Shacha Noodles

Noodles built around a jarred sauce of dried seafood and garlic, where the work is loosening it without frying it.

Beef. Not vegetarian — contains beef, chicken stock, oyster sauce.

Ingredients

For the beef

• 300 g beef sirloin, sliced thin across the grain
• 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon cornflour
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon water

The sauce

• 5 tablespoons shacha sauce, stirred up from the bottom of the jar
• 2 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 300 ml hot chicken stock

The rest

• 500 g fresh thick wheat noodles
• 200 g choi sum or similar greens, in lengths
• 1 onion, sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, sliced
• 2 tablespoons flavourless oil
• 2 spring onions, sliced

Method

1. THE SAUCE IS LOOSENED, NOT FRIED, and it is the only difficult thing here. Shacha is already finished -- dried fish and shrimp, garlic and chilli ground and cooked into oil -- so there is nothing to develop and a great deal to lose. Put it into a hot dry wok and the dried seafood in it scorches within about thirty seconds and turns acrid. It is let down with hot stock in a bowl, off the heat, and poured in as a liquid.
2. AND IT IS STIRRED UP FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE JAR. Shacha separates hard in storage into a clear oil cap and a dense brown sediment, and the sediment is where everything it tastes of has settled. Five tablespoons off the top is five tablespoons of oil.
3. Beef sliced thin across the grain and mixed with the soy, cornflour, sugar and water. Left 20 minutes.
4. The shacha jar stirred thoroughly with a clean spoon, all the way to the bottom, until it is one even paste again.
5. Five tablespoons of it into a bowl with the soy, oyster sauce and sugar, then the hot stock poured over and whisked until smooth. Set aside.
6. Noodles boiled until just short of done, drained, and rinsed briefly -- they go into a liquid sauce and will keep cooking.
7. Oil in a wok over a high heat. Beef in a single layer, left 30 seconds, turned, 30 seconds more, and out while still pink in the middle.
8. Onion and garlic in, 1 minute, until the onion is softened at the edges.
9. HEAT TO MEDIUM, then the sauce poured in. It should simmer gently, not boil hard. 2 minutes.
10. Greens in, 1 minute, pushed under the sauce.
11. Noodles in and turned through for 1 minute until they have taken up most of the liquid and what is left coats them.
12. Beef back in with any juices, folded through twice, off the heat.
13. Spring onions over the top, into bowls at once. The noodles go on absorbing, so a dish that looks slightly too wet in the wok is right by the time it is at the table.

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