Spicy Food & Cutest Pandas in Exotic Chengdu
Wok stars and bear necessities: Spicy food and the cutest pandas in exotic Chengdu: It starts deceptively slowly, and at first it's just a tingle on the tongue. But another bite and the tingle turns into a tornado as a full-scale thermo-savoury storm breaks out inside my mouth. But there's more to Sichuan food than just being hot. In Chengdu, Sichuan province's capital city, there are plenty of dishes that will make your mouth, rather than your eyes, water.
With a population of 13million people, Chengdu is one of China's fastest developing cities, fuelled by its booming technology industry - two-thirds of the world's iPhones and 20 per cent of computers are produced here. Chengdu is also an authentically Chinese city, where tea houses rather than Starbucks thrive, and where hand-carts sit alongside motorbikes at traffic lights. Beyond the city, rolling farmland and tea plantations give way to dense, mist-shrouded forests where 80 per cent of the world's giant pandas live, and to blue-silhouetted mountains that rise 10,000ft to the Tibetan plains.
There is no such tranquillity as we inch through crowds in JinLi Street. Nearby is the 1,300-year-old Wenshu Buddhist monastery. Locals and Chinese tourists flock here for the Sichuan street food. Never mind pop-up restaurants and food trucks, this is the real deal: carts balance huge spitting woks, plastic washing-up bowls crammed with thick noodles, and chopping boards scattered with vicious-looking knives, smashed garlic and nobbly roots. I give the braised pig's lungs and fried duck head a miss and plump for a skewer of innocuous-looking mushrooms. But after two gulps, my mouth is melting down faster than a toddler at bedtime.
As a fire rages around my tonsils, I'm aware it's more than just plain heat: there's a numbness, and a strange but not unpleasant oily-saltiness.
At the Museum of Sichuan Cuisine, the internationally renowned cookery school on the western fringes of Chengdu, chef Si Goll explains that this is the crux of Sichuan cooking: it's not about ingredients but flavours. 'There are about 24 base flavours, including salty, sweet, hot, spicy, sour and bitter,' he says.
'We use specific Sichuan-grown ingredients to create a them, such as fermented broad bean paste, mustard tubers, chillies, garlic, ginger and well salt.
'The most distinctive ingredient is the Sichuan peppercorn - it produces a numbing effect which becomes almost addictive once you are used to it.'
And strangely, he's right. Over the next few days, between strolling around the picturesque People's Park, singing karaoke in boisterous bars along the Brocade River and melting at the sight of newborn cubs at the Chengdu Panda Base, I feasted on the whole Sichuan cuisine scene.
My favourite was chuan chuan xiang, or skewers of fish and beef cooked theatrically in a spicy broth at the table. By now, I didn't just recognise the numbing Sichuan peppercorns but looked forward to them. Tongue tingling and lips buzzing, my mouth has never felt more alive.
Meet the locals: Sichuan's cutest animal residents
They are among 17 new arrivals at the Chengdu Panda Base, China's leading breeding centre for these much-loved but endangered animals, writes John Craven.
Thriving Chengdu has dozens of new millionaires, Asia's biggest building, and swanky new hotels. But for tourists like me, pandas are its top attraction.
So it was a great honour to be invited backstage at the not-for-profit Panda Base, where ticket money helps pay for research. I donned surgical kit and was allowed to get up close to these cubs at the 600-acre centre.
Little did they know that from tomorrow, I will be their official UK ambassador. The title will be bestowed upon me at a ceremony at the World Travel Market in London. But my involvement goes back to my days on the TV show Newsround in the mid-1980s, when I was the first Western TV reporter permitted to film a special unit caring for pandas rescued from starvation in the wild.
My ambassadorial duties will include introducing British visitors travelling with Wendy Wu Tours to the 120-plus pandas at Chengdu and others at a research centre in the misty mountains of Bifengxia.
I'll also be spending time with veterinary teams, learning about new techniques that ensure about 90 per cent of newborns survive.
On my recent visit, I held a lively three-month-old twin that had been rejected by its mother. The nursery team switch him every few days with his sibling so that while one is being bottle-fed, the other is with mum - she never suspects.
Fewer than 1,600 giant pandas roam free, but one day these cubs could be released as part of the campaign to drag these entrancing creatures back from the brink.
Source from: By JENNIFER COX, DailyMail.Co.Uk
