Early Look: Crispy Mint Ribs (Traditional Yunnan Drinking Food)

For me, deep frying herbs is a technique that I associate quite a bit with Thai cooking.

Because... it’s a move that makes a lot of sense if you’re running at, shall we say, an ‘herb surplus’. Like, living in Bangkok, figuring out what in gods name to do with massive bundles of excess Makrut leaves is a… constant struggle for me. The smallest quantity I can pick up at the market is, like, twenty – a variable when most recipes call for two or three. Because while certain vegetables seem to struggle in the Central Thai climate, my god, do herbs thrive: pretty much all our neighbors have a some sort of herb garden outside their house. In our alley’s parking lot, Gaprao grows in the cracks in the cement.

Of course, by contrast, Chinese cuisines tend to go pretty light on herbs. Scallion and cilantro are ubiquitous, of course, and Chinese chives and green garlic bring up the rear… but after that? You really start having to delve into extremely local dishes and ingredients.

That is, with the notable exception of the Yunnan province. In addition to the usual suspects, you can also find sawtooth coriander, laksa leaf, fish mint, Thai basil, and... Mint. And of those, the one with the most reach – the one that cuts through pretty much all of Yunnan – has to be mint.

And so, interestingly, that same herb-deep-frying technique seems to - almost randomly - pop up in Han Chinese Yunnan, around Kunming, smack dab in the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau. How it got there (skipping over south Yunnan) is a bit of a head scratcher for sure: perhaps they were just running at a surplus of mint.

In any event, this is a reasonably easy, fantastically portable to whatever supermarkets you happen to have around you... and is definitely a top tier dish to consume alongside of a bit of baijiu liquor (or whatever you happen to have around).