The ULTIMATE Sous Vide Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

Beef noodle soup is one of the most famous dishes in Taiwan and actually it's only been famous the last couple of decades because in Taiwan they used to rely a lot on agriculture while the farmers would use cows and oxen to plow the fields so they have a very high respect for cows so they didn't really eat beef. After World War II when a lot of mainland Chinese people moved to Taiwan, there were a lot of Sichuan people there as well and one of the dishes that they had was red braised beef. They made that in Taiwan and then they added noodles there and that's how the beef noodle soup was born and then I guess from there it just spread all over Taiwan and it became an iconic Taiwanese dish. So we're going to use two cuts of beef today, we're going to use a beef shank and a beef short rib. The beef short rib, I seared it on both sides in a hot skillet with oil, that's just to give it some colour and add a little bit of flavour. Do you remember when we went to Taiwan and we had the most expensive beef noodle soup in the world? How much was it? 300 US dollars. We were filming for Confucius was a Foodie and we were lucky enough to be able to try one of these, the most expensive beef noodle soup. The place was called Niu Ba Ba, which means… Beef Daddy! Beef Mama, Beef Daddy! It was really good. Yeah and I really admire the owner, or actually the owner's dad now, who spent years creating this dish. When he first started he didn't actually charge people and eventually he asked people to name their own price. This 300 US dollars is basically the average of what people paid him. It was the best beef noodle soup I've ever had. The beef was melting in your mouth, it takes three days to make it. It was like… Wagyu. It was served beautifully. It was so good. And if you ever go there, if you ever get a chance to go there, you can look on the wall and you can see if you can find Carmen and I. With Niu Ba Ba as our inspiration, we're going to try to recreate it with much cheaper cuts of beef. Oh one more thing, we mentioned that they cooked it for three days and they actually didn't use a sous vide because we had a chance to go in the kitchen to see how they make it. We will use the sous vide. All hard labor. Okay, so we're going to start with black cardamom. These bags are great for these kinds of cooks because you have so many little spices. You don't want your guests, you don't want yourself to be like taking a sip of soup and spitting it all out. These you can buy them in the Chinese grocery stores and if not we'll find the link and put it in the description down below. Yep. Alright, so black cardamom. Make sure you crack them first too. Chili peppers. You can use these according to your taste. You can use two, you can use zero, use five, whatever you want. But don't forget the next sauces are also a little spicy. Cinnamon, two bay leaves, star anise, and we also have cloves, Sichuan peppercorns, and fennel. We're going to close it up and tie it up. Next we're going to get our vacuum bag. First we have regular soy sauce, all in. We have rice wine, dou ban jiang. This is a very flavorful, pungent, spicy sauce. This tomato paste usually has regular tomatoes but we don't have any so we just substitute a little tomato paