Sichuan Pork: A-salted and battered

The recent Chinese New Year celebrations cajoled me into finally opening the somewhat beaten-up looking tin of Sichuan Pork that I picked up a while back from the reduced shelf in my local Tesco. I say somewhat beaten-up - in fact it looked far more dented than a simple drop on the floor could ever have caused; drop-kicked seemed more likely from the size of the divots in its sides. Given its state you'd think it might have been a bit more reduced than £2 down to 80p. Still, tins are generally still fine to use when it is just the sides that are dented; it wasn't rusted at all, or bulging at the top or bottom, nor did it make a popping sound when pressed at the ends (a sign that the seal has been broken) or spray its contents everywhere when opened, so I felt it was safe to proceed. Note how I slipped in a little food safety lesson there - it's educational stuff, this blog, innit.




The side of the tin gave nutritional information for the product based on a serving size of 55g, with 6 servings per tin. Given that it was just a standard size tin, this didn't sound like very much, so I weighed out 55g to see how big this serving actually was. Now I know we are always being told by health experts these days to cut down our portion sizes, but this was ridiculous - the tiny pile of pork and veg looked lost and helpless in the middle of the plate. If they'd served this amount of food up in the workhouses it wouldn't just have been Oliver Twist asking for more. Not that they really went in for Sichuan cuisine in Victorian London, but at least their portions of gruel weren't so small they could be served up using a teaspoon rather than a ladle.


Really?

In all seriousness though, the manufacturers can't genuinely have believed this amount would fill anyone up, so there must be some other reason for suggesting such a small quantity as a portion. Looking further down the nutritional info list reveals perhaps why: that tiny 55g serving contains 300mg sodium, a whopping 15% of the recommended daily allowance for an adult. By comparison, the same quantity of standard baked beans contains only around a third of that amount. I think it's more than a little sneaky to give nutritional information for an improbably small quantity of a product - if you don't read the information properly, you could easily be fooled into thinking that the product was nowhere near as bad for you as you think. Cereal manufacturers are often guilty of this, listing nutritional values for what would be an incredibly small bowlful in order to make it appear that the product contains less sugar.

So, while I probably could have eaten the whole tin myself, I decided against consuming 90% of my daily salt allowance in one go ("Please Sir, my poor 'eart can't take any more...") and went for just half of it, with a big mound of plain rice on the side and a sort-of Asian-ish salad of sliced carrot, cucumber and pepper in a chilli and lime dressing.

That's more like it!

It is spiciness though, not saltiness, that Sichuan food has a reputation for. I was lucky enough to have the chance to visit a friend in China last year (more on that anon), and while I didn't make it down to the Sichuan province during my stay, I did try a couple of dishes containing the infamous Sichuan "numbing spice", which does much as the name would suggest to your tongue. I didn't really expect the contents of the tin to have quite the same effect, but being quite a fan of spicy foods I had high hopes that the pork would have a bit of a kick to it.

Sadly, it disappointed on that front - although the ingredients list included 'mashed Chilli pepper', it was in fact very mild, to put it...err, mildly. Thankfully it didn't taste incredibly salty, as I had been expecting, though in a way that is quite worrying too - it is quite surprising just how much salt can be added to food before it starts to taste unpleasant.

The pieces of pork could perhaps have been left a little bigger prior to cooking- as it was they had started to disintegrate into the rest of the sauce a bit too much, leaving them looking rather small and insignificant among the other ingredients. The strips of carrot and bamboo shoot had a nice bit of bite left to them though, and while the somewhat sinister-sounding (and looking) pieces of 'black fungus' were perhaps a little slimy in texture, they gave a good savoury 'mushroomyness' to the overall flavour.



My heart and kidneys appeared to survive the hefty whack of salt that even half a tin provided, but inevitably it didn't really take me back to some of the fantastic meals I had on my travels last year. Seeing as it was produced in the Czech Republic rather than China though, that might have been a bit too much to ask for.