Dandan Noodles

A sauce built cold in the bottom of the bowl and never cooked, with hot noodles dropped on top and stirred up at the table.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains chicken stock, pork.

Ingredients

For the bowls

• 4 tablespoons sesame paste
• 6 tablespoons chilli oil with its sediment
• 4 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons black vinegar
• 2 teaspoons ground roasted Sichuan peppercorns
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed to a paste
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 8 tablespoons hot chicken stock or the noodle water

For the topping

• 300 g pork mince
• 80 g preserved mustard greens, rinsed and chopped
• 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
• 1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon flavourless oil

The rest

• 500 g thin wheat noodles
• 4 spring onions, sliced
• a handful of blanched leafy greens

Method

1. THE SAUCE IS BUILT IN THE BOWL AND NEVER SEES A PAN. Every ingredient for it goes into the empty serving bowl cold, in order, and the hot noodles and a spoon of their water are what bring it together. Cooked in a pan, the sesame paste tightens and splits and the garlic loses its edge; the whole character of this is raw garlic and uncooked paste loosened by heat arriving from somewhere else.
2. SO IT IS STIRRED UP AT THE TABLE AND NOT IN THE KITCHEN. It is served looking wrong -- a pile of noodles on a dark puddle -- and whoever is eating it turns it over themselves. Mixed in advance it sits and thickens.
3. The pork first, because it can wait and the noodles cannot. Oil in a wok over a high heat, pork mince in, and pressed flat and left to catch before it is broken up.
4. Broken up and fried hard 5 minutes until it is dry, dark and slightly crisp at the edges. Wet mince is the commonest fault in this topping and it only ever comes from stirring too early.
5. Wine and dark soy in, then the mustard greens. 2 minutes more until everything is dry again. Set aside.
6. Now the bowls. Into each: a tablespoon of sesame paste, a tablespoon and a half of chilli oil taken from the BOTTOM of the jar where the sediment is, a tablespoon of soy, half a tablespoon of vinegar, a quarter of the garlic, peppercorn and sugar.
7. Two tablespoons of hot stock into each bowl and stirred once to loosen the paste. It should look like thin gravy, not like a lump.
8. Noodles boiled until just done, drained but NOT rinsed -- the starch on them is what makes the sauce cling.
9. Noodles straight into the bowls on top of the sauce, the pork spooned over, greens and spring onion on top.
10. Carried to the table unmixed, with the instruction to turn it over from the bottom before the first mouthful.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under China · All recipes