Fat is Flavor: Recipe for Stir-fried Yunnan Ham, Pine Mushrooms, and Something Green (云腿松耳炒青菜)

This post was written to mourn the last chunk of Yunnan ham (yuntui 云腿) that I brought back from, well, Yunnan, in southwestern China.  I love food souvenirs, and a friend had specifically requested Yunnan ham.  During a week-long trip, I wandered through no less than six markets in Dali (where the traveling Bai minority peoples’ market that skips from town to town around Erhu Lake is known as ganji 赶集) and Lijiang.  In the Disneyland circus that was Lijiang, the only thing that made staying in the old town worthwhile was the large market at the southern tip, where I perused copper pots and tea.  There, I bought a disconcerting amount of Yunnan dried mushrooms, famed for their variety: ‘tea tree’ mushrooms (chashu gu 茶树菇), charmingly irregularly sized wild shiitake mushrooms, diminutive mushrooms for chicken soup, and ridiculously faint-inducing fragrant pine mushrooms (song’er 松耳, also known as matsutake mushrooms).

Intimidation had kept me from buying ham earlier in my trip, but emboldened by my fellow tourists, I picked out a stand with particularly hairy-looking legs of ham, and asked for a conservative one and half jin.  It was 26 RMB per 500 grams, and I wasn’t sure that I would be able to eat that much ham.  Curses to my stupidity!  Little did I know that Yunnan ham would be my crack, my love, my Lolita.

Yunnan ham is often described as funky and pungent, with a salinity that has unmatched depth.  The texture is delectably minerally, almost shardlike, and carving through the dense block of flesh is deeply satisfying.  When I protested the excessive amount of fat on my chunk, the ham lady smirked at me and said that that was the source of its flavor. Typically sliced into thin slices or slivers, Yunnan ham is used in everything from stir-fries, braises, to soups.  It’s dry-cured with salt for over a year and a half, which means that my chunk was probably started sometime in 2009, possibly 2008!

On the advice of a friend, I had a luxurious meal at 1910 La Gare du Sud in Kunming, where I ate wide slices of Yunnan ham stir fried with green peppers.  Now my favorite way to showcase the ham is to stir fry it with a large volume of vegetables, then downing it on my own for lunch, scraping at the plate for the last bit of savory goodness.  About stir-frying: it’s a term that never fails to make me shudder.  In college there was a station in the dorm cafeteria where “Stir Fry Bob” would throw together vegan-vegetarian concoctions involving every vegetable under the sun, bound together with soy sauce, garlic, peanut butter, and coconut milk in varying proportions.  Invariably, in spite of appellations that referred to various southeast Asian countries, they always tasted a bit samelike.  Myself, I prefer a stir-fry with well-considered pairings and combinations, like the classic pairing of tomato and egg.  An excellent article on stir-frying by Lillian Chou, by the by, can be found here in Saveur.

This dish was an accident, borne of my desire to experiment with my tourist stash, but it became part of my cooking-for-myself repertoire.  The stir-fry doubles the umami of ham with dried mushrooms, and infuses the greens of the day with all of that flavor.  It’s rich and smoky, with the saltiness of the ham and savoriness of the mushrooms against the sweet leeks, coating the leafy green vegetable that I know I’m supposed to be eating.  Caixin, bok choy, water spinach, spinach, and Chinese broccoli all work.  I soak some pine mushrooms for thirty minutes beforehand, and it all comes together in a five-minute flash over high heat in a iron steel wok.

Ingredients (for two)

about a 2 inch chunk of Yunnan ham
a handful of dried pine mushrooms (shitakkes are good too but they will need to be soaked longer)
a green onion or leek
a bunch of a leafy green vegetable: caixin, bok choy, water spinach, spinach, or Chinese broccoli

1.  Soak mushrooms for about thirty minutes with just enough water to cover the mushrooms.  Don’t throw out the water.

2.  Slice the ham into thin 1/4 inch slices (you can do slivers too, depending on how much you want to highlight the ham).  Slice green onions or leeks thinly on the diagonal.  Cut the leafy green bits of the vegetable from the heartier stems, if using caixin or Chinese broccoli; otherwise just cut the vegetable into finger-length segments.

3.  Heat up a pan on high heat.  I heat to smoking, but it’s bad to do it on a nonstick pan.  When the pan is very hot, thrown in the ham and rend it of its fat.

4.  When the fat had rendered out of the ham, add the green onions or leeks and give it a good toss. Let them soften in the fat for about a minute.

5.  Add the stems of the vegetable and mushrooms.  Give it a good toss to coat it with the fat.
6.  Add in the leafy bits, toss with other ingredients.

7.  I often add in the soaking water from the mushrooms at this point, but carefully — you don’t want all the sandy bits that will have fallen to the bottom of the water.  Let the water reduce over high heat until it’s gone, all the while keeping the ingredients moving in the pan.
8.  I like the stir fry slightly seared, so I cook for another ten seconds or so.
9.  Ready to eat with rice!