Stir-fried green soy beans with snow vegetable recipe (xue cai mao dou)

Created by Fuchsia Dunlop

Add a comment

Enlarge text

Rate this recipe

Cuisine: Chinese
Prep Time: 5 min(s)
Cook Time: 10 min(s)
Serves 4

Young green soy beans, commonly known as edamame, are one of my favourite vegetables, small and exquisite, their colour a sweet emerald green that brightens up any supper table. You may serve them boiled, in their fuzzy pods, for the pleasure of popping them out and nibbling them with a glass of beer. Otherwise, they can be steamed or stir-fried, or used in colourful “eight treasure” stuffings. I’ve even had them, dried but still bright green, in mugs of salty green tea in rural Zhejiang province!

The following dish is one that I enjoyed on a September noon in the Zhejiang hills, when my friend A Dai took me to visit an organic chicken farm. We explored the farm, where healthy-looking chickens pecked around a slope stocked with bamboo, persimmon, camphor and loquat trees, then walked down to the farmhouse for lunch.

This recipe, made with “snow vegetable”, one of the favourite local preserves, was on the table that day and I’ve never forgotten it. You can add more or less snow vegetable as you please and you might like to pep it up with a little chilli and Sichuan pepper, to give it a Sichuanese twist. Either version is great served either hot or cold. The same method can be used to cook peas or broad beans.

Level of difficulty: easy
Season: Summer

Ingredients

salt
250 g fresh or defrosted frozen green soy beans (podded weight)
2 tbsp cooking oil
5 dried chillies (optional)
½ tsp whole Sichuan pepper (optional)
50 g snow vegetable, finely chopped
½ tsp sesame oil

View conversion table

Preparation

If using fresh soy beans, bring a pan full of water to a boil, add salt, then the beans. Return to a boil, then cook for about five minutes, until tender. Drain well. (Frozen soy beans are already cooked.)

Heat a seasoned wok over a high flame. Add the oil and swirl it around. If using the spices, add them now and sizzle them very briefly until you can smell their fragrances and the chillies are darkening but not burnt. Then add the snow vegetable and stir-fry briefly until fragrant.

Add the beans and stir-fry briefly until everything is hot and delicious, seasoning with salt to taste. Off the heat, stir in the sesame oil and serve.

Variation: Stir-fried green soy beans
Take 250 g fresh or defrosted frozen green soy beans (podded weight). If they are fresh, boil them as described in the main recipe, then drain. Cut a strip of red pepper into small squares about the size of the soy beans. Add 2 tablespoons oil to a wok over a high flame. Add the beans and pepper squares and stir-fry until hot, seasoning with salt to taste. Off the heat, stir in 1 teaspoon sesame oil and serve.

SBS cook’s notes
This recipe has been reproduced with minor SBS recipe style changes. | Oven temperatures are for conventional; if using fan-forced (convection), reduce the temperature by 20˚C. | We use Australian tablespoons and cups: 1 teaspoon equals 5 ml; 1 tablespoon equals 20 ml; 1 cup equals 250 ml. | All herbs are fresh (unless specified) and cups are lightly packed. | All vegetables are medium size and peeled, unless specified. | All eggs are 55–60 g, unless specified.

Recipe from Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop, with photographs by Chris Terry. Published by Bloomsbury.

If you enjoyed this Stir-fried green soy beans with snow vegetable recipe (xue cai mao dou) then browse more Chinese recipes, stir-fry recipes, vegetarian recipes, easy recipes, quick recipes and our most popular hainanese chicken rice recipe.

Chinese Restaurants

Displaying 10 of 815 Chinese Restaurants.

	Restaurant	Book Online	Suburb
1.	Eastern Garden Chinese Restaurant		Toorak Gardens
2.	Zen		Magill
3.	Greenwood Seafood Restaurant		North Sydney
4.	Harry's Singapore Chilli Crab		Sydney
5.	Dragonfly Theatre & Cabaret Restaurant		Tullamarine
6.	Asian Cafe		City
7.	The Chairman and Yip		City
8.	China Tea Club		Lyneham
9.	Lakeview Restaurant		Tuggeranong
10.	Leong Kitchen		Campbell

View all Chinese restaurants | Start a new search

Comment on this recipe

PLEASE NOTE: All submitted comments become the property of SBS. We reserve the right to edit and/or amend submitted comments. HTML tags other than paragraph, line break, bold or italics will be removed from your comment.