The New Skills

The New Skills- Breakfast Noodles

Okay, so I had an idea. My job is boring. I mean, like, the most interesting thing I've done at work for the last couple of weeks is tighten up employee evaluation policy. I'm not complaining, its good work, and it needs doing, but my creative muscles are atrophying. My solution? Embark on an insane project. My insane project is that in the next calendar year, I will learn one new dish a week, and write it up here. 

These dishes are going to come from everywhere. I read lots of food periodicals, and constantly skim cookbooks. I have friends that cook, and there are a certain number of dishes I have always wanted to try, and just never had a reason.

This is the first installment.

The Dish: Yunnan Breakfast Noodles (Chinese: mi xian, or mi gan, “depending on the type of noodles used,” more on why that means nothing to me later)

The Source: Saveur #187 (2017)

Cultural Overview: This dish is a normal breakfast item in Yunnan provence, Southwestern China, a mountainous region bordering on Laos and Burma. It was presented in the context of being a dish that tea-gatherers snacked on before sallying out into the hills to harvest poo-erh, which is some trendy aged tea. Don't care about tea.

Technical Overview: This dish is all about assembly. The base dish is simply rice noodles, simmered and served in a rich but mild porky broth. It is white on white, and is bland and neutral by design. The fun comes in when you add all the condiments, of which there are many. The article had quite a list of condiments, which I faithfully recreated, and it was a totally rewarding experience. I am not normally a fan of the aesthetic of “build-your-own,” but this was just calling my name.

Step 1: Procurement

I got every single component for this dish at the incredible H&L Supermarket on Rivers Ave, which is the greater Charleston region's finest Asian market. In fact, it is the best specialty grocery in the region. I spent $66, which is hard to do, but my pantry is swollen with weird, spicy goodies. The only snag I hit was the noodles. The recipe called for fresh rice noodles, which are unattainable. I just grabbed a bag of rice noodles that looked like it was going to be close enough, and then when I opened it, I saw that the noodles weren't the translucent white pappardelle I was expecting. Instead, they were ragged, all different shapes and sizes. The only English words on the package were “Rice Slice,” slice of what, I couldn't say. They looked weird, but they cooked up just fine.

Step 2: Broth (3 hours duration/5 minutes work time)

The dish calls for white pork stock. It called for 5# pork bones, covered with 18 cups of water, and cooked down to 8 cups. I used 2.5# pork feet, three quarters of a pound of ground pork, and about half a pound of cracklings I had in my freezer. Add cold water to cover, simmer three hours. It yielded a nicely gelatinous broth. At first, I was a bit concerned, because the cracklings I was using quickly bled off a very deep-fried kind of aroma, and it was all the broth tasted of. However, over time, that blew off and what was left was really intense porky goodness. The broth was seasoned only with a pinch of salt.

Note: A problem with recipes. As said before, the recipe called for 18 cups of stock cooked down to 8. The recipe reads “Simmer until broth is flavorful and reduced, about three hours. Strain through a fine meshed strainer and discard the solids. You should have 8 cups broth.” Nothing at all on what to do if you don't have 8 cups broth, but the yield is important. My broth cooked down to a quart. I let it out with water. A home cook may not realize how easily fixed that problem is. Shitty copy-editing. Then again, this is why when I write a recipe, its goddamn three pages long. So maybe I'm wrong.

Step 3: The Meats (20 minutes)

The recipe called for 2 kinds of meat, ground pork and pork loin. It had you simmer the meats in water, which then had the noodles cooked in it. This has the effect of giving the noodles some porky flavor, but simmering is a needlessly messy and time-consuming way of cooking ground pork. I wish I had just sauteed it. Instead of pork loin, I used belly, which I simmered for 3 minutes and then dressed in doubanjiang, which is a fermented chile-bean paste used in Sichuan cooking. (I had some on hand, as part of my emergency ma-po tofu kit.)

Step 4: The Garni (20 minutes)

Building the garnish tray was fun. The challenge for most cooks will be finding enough ramekins to attractively present the spread, but my mom compulsively shops at Crate and Barrel, so every Christmas I get more ceramic knick-knacks. I never want for ramekins. The garni were:

Black Vinegar (Chinese rice vinegar, aged, kind of like cheap, ghetto balsamic)

Chile Oil (another Asian market product, just a bright red, mildly spicy oil)

Sambal (not exactly Chinese, but I'm sure they have an analogue)

Mint (lots of it)

Garlic Chives (Asian market)

Pickled Mustard Greens (Asian market, surprisingly mild, provided a great textural note)

Pickled Red Chiles (I found a brand at the Asian market that look like bird chiles, but are not nearly so hot)

Scallions

Sesame Seeds

Kosher Salt

MSG

Step 5: The finish: Rewarm the meats and set them next to the garnish tray. Simmer the noodles in the pork broth (or in the pork cooking liquid, if you followed the convoluted and unnecessary step of simmering the pork in separate liquid), and ladel them into bowls, along with a healthy slosh of the broth. Take a look at your creation, and marvel at its bland, blank, whiteness. Then, hit the condiment tray and go crazy! The broth ends up seasoned almost like hot and sour soup, the mustard greens provided a great texture and sauerkraut-like flavor, and the mint was the difference maker. Just terrific. I love this dish, and am making it again tomorrow with all the leftover prep I still have.

                                                         before.

                                                                       AFTER!!!

Beverage Pairing: Goose Island Pre-Season Lager, cause why not, and also cause Go Cubs.

Why I Love This Dish: This is what I wanted pho to be. I love pho, don't get me wrong, but I am stressed out by the garnish tray. I mean, first off, who needs the cup and a half of bean sprouts they always give you. Also, the broth is so good on its own, why do I need hoisin and Sriracha? Also, isn't Sriracha Thai anyway? What am I supposed to do?

I'm always torn. I like the broth basically unadorned, with its subtle, meaty, spice character taking the lead (although I will sneak in a slice of jalapeno). But if I'm given condiments, I want to use them, and so I'm tempted to load in the lime, basil, hot sauce, and sprouts. But then the pho no longer tastes like meat and anise, it tastes like lime, basil, hot sauce, and sprouts. (My proclivities were vindicated by an article on pho that I read in the Lucky Peach pho issue. Apparently, pho was a Hanoi dish, and then, when Hanoi fell on hard times, the cooks fled south to Saigon. Once there, they didn't have access to the meat that was necessary to make a great broth, so they started covering up with chiles and herbs and shit. Prosperity returned, but the garnish tray never went away.)

But this dish makes it easy. The only ingredients in the base noodles are pork bones, water, rice, and salt. Its a no-brainer that it needs to be dressed up. There is no stress, and no guilt, about going for the gusto.

Professional application: This would be hard. You could dress the noodles up for them, but the fun of the dish is in the customization. Yet there are so many garni, that to do this a la carte would be too expensive, and time- and space-consuming. I suppose you could do it if it was your main dish. You could have a garnish bar set up like a salad bar. Or, it could be something you sold to a whole table. It would be a tough sell, though.

Final thought: The main thing this dish reminded me of was Hot Mustard, the crappy Chinese delivery that I live off of a lot of the time. It is a prototypical ghetto Chinese restaurant, and their fried stuff and rib tips are sublime, but their stir-fries and soups are always bland and awful. They are really cheap and fast, though, so I order it all the time anyway. I keep a pretty good pantry, so I am ready to dress up the offerings as needed. This dish was that, except by design, instead of being due to wild, mind-bending kitchen incompetence.

No offense, Hot Mustard. I want you to know I still love you!