Dan Dan Noodles make a dreamy weeknight meal

By Genevieve Ko

The New York Times

Main Street runs through the center of Alhambra, in Los Angeles County, the way it runs through any town. It’s lined with coffee shops and banks, and its businesses have changed with the times. Under the brick and stone facade of what was once a movie theater, built for vaudeville on a wheat field in the 1920s, sits a line of eateries. And what is now a frozen yogurt shop was once Noodle King, my favorite childhood restaurant.

By the time I was growing up near this Los Angeles suburb in the San Gabriel Valley, enough immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan had settled there to create a Chinese food boom. The restaurants featured specials in Chinese characters, the chefs didn’t worry about shocking patrons with chicken feet or jellyfish. Within this landscape, there was no authentic or inauthentic. They were just Chinese chefs cooking for Chinese diners.

And so I assumed my favorite dish at Noodle King, dan dan mian, was the one true version, its thin noodles in a pool of savory sesame paste and soy, topped with bits of pork, peanuts and pickled vegetables. At the table, we’d slide chopsticks through the tangle and pull the noodles up and over, coating them with the warm sauce so the meat and pickles would stick to the strands. Toasty and salty, tangy on the cliff of funk, chewy with pops of peanut, it was a bowl of contentment.

My attempt to recreate that dan dan mian took dozens of tries and the realization that the version I hold dear isn’t quite like dan dan mian in its Sichuan origins. In that southwestern province of China, chile oil and lip-tingling Sichuan peppercorns give it layers of spiciness, known as mala, but Sichuan peppercorns couldn’t be imported to the United States until 2005 and the Cantonese diners of the San Gabriel Valley may have preferred the more delicate seasonings of their southern Chinese cuisine.

Perhaps Noodle King’s chef accommodated local tastes or his own with his sesame-heavy take, but he channeled the nature of dan dan, which is to make it however you like. Mian means noodles and dan refers to the act of carrying goods on bamboo poles. In “The Food of Sichuan,” the author and Chinese food scholar Fuchsia Dunlop explains that dan dan noodles were snacks sold by vendors who balanced baskets of noodles and sauce on their shoulder poles and cried out “dan dan mian!” to hawk their wares. “The name,” she wrote, “didn’t originally refer to a particular style of noodles.”

Nowadays in the Western diaspora, the dish is associated with a few essentials, namely chile oil and sesame paste, but I’d throw in another: preserved vegetables. In Sichuan and other parts of China, the term ya cai encompasses a world of preserved mustard greens, from stems to leaves, with and without chiles and spices, in shades from dark khaki to forest green.

Salty and a little sweet with the sour oomph of fermentation, these vegetables give the soothing noodles an umami zing. Yibin ya cai and sui mi ya cai from the Sichuan Province start as mustard green stems that have been dried before being salted and fermented with a spiced brown sugar syrup. They’re ideal for dan dan, but other Chinese pickled mustard greens taste great as well.

When I was too lazy to drive to an Asian market, I tried to replicate ya cai by swapping in chopped dill pickles, kimchi, quick-pickled mustard greens and sauerkraut. The closest approximation came from a mix of diced capers and bread-and-butter pickles, but it still wasn’t quite the same. Ya cai, which keeps as long as any pickle in the refrigerator, is worth a trip to an Asian grocery, where you can also pick up Chinese sesame paste. Ground from deeply roasted sesame seeds, it’s more fragrant and toasty than tahini, which works as a substitute.

Once your pantry is stocked with dan dan ingredients, you can pull this meal together as quickly as any pasta dish. Each time you cook it, you can season it to your taste, lashing it with as much heat as you crave, splashing in more vinegar or soy sauce for more acid or salt, adjusting the sesame paste and ya cai for your just-right balance of nuttiness and funk. To make dan dan is to chase and find your noodle bliss.

