For vegetarians, going to Chinese restaurants is often a dicey endeavor. In China, if you ask for meatless dishes at a restaurant, you'll often hear something along the lines of, "Hmm. Well, we have plenty of chicken dishes. Or beef. Or fish." (In Chinese, the word for "meat" is the same as the word for "pork".) Even here in the US, often "vegetarian" dishes in Chinese restaurants would contain pork or chicken stock or fish sauce.
The thing is, Chinese food doesn't have to contain tons of meat. There are plenty of dishes that are based on using fresh vegetables and tofu, and many of them can be made entirely meatless.
A while back, I started teaching Chinese vegetarian cooking classes at ICE and the Brooklyn Brainery to help vegetarians navigate the tricky landscape of Chinese cuisine. One of the dishes we've done in class is vegetarian mapo tofu, and over the years I've refined it to make it even better.
Now, traditionally, Sichuan mapo tofu contains plenty of ground pork for flavoring, but there is a lesser-known vegetarian version called mala tofu. (Mala refers to the numbing spiciness that comes from Sichuan pepper...numbing in a very good, highly addictive way.) It's often made by just leaving out the pork, which makes the flavor rather flat, in my opinion. What you need to do is to get creative with shiitake mushrooms.
For the best vegetarian mapo tofu, I soak shiitake mushrooms in room temperature or warm water, then mince the caps. Then I stir-fry the minced mushrooms with a slightly larger dose of fermented black beans until both are crispy and fragrant. And the water that the mushrooms were soaked in, so full of umami goodness? It gets mixed into the sauce to add some oomph.
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