Here is the second installment of my monthly column in Chengdoo Citylife Magazine, 'Your Chuancai Cupboard'. This month: Sichuan Pepper.

Sichuan pepper, or huājiāo （花椒） in Chinese, is one of the most loved, and simultaneously, one of the most hated of Chinese spices. Some people abhor its ‘soapy’ aroma, and pick out the peppercorns from a dish with distaste; others positively seek them out to enjoy their characteristic numbing flavour to the fullest.

Sichuan pepper appears in many of the most famous Sichuanese dishes, and its flavour is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the region’s cooking – others, such as Hunan and Guizhou, use just as much chilli, but none use huajiao with such a liberal hand as the Sichuanese. It is also worth noting that huajiao’s appearance in Sichuan cuisine far predates that of chillies.

Today, Sichuan pepper is most frequently fried with dried chillies, a method that brings out its smoky tones (for example in Kung Pao Chicken), but it is also dry-fried and ground to a powder (as in Mapo Tofu), and even occasionally used raw (as in Jiao Ma Ji Pian – chicken slices in a Sichuan pepper sauce). Sichuan pepper is also one of the ingredients in the famous (and highly variable) Chinese ‘five-spice’ mixture, and is also used in various other Asian cuisines, including Japanese, Korean and Indonesian.

In spite of its name, Sichuan pepper is in fact related neither to black pepper nor chilli, but is the outer husk of the fruit of the prickly ash tree, Zanthoxylum. This somewhat stunted tree (thorny branches bare in the winter, covered by dark green, pale-edged leaves in the summer), produces its harvest in August: slightly knobbly, dusky pink balls, gathered in busy clusters – a stunning contrast to their surrounding dark leaves.

Qingxi village in Hanyuan County (about 300km south-west of Chengdu) is where the most prized and famous Sichuan pepper is grown. Its history here is long and illustrious; it is mentioned in the foundational Book of Songs, thought to be compiled by Confucius himself, and Qingxi’s Sichuan pepper was for many centuries sent in tribute to the imperial court of China’s emperors.

When I visited Qingxi, only a few weeks before the harvest, the trees were positively dripping with the peppercorns, and their lemony aroma reached me before I was even close enough to touch them. I learnt from villagers that once picked, some of the peppercorns would be used fresh to make huajiao-flavoured oil; the rest would be left to dry in the sun, laid out in bamboo baskets, until the skin has cracked to reveal the shiny black seeds within.

The seeds would then be shaken from the husks and discarded, and the leftover husks are thus ready for use in cooking.

You too can make the arduous journey to buy Sichuan pepper from the very village where it is produced, but for those not quite as huajiao-obsessed as me, just try to buy a brand from Hanyuan County. I also recommend buying Sichuan pepper in pre-sealed packets, not loose, as its flavour diminishes rapidly if not kept in a sealed container. For those not in China, Sichuan pepper can be bought online from specialist suppliers (such as the Cool Chile Company), and for British readers, is available in most supermarkets in the Bart’s spices range.

As mentioned earlier, Sichuan pepper is delicious fried with dried chillies; this method, called qiang in Chinese, can be used in combination with all manner of fresh vegetables – I like it particularly with slithers of round courgette (zucchini). But perhaps the most famous of Sichuanese dishes that uses Sichuan pepper is Mapo Tofu, a recipe for which I’ve adapted from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery and which you can find below.

Mapo Tofu 麻婆豆腐

1 block of tofu
3-4 spring onions (scallions)
Vegetable or peanut oil
150g minced beef (optional)
2 tablespoons chilli-bean paste (doubanjiang)
1 tablespoon fermented soy beans (dou chi), rinsed and drained
200ml water
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons light soy sauce
1 teaspoon of cornstarch mixed with 1 tablespoon of water
1 teaspoon Sichuan pepper

1. Cut the tofu into 2cm cubes and leave to steep in very hot, salted water. Slice the spring onions into 3cm-long chunks. Dry-fry the Sichuan pepper in a hot wok until smoking, tip out into a pestle-and-mortar and then grind to a fine powder (you can use pre-ground Sichuan pepper, but it won’t taste as good).
2. If using the beef, pour about 2 tablespoons of oil into a wok and heat. Once smoking, add the minced beef and fry until a little brown and set aside.
3. Add another tablespoon or so of oil, heat and add the chilli-bean paste. Fry for about 30 seconds, taking care not to let it burn, and then add the fermented soy beans and cook for another 30 seconds.
4. Pour in the water, add the sugar, soy sauce and salt to taste and now add the drained tofu cubes. Simmer for about 5 minutes, to allow the tofu to absorb the flavours.
5. Add the spring onions (scallions) and gently stir in. Once they are just cooked, add the starch-and-water mixture to thicken the sauce. Finally, pour everything into a serving dish, scatter with the cooked minced beef and the ground Sichuan pepper and serve.

Earlier this year, Cam and I were in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, and craving to get out of the city. Having talked for ages about jumping on a random bus and seeing where it took us, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to actually do it. From the town centre we boarded the number 2 in high spirits; yet 45 minutes later, instead of ending up in some pastoral idyll, the last stop turned out to be just another grim suburb.

With our time in Kunming rapidly slipping away from us, we realised we needed some local expertise, and so called our friend Joe, a Norweigan who is currently living in the city. Trying not to sound too desperate, I explained our predicament, and asked Joe if he could recommend anywhere we could go.

“Yes!” he said straight away, “you should go to Hao Bao!” And so it was that a couple of hours later we were in a mini-van, on a road snaking through thickly-wooded hills, to a destination more perfect than we could have imagined.

Kunming Hao Bao Qing Organic farm 昆明好宝箐生态农业园, 35 km north-west of the city, is, we were told, the oldest organic farm in China, established in 2002 and receiving organic status in 2005. The 110-mu (96 hectare) farm, nestled in a peaceful narrow valley, employs around forty people, growing vegetables and raising pigs, ducks, sheep, rabbit, turkeys and chickens – all to organic standards that are inspected every year. In addition, the farm also runs a restaurant and a small hotel, whose rooms are spilt between the main building and several cave-like rooms set into a hillside.

We arrived in the late afternoon, and before dinner I was given a quick tour of the main greenhouse by farm manager Li Gang. Everything at Hao Bao, Li Gang explained, takes much longer to grow than on a conventional farm, where fertilisers and pesticides are used to speed up the growing process; the pigs at Hao Bao, for example, are slaughtered at eight months old, as opposed to the normal four. Some of these are kept in a pen next to the restaurant, and munched away nosily on their dinner as we spoke.

It was soon time to eat our own dinner, the ordering of which turned out to be one of the highlights of our stay. The ordering of one's dinner at Hao Bao is perhaps the most lovely way of ordering food I've ever experienced. Instead of any sort of menu, we were led around the greenhouse, between beds thick with countless varieties of vegetables. Next, we decided what took our fancy, and pointed it out to a member of staff. As we returned to our table, our choices were dug up and cooked not ten metres away from where they were grown; five minutes later, the vegetables we'd chosen had been transformed into a simple but mouth-watering meal: fried egg and tomato, a cabbage soup, stir-fried fennel and stir-fried cauliflower. I'm not sure if I've ever eaten such fresh food, nor eaten a meal that was so delicious.

The next day after breakfast, farmhand Zhao Zhongming treated us to a full tour of the farm. In the smiting cold, we saw the main animal sheds, more greenhouses, and countless fields planted with spring onions, radishes, red cabbages and many more. Zhao Zhongming echoed Li Gang's emphasis on the slowness of their methods, and explained that vegetables, like the pigs, are only ready to eat after twice as long as those grown using fertilisers and pesticides.

With this approach in mind, and the comparative expensiveness of their products, I found it slightly hard to imagine how commercially successful projects such as Hao Bao can be; yet it seems that the awareness and popularity of organic food in China is growing. Hao Bao's vegetables are now being distributed through Green Kunming, a veg-box scheme, and it is now common to find an organic section in most major supermarkets. Furthermore, the widespread public outrage in response to last year's baby milk fiasco (and many other recent food safety scandals), seem to point towards an increasing realisation of the problems inherent in the current food industry.

Though I often revel in the cheapness of food in China, I also know that that cheapness must surely come at a price. While more natural methods of farming, like those at Hao Bao, are undoubtedly more expensive for the consumer, it is clear to me that these methods make the cost to both the environment and our health considerably less. As such, I sincerely hope that organic food will continue to spread in popularity in China, and that farms like Hao Bao continue to prosper.

(Additional information gathered from www.gokunming.com)