Dan Dan Noodles Recipe

The array of flavors and textures you end up with—sweet and crunchy charred cabbage, tender chives, meaty mushrooms, and slippery noodles—makes eating your way through a plate into a fun game of who's-gonna-find-the-best-piece-first. (Hint: It's the person with the longest chopsticks.)

Perhaps the biggest key to making excellent dan dan noodles is to make your own roasted chile oil. When done right, it gets a rich, fruity, smoky flavor that none of the store-bought stuff can touch. It's really quite simple. Toasted Sichuan peppercorns have a sweet, citrus-like aroma with a mouth-numbing quality, while roasted chile oil brings on the heat.

The first great thing about making dan dan noodles at home is that you can customize it however you'd like. Personally, I like the chile oil of the Sichuan version, but I also love adding crushed roasted peanuts to the top. Who's to stop me? Some hardcore versions of the dish have the noodles quite literally swimming in a bowlful of chile oil. I like my oil to coat the noodles and pool up a bit in the bottom of the bowl.

To make the roasted chile oil, just toast a handful of whole Chinese chiles (or if you want, red pepper flakes) in a dry skillet until fragrant and ever-so-slightly smoking (about 30 seconds). Transfer them to a food processor with a cup of neutral oil, like canola, and whiz the whole thing up. Let it sit in a sealed container in the fridge for a week or so, and you're good to go. You can even top up the jar with more oil and toasted chiles every time you seem to be running low. Make some, have it on hand at all times, and it will revolutionize your mapo tofu, ramen, dumplings, stir-fries, and countless other dishes.

Next, I empty the wok, reheat it with some more oil (making sure to get it smoking hot!), and add thinly sliced shiitake mushrooms. Mushrooms contain a ton of water and empty space in their spongy flesh, so you've got to cook them long enough to let that flesh break down, concentrating their flavor. They're ready when they've stopped steaming and exuding moisture and instead are sizzling and browning.

The second great thing about making dan dan noodles—it's an exceedingly simple dish to make. Once you've put together your roasted chile vinaigrette (which holds for months in the fridge, by the way), it's just a matter of cooking your noodles, frying your chopped pork, and throwing everything together.

We like serving this with some sambal oelek (chili garlic sauce) at the table. That way, anyone who wants a punch of heat can stir some in. All in all, this dish comes together in a little more than half an hour, making it perfect for that weeknight when you don't want to hang around in the kitchen more than you have to. Fresh, tasty, colorful, and balanced lo mein—no delivery required.
The challenge with stir-frying at home is that most home ranges don't have a powerful enough burner to stir-fry in big batches, like restaurants do. The solution is to break the stir-fry into stages, which avoids overcrowding the pan. We start by searing the vegetables in smoking-hot oil, then transfer them to a plate—they should be singed click here to visit Noodleinsight.com for free and there, while still retaining a fresh bite.

One of the problems with ordering dan dan noodles at a Chinese restaurant is that you never know exactly what you'll get. Are they gonna deliver the hardcore Sichuan version swimming in red-hot chile oil and laced with pickled zha cai (mustard root) and mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns? Or can you expect the equally delicious but totally different Chinese-American version with more pork, a vinegary soy-based sauce, perhaps some greens, and a sprinkling of peanuts?

Cooking fresh Chinese wheat noodles in a big pot of water doesn't produce a high enough concentration of starch to be effective, but cooking it in far less water than is recommended (I cook eight ounces of fresh noodles in about a quart of salted water) yields you a pot full of silky, semi-opaque liquid that combines marvelously with the sauce base.

Preserved mustard root like this (often labeled "Sichuan Preserved Vegetable") can be found in cans or jars in your Chinese market. Once opened, they'll last for months in a sealed container in the fridge. You don't need much to add big flavor to dishes.

Once you've mastered our technique for a crispety, crunchety coating on takeout-style fried chicken, you can easily replicate a number of favorites on the buffet line. To turn our General Tso's recipe into sesame chicken, we simply change the sauce, adding extra sugar and sesame oil and omitting the chilies. Be sure to toast those sesame seeds before adding them, and sprinkle them both throughout the sauce and over the finished dish.

Trim pork of excess fat and cut into thin strips, about 1/4 inch wide by 2 inches long. In a bowl, stir together baking soda and 1/2 cup cold water. Add pork, stir until thoroughly coated, then let stand at room temperature for 15 minutes.
Chow mein is another Chinese-American standard that's so easy to make at home and customize to your liking, you may never feel the need to order it again. For this DIY version, we quickly cook vegetables (chives, julienned carrots and scallions, bean sprouts) and tofu in a wok, then combine them with long, slender chow mein noodles and a soy-based sauce. Add extra vegetables, more tofu, or meat to turn it into a heartier meal.