This is one of those dishes that just crept up on me – building from a variety of ideas drifting through my head all day, looking for purchase.  I’d had the sprouts for a while, and they needed eating.  I’ve been roasting the sprouts with garlic, to lovely effect, but knew even when I bought these that this time, I wanted something different.

Watching Bourdain scarf down a gorgeous-looking soy green soup with chili sauce in Shanghai, I wanted chili sauce.

Here’s what I did:

Clean and halve the sprouts.  Toss them in a pan with about 1.5 tablespoons mirin, over medium heat, and cover.  Leave them to caramelize, stirring every 5 minutes, until they’re almost done.  Now toss in your garlic.

While cooking, add about 3 teaspoons of chili sauce and equal volume cream to a glass or small mixing bowl and stir like hell to emulsify.  Add fish sauce if you’re so inclined (I did).

Turn up the heat on your pan to medium-high (maybe a bit more) and stir in the sauce – it’ll scald fast, and that’s good.  Let it cook till it’s just a sticky coating on the sprouts, and they are just barely done.  Transfer to a serving vessel, and cover.  Now, deglaze your pan with rice wine, letting it reduce about 3/4 to a nice rich sauce.  Pour that over your sprouts.

I ate mine over scrambled egg whites, because I felt like it.  The eggs sopped up the extra sauce, which was lovely, and also made me feel better about all that cream, by not having yolks.

– MAW

(Photo by Johnsu)