Location: Zhangjiajie — The Mountains That Inspired Avatar
This is the biggest chapter in the book, and it earns that size. Twelve recipes span nearly every major region and technique in Chinese cooking — a Hunanese pork belly braised until it wobbles, Sichuan’s numbing mapo tofu and kung pao chicken, a whole steamed fish finished with sizzling oil, and the crispy, sticky, sweet-and-sour dishes that introduced most of the Western world to Chinese food in the first place.
Nothing quite prepares you for Zhangjiajie. More than three thousand quartz-sandstone pillars rise straight out of the forest floor, some over a thousand feet tall, wreathed in cloud for a good part of the year — a landscape so genuinely alien that James Cameron used it as the visual template for the floating mountains of Pandora in Avatar, and the park later renamed one of its peaks “Avatar Hallelujah Mountain” in tribute.
The pillars formed over hundreds of millions of years, as water worked its way into cracks in the sandstone and slowly carved the rock into the narrow spires that remain today. This mountain range sits in Hunan province — the same province that gave the world Mao Zedong, ferociously spicy food, and the red-braised pork belly that opens this chapter. It felt like the right backdrop for the most substantial chapter in the book: a landscape built on scale and patience, much like the braises that follow.
These are the recipes worth building a whole dinner around. Make one as the centrepiece with a couple of small plates from Chapter 2 or 7 alongside, or work through this chapter alone, one Sunday braise at a time.
Recipes in This Chapter
- Red Braised Pork Belly
- Kung Pao Chicken
- Mapo Tofu
- Ginger Scallion Steamed Fish
- Twice Cooked Pork
- General Tso’s Cauliflower
- Sweet & Sour Pork
- Char Siu BBQ Pork
- Yu Xiang Aubergine
- Salt Baked Chicken
- Black Bean Spare Ribs
- Stir-Fried Water Spinach
Every good sauce in this book has a base recipe of its own — next up is Sauces & Condiments.