Dan Dan Noodles

A specialty from Sichuan, a province in the southwest of China, vendors once balanced baskets of noodles and sauce on their shoulder poles and cried out “dan dan mian!” to hawk their wares. Dan dan refers to those bamboo shoulder poles and mian means noodles, but there’s no one way to prepare them. Nowadays in the Western diaspora, the dish is associated with a few essentials, namely chile oil and sesame paste, but another is worth adding: preserved vegetables. Salty and a little sweet with the sour oomph of fermentation, pickled mustard greens give the soothing noodles an umami zing. These noodles are especially rich with sesame, but you can adjust all of the seasonings to your taste. Toasty and salty, tangy on the cliff of funk, chewy with pops of peanut, dan dan noodles are a bowl of contentment.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

INGREDIENTS

For the sauce:

1/4 cup well-stirred Chinese sesame paste or tahini (see Tips)

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1 to 2 tablespoons chile crisp, preferably Sichuanese, plus more for serving

2 to 3 teaspoons brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon Chinkiang vinegar or balsamic vinegar

For the meat:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1/2 cup ya cai (Sichuan preserved mustard greens) or other finely chopped Chinese pickled or preserved mustard vegetables (see Tips)

1 large garlic clove, finely chopped

8 ounces ground pork

1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine or other rice wine

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2 teaspoons tian mian jiang (sweet wheat sauce) or hoisin

For the noodles:

1 pound fresh Chinese wheat noodles (see Tips)

8 to 12 leaves bok choy or gai lan (Chinese broccoli), optional

Chopped roasted, salted peanuts, ground Sichuan peppercorns and finely sliced scallions, for topping

DIRECTIONS

1: Start the sauce: Set a large pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, mix the sesame paste, soy sauce, sesame oil, chile crisp, brown sugar and vinegar in a large bowl. The mixture will be thick. Taste and add more chile oil or brown sugar (or other seasonings) to your liking.

2: Make the meat: Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a wok or large, deep skillet over high. Add the ya cai and cook, stirring, until softened and fragrant, about 1 minute. Scrape half into the sauce bowl. Add the remaining oil to the wok. When it’s hot, add the garlic and stir until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the pork and cook, smashing it into the vegetables and stirring to break it into tiny bits. When its pinkness fades after a few minutes, add the wine, soy sauce and tian mian jiang, and stir until the pork is cooked through. Keep warm over low.

3: Finish the sauce: Scoop 1/4 cup boiling water from the pot and add to the sauce. Stir until smooth. The sauce should run off the spoon. If it doesn’t, add more boiling water a tablespoon at a time.

4: Make the noodles: Drop the noodles into the pot of boiling water, stir and cook until there’s still a bite in the center, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the bok choy and cook until bright green and the noodles are just tender, about 1 minute longer. Drain and run under hot tap water to rinse excess starch off the noodles.

5: Slide the noodles and bok choy over the sauce, scrape the pork and its sauce on top, then sprinkle with peanuts and scallions if you want. Top with more chile crisp if you’d like. Mix well and enjoy immediately.

Tips:

Chinese sesame paste has a deep toasted flavor. If using tahini, try to find one made with roasted sesame seeds, such as Joyva. If using tahini ground from raw sesame seeds, add another tablespoon toasted sesame oil.

Sichuan preserved mustard greens, known broadly as ya cai or more specifically as Yibin ya cai for the region from which it comes, come in small foil packets or jars. The dark brown bits of preserved vegetables start as strips of Sichuanese mustard green stems, which are then dried, salted and fermented with a sugar syrup and spices. They end up savory, a little sweet and pleasantly funky. There’s no great substitute, but other varieties of Chinese pickled or preserved mustard greens, such as sui mi ya cai, work. In a Western pantry, a combination of finely chopped capers and finely diced fermented bread-and-butter pickles comes closest.

If you don’t have fresh Chinese wheat noodles, you can use 12 ounces dried lo mein noodles, thin spaghetti or ramen and cook according to the package directions before draining and rinsing.

Recipe by Genevieve Ko.