noodles

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Amazing (ly Expensive) Noodles: Xiaolumian at Mutianyu

August 14, 2010 in EAT by jen | 2 comments

Most noodles in Beijing run from 6-15 kuai in the small mian dians. If you want to go fancier and hand over a few more kuai, you can get specialty noodles made from unusual ingredients, or double or trip up on the meat. To go even more exotic, a bowl of Japanese ramen would  bring you to 20-50 kuai. But one of the most enjoyable, and indubitably the most pricey bowl of zhajiang mian I’ve had in China was at Xiaolumian up in Beigou village by the Mutianyu Great Wall. It’s an adorable old Chinese village house, with a little outdoor terrace where you can see the Great Wall in the distance and smell the lavender growing in their gardens (lavendar! in China! wonderful). … READ MORE | 2 Comments

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A Break From Grease, an Ode to Liangcai: Shanxi Knife-Cut Noodles (Mianxiang bafang 面香八方)

May 12, 2010 in EAT by christine | 6 comments

Occasionally we get tired of the Tsinghua cafeteria and escape to a Shanxi 山西 noodle restaurant outside of the east gate of Tsinghua for a quick lunch.  Mianxiang Bafang is bustling at lunch, and the menu spans a wide variety of Shanxi specialties, knife-cut noodles, liangcai, stir-fried dishes, and skewers.  Although Shanxi cuisine is known for its million variations on noodles, especially those delightfully irregular and wonderfully chewy knife-cut noodles (daoxiao mian 刀削面), for a healthy lunch we like to order several cold vegetable dishes (liangcai 凉菜).

Packed with micro-vitamins ostensibly found in green-type foods, the liangcai are usually relatively light, making it the perfect break from a pork-grease heavy Beijing diet.  (A sidenote.  One morning we… READ MORE | 6 Comments

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DaGui (大贵) Cold Dishes: Because vinegar is delicious

April 24, 2010 in EAT by jen | 8 comments

Hello, magical peanuts. In my pre-Beijing existence, I was never really fond of the peanut. If I felt a nut craving, the stores were stocked with an infinite variation of other nuts – smoked almonds, candied cashews, and the oh-so-buttery chocolate-covered macadamias. However, despite its American heritage, the Chinese love peanuts, and most restaurants have some variation as appetizers, and now, I’m a convert. They are just so damn good. (So good, in fact, that we’ve decided to recreate a bunch of peanut recipes for our next project. But I digress.)

The vinegar peanuts at Dagui (大贵) sparked my new-found adoration for the humble peanut, and I’ve become a devotee of this small Guizhou restaurant tucked inside the hutongs of old Beijing. There are easily a dozen great dishes here, but this post is dedicated to cold, vinegary appetizers (凉菜), which epitomize the winning combination of spicy-sourness that is the key note of Guizhou cuisine.… READ MORE | 8 Comments

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Pita Chips: making chips from hand-pulled noodles (chemian 扯面)

December 31, 2009 in COOK by jen | No comments

chip

As a bonus from our pulled noodle adventures, I manufactured a load of…pita chips. Or some variation tasting an awful lot like the pita chips from Trader Joe’s I used to love to munch on with or without dips.

After pulling enough noodles to make our two large bowls of biangbiang mian (see post on making the noodles), we still had about three lumps of pasta dough left. I simply rolled out the remaining dough (quite thin but not noodle-thin, but the thicker ones were also tasty), and sliced them into rough triangles. Ground a little sea salt on top and tossed them in my toaster oven at a low temperature (140 -150c) for about 10-13 minutes, or… READ MORE

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Noodling Around: biangbiang noodles (youpo chemian 油泼扯面)

December 17, 2009 in PREP by christine | 6 comments

To a displaced American with southern Chinese-Taiwanese roots, where rice rules supreme, northern Chinese noodle and bread culture (mianshi 面食) is completely bewildering.

But the pleasures of biangbiang noodles are many.

Jen introduced me to biangbiang noodles, which I loved immediately. Biangbiang noodles are a specialty of Shaanxi 陕西 province, most often found in Xi’an 西安 as a street food. The character is infamously difficult, so there are several versions of a mnemonic poem that are used to invoke its 57 (52, or 56… depending on which version you subscribe to) strokes. It can also be found on menus as biaobiao mian 彪彪面, bangbang mian 邦邦面 or 棒棒面, and youpo chemian 油泼扯面. Or you… READ MORE | 6 Comments

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In Search of Dough: biangbiang noodles (youpo chemian 油泼扯面)

December 17, 2009 in PREP by jen | 4 comments

Biangbiang noodles are a damn tasty treat that I became addicted to at first bite. Despite all the variations, it consists of a relatively simple formula. Chewy noodles, a few blanched vegetables, and an oily spicy/salty sauce. Sure, a bowl will only set you back about RMB 12 (a little less than 2 dollars), but there is something to be said for actual home cooking so we wanted to figure out how to make a killer version of biangbiang mian.

With that in mind, we found two Shaanxi noodle shops and ate four bowls of noodles one afternoon to suss out the exact ingredients we should throw into our noodles. The first pick was obvious – the… READ MORE | 4 Comments

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Recipe for Hand-Pulled Noodles (chemian 扯面), biangbiang noodles (youpo chemian 油泼扯面)

December 17, 2009 in COOK by the ladies | No comments

The first step to making a good bowl of biangbiang mian, is, of course, making some good mian. At the Shaanxi restaurants we visited, the noodles were hand-pulled right before cooking, and the belt-strap wide chewy noodles of charmingly uneven thickness is a big part of what makes this dish so enjoyable. Therefore, we took a shot at making our own hand-pulled noodles. We pulled together a recipe from a number of sources (we are indebted to advice from eGullet; a recipe for Kazahk noodles by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid from the book, Beyond the Great Wall, available online here; and this fantastic post from a Chinese blog).

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Recipe for Biangbiang Noodles (youpo chemian 油泼扯面)

December 17, 2009 in COOK by the ladies | 8 comments

This was the best bowl of noodles we’ve made in a long time. Today, we pulled ourselves some fresh noodles (see hand-pulled egg noodles) and made biangbiang mian. Despite the mass of chili, it’s an easy dish with simple ingredients. Its deliciousness comes from a subtle balance between the alliums, chili, vinegar, and soy sauce.

There are two tricks that made our humble noodles just that much tastier.

First, we bought dried whole peeled and seeded chilis, toasted them to charred in a toaster oven, then ground them… READ MORE | 8 Comments

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Recipe for a Quick Ten Minute Lunch, or Tomato and Egg Noodles (xihongshi jidan mian 西红柿鸡蛋面)

December 4, 2009 in COOK by jen | 7 comments

Tomato and egg is a common homestyle dish in China, but in Beijing, I’ve also seen it stuffed into dumplings and ladled on top of noodles – both are delicious. So, a week after watching Christine eat a giant tin plate of tomato and egg noodles at the cafeteria [link], I got a craving this morning and decided to have a go at it for lunch. It’s great tasting, pretty healthy, and only took me about 10 minutes to put together, which is eggcellent (sorry, it was just begging to be said).

RECIPE (2 bowls)

2 tomatoes
2 eggs
1 clove of garlic, chopped
handful of green onion, chopped
2 servings of Chinese noodles (white flour-based)

1/2 tsp… READ MORE | 7 Comments

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Tsinghua Cafeteria Series 1: noodle station

November 30, 2009 in EAT by the ladies | No comments

Noodle station at Tsinghua. Tomato and egg noodle soup, with hand-cut broad noodles.

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