Ya cai
芽菜 · yácài (pinyin)
A Sichuan pickle made from mustard green stems, chopped small and used as a salty, tangy seasoning for noodles, green beans and other dishes.
What it means
Ya cai (芽菜) is a Sichuan pickle. Wikipedia traces it to the top part of the stems of one kind of mustard green and calls it sharper in flavor than zha cai, a different pickled mustard often sold beside it.
Omnivore's Cookbook describes the Yibin product sold as sui mi ya cai (碎米芽菜): mustard green stems are dried, fermented in brine, boiled with brown sugar and fermented again with spices. In its explanation, yá cài is the vegetable, and suì mǐ, crushed rice, describes how the Yibin flakes look.
The pickle is a seasoning rather than a vegetable side. The Woks of Life adds pickled suimi yacai to its Sichuan dry-fried green beans and lists it with its other preserved vegetables.
A common mix-up
Ya cai is not zha cai. Both are pickled mustard, but Wikipedia describes ya cai as more pungent, and the two are sold as separate products.
Questions people ask
Is ya cai the same as zha cai?
No. Wikipedia says ya cai is made from upper mustard stems and is more pungent than zha cai. They are different pickles, sold as different products, so one does not stand in for the other without changing the dish.
What does sui mi ya cai mean?
It is the Yibin version of ya cai, chopped into small pieces and sold in packets. Omnivore's Cookbook explains that suì mǐ means crushed rice and describes the size of the pieces, not an ingredient in the pickle.
Sources & further reading
Background and preparation references. Our descriptions are editorial summaries, not restaurant reviews.