Silver Case

This evening I made my first stab at cooking Dan Dan Mein.

My approximate recipe:

1. Made a soffrito of onion and garlic in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan. Wok-cooking doesn’t work for me. I’ve never seen how to do it properly and my stove burners are too anemic anyway. Plus, I don’t think that high temperature flash-searing is appropriate for what I was doing anyway.
2. Tossed in several handfuls 1/8″ thick slices (cut across the grain) of fresh boiled bamboo along with some more peanut oil, rice wine vingegar, and some sort of dark Chinese cooking wine.
3. Browned in a small packet of ground pork. Perhaps two cups’ worth max.
4. Added several teaspoons of ground szechuan pepper, a handful of szechuan red chillis, and a teaspoon or so of chilli oil.
5. Let cook a bit and then tossed in the ya cai preserved vegetables and poured in some hot water to make the whole mess more soupy
6. Kept tasting and periodically adding more spices… especially chilli oil and ground pepper. Also put in sugar, tamari sauce, and salt.
7. When there was enough water to make it soupy, I ladelled in several tablespoons of tahini as well as a generous handful of freshly-roasted, ground peanuts.
8. I couldn’t get the heat to the level I wanted, so I kept adding more chilli oil and dried chillis. I’m not sure how much difference it made.
9. Threw some packets of frozen udon into the boiling water. They cook nearly instantly are reasonably decent. Not too sticky or gelatinous.
10. Handful of udon in each bowl covered with a generous ladle or two of the dan-dan mixture.

Results? I’d give it a C and think I can get it to a B- or B with some changes:

1. Put the ya cai in last. In cannot withstand much simmering before it disintegrates.
2. Give it more liquid. It was too dry for my taste. I want a hot liquid to slurp that is spicy enough to curl my tongue.
3. Ling thought the heat level was fine, but I would have liked it several degrees hotter. I am not sure what I need to do to give it that kick. What is the appropriate spice to use? The ground pepper doesn’t seem to make the dish much hotter, only gives it a stronger black-pepper taste. The chilli oil also seemed to lose its efficacy at hight dosages. Perhaps the dried red chillis I used I should have been using either far more, or chopping them up finely, or letting them simmer for a long time to drive the heat out of them and into the food. I don’t care for basic chilli powder spice — it tends to be crude, hot, and uninteresting. Perhaps I just woefully underestimated how much chilli oil a good dan-dan mian requires? (for that matter, the chilli oil is little more than sesame oil with chilli powder, so maybe I shouldn’t be so cavalier in dismissing simple chilli powder as the answer).
4. Not sure if there are some other dimensional flavors I could add. I think I maxed out the sesame/peanut vector nicely. The heat fell short. Wonder if I should have pushed some other dimension harder, like sour or something.

Anyway, not a bad dinner. It was too much calories today though. That tahini and peanut and pork plus noodle adds up. I’ll have to write off the idea of eating anything else tonight.

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Followups… read a description of szechuan flavor as coming from lajiao you (ground roasted chilies “cooked” in oil) and huajiao (Sichuan peppercorns). Next time I’ll chop and fry the red chillis in sesame oil first and try to produce more heat.Here’s a fragment of a recipe for making chilli oil..

1. For the chili oil: Heat the oil until it is just beginning to smoke.
2. Remove from heat, add the hot red pepper flakes, and stir.
3. The mixture will foam, and will smell very strong!
4. It can be kept for months under refrigeration.

I just tried this. I’ll put a photo essay on Flickr.

The thing I like most about this recipe is that it provides for all the guests to mix up their own sauce to their own tastes. It sounds like a very nice family time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Food.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.