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?
Toast drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkled with parsley, garlic, and red pepper flakes? As long as you don’t mind the effects it might have on your breath, it makes for a fine start to the day.
Return pot of water to a hard boil and add noodles. Cook, stirring regularly to prevent noodles from sticking to each other or the bottom, until barely cooked through with a springy bite, about 4 minutes. Drain, reserving 3/4 cup of cooking liquid. Add cooking liquid to bowl with sauce and stir to combine.
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.
You have to do ribs on the grill at least once in the summer, and if you’re looking for something beyond your basic bottled barbecue sauce, you’ve come to the right place. Here, apricot preserves give the sauce a sweet, fruity flavor, and chipotle chiles add a contrasting earthy, spicy flavor to the sauce that tastes just as good when licked off your fingers as it does on the ribs.
Transfer noodles to serving bowl and top with pork mixture. Stir vinaigrette and spoon over and around the noodles (you may not want to use all of it). Sprinkle with roasted peanuts, Sichuan peppercorn, grated garlic, and scallion greens. Serve immediately.
J. Kenji López-Alt
Recipes abound for General Tso’s chicken, one of the most iconic dishes in the takeout canon. All of them, however, seem to consist of chicken fried in a crispy shell, then tossed in a sweet, glossy sauce flavored with garlic, ginger, dried chilies, soy sauce, and sesame oil, among other ingredients. Our biggest complaint about the formula is that overly sugary sauce, which we balance in this recipe with a good amount of vinegar. A couple of tablespoons of vodka and a little marinade added to the batter result in a supremely crunchy, well-textured coating.
While the most traditional versions don’t include a sesame product, I’ve recently taken to adding a touch of tahini to my sauce, after having tasted it in Chichi’s vermicelli with chili oil recipe. Not enough to bring a distinct sesame flavor to the dish, but just enough to lightly bind the sauce and add a touch of creaminess to help it cling to the noodles a little bit better.
A little spicy, a little sweet, a little salty, chewy Chinese noodles with cucumbers, peppers, and scallions coated in a chunky peanut sauce is a tasty, filling meal that’s hard to get tired of. This version is made with far fewer noodles and many more vegetables. Indeed, it’s now more of a vegetable salad with a few noodles added in for textural contrast.
As tempting as it can be to reach for a jar of ready-made curry paste, nothing you’ll get in a store compares to what you can make at home. For this Thai dry curry, we use a mix of fresh and dried chiles, galangal, garlic, shallots, lemongrass, and makrut lime leaves to make a chile paste, which we then use to flavor crispy tofu and blistered green beans.
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.
Here’s another recipe in my quest to take the cute and cuddly animals out of all of my favorite foods in a no-BS, as-delicious-as-the-real-thing, good-enough-for-anyone kind of way. I’m particularly happy with this one, which makes sense, as it’s a logical extension of my vegan mapo tofu recipe. I’m talking about the other great pillar of cheap-and-easy Sichuan cuisine: dan dan noodles.
Our original attempt at real-deal Chinese kung pao chicken , adapted from a recipe by a Sichuan chef working in Boston, gets its mouth-numbing heat from Sichuan peppercorns. So does the kung pao chicken from Kenji’s book , noodleinsight.com based on the version he tried in Sichuan Province. This Chinese-American take, meanwhile, is much less spicy, with cubes of chicken in a thick, slightly gloppy sauce, permeated by a gentle heat. It’s a quick and easy recipe, too: Just stir-fry marinated diced chicken with roasted peanuts, diced celery and peppers, ginger, and red Chinese or árbol chilies, then coat it all in a mixture of soy sauce, chicken broth, vinegar, sesame oil, sugar, and cornstarch. Dinner’s on the table in 30 minutes.
