mild would happen to beans, but i think that given 3 days, you will probably have some pickling happening. And if it's not pickled enough for you, let them sit longer!

[adania]

Err, fell prey to the many homophones in Japanese. "asa" in this case is "shallow" rather than "morning." It's still a one-night thing、as another name for the same style of pickle is "hitobanzuke" or "one-night pickle."

[whynotkay]

I still claim that I made the salty bean version (not quite Fuschia's recipe, but something similar), and it wasn't just "moist salty beans" at the end.