Sick and tired of potatoes? Don’t know what to do with potatoes except bake them, fry them, put them in the oven or mash them? Well, today I am going to share one of my favourite authentic Chinese recipes, and we will make a cold dish with potato.

Yes, a cold dish.

First let’s do some groceries shopping. You will need:

Potatoes, I use 2 for two persons;

Garlic;

Ginger;

Curry powder;

Cumin powder;

Chicken powder;

Five spices powder;

Sichuan pepper;

Dried chill;

Cinnamon;

Star anise;

Tsaoko;

Oil;

Sesame oil;

Sugar;

Salt;

Dark rice vinegar.

First of all, peel the potatoes. Prepare a big bowl with some water, a slicer/mandolin (with a protector will be the best). A bowl of water because you need to flush off most of the starch, so you get a better end result. Then you can start slicing the potatoes,  if you can cut them in very thinly you can use a knife as well in this case. After slicing all the potatoes, flush them. Now, you can put on a pan of water, after the water is boiling, put all the sliced potatoes in. Just wait until it is boiling again, now you can get the potatoes out, flush them with cold water and make sure the potato is not warm any more. This is an essential part of preparing this dish, by flushing the potatoes, you make sure that they will not taste too soft or soggy later on.

Now you can get a bowl to mix some of the ingredients together. For two persons, I mixed 1 tsp of five-spice powder, 1 tsp curry powder, 1 tsp cumin powder, 1 tsp sugar, ½ tsp chicken powder and a little bit of salt (depends on how salty you normally eat). Then you chop some garlic in the bowl to mix everything together.

The last step is to make the spicy dressing oil, you should put 1 piece of cinnamon, 1 piece of tsaoko, some dried chill, ginger and Sichuan pepper in the pan with some oil. You don’t want to put too much Sichuan pepper in the oil if you never made any dish with Sichuan pepper. Simply because too much of these pepper can make your mouth feel numb and you probably can’t feel anything for like 30 minutes or even longer haha. So my suggestions is to start with 10-15 of them, and if you think you can handle the taste you can put more in it next time.

An essential step in making the dressing is to add all ingredients to the oil before you start heating up the oil. Throughout the whole process the pan should be on the lowest fire you have on your stove otherwise the oil may turn bitter, something you want to avoid. In about 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the amount of oil you put in the pan, the dressing will be done. How can you tell the oil is done? You can see that the dried chilli and Sichuan pepper have changed colour and the cinnamon has opened up a little bit. You don’t want to burn the chillies, you want to fry them to the moment that they are about to turn black not just yet.

 put them with cold oil

 it is done

 see the oil is basically cooking the powder mix

 make sure to stir it

Now you can pour the oil to the bowl of the powder mixture you just mixed. To finish the dish, you can just pour the dressing on the potatoes, then add 1-2 tbsp. of dark rice vinegar, and ½ tsp of sesame oil in the dish, stir and mix them well. Here you go, an easy but tasteful cold dish!

Hope you guys like this recipe and surely there will be part II 🙂 and next time I will take better pictures :P, I was cooking and taking pictures with my phone at the same time and it is more difficult than I thought…

xx

Ting