Bok Choy with Yellow Bean Paste

With bok choy you can prepare a lot of Asian dishes. A very simple but delicious recipe is this “Pad Pak Choi Tao Jiaw” ( ผัดผักฉ่อยเต้าเจี้ยว ) with yellow bean paste from Thai cuisine. If you replace the oyster sauce with vegetarian mushroom sauce and the fish sauce with no-fish sauce or soy sauce, you can even prepare the dish completely vegan.

Preparation

As always with stir-fry dishes, all ingredients should be prepared in advance so that the frying in the wok itself goes smoothly and stress-free. First, remove the leaves from the baby bok choy stems and wash them. If you use regular, large bok choy, you should cut the individual leaves into smaller pieces and separate the white, firm parts from the green leaves.

Next, we turn to the sauce. Mix the yellow bean paste with the oyster sauce, fish sauce and some water and dissolve the palm sugar in this mixture. Finally, crush the white peppercorns and stir the resulting pepper powder into the sauce mixture as well. Then peel and finely chop the garlic cloves and remove the Thai chilis from their stems and cut them into fine rings.

Now heat the vegetable oil in the wok and as soon as it has become hot, fry the garlic together with the Thai chilis until both are fragrant. If you are using regular bok choy, only add the white parts to the wok and fry them. With young baby bok choy, proceed the same way with the whole leaves. Then deglaze everything with the sauce mixture and let it simmer briefly.

In the case of baby bok choy, the dish is now ready. When using regular bok choy, now add the green parts of the leaves and fry them too until they wilt. In both cases, serve the finished dish immediately, steaming hot, together with jasmine rice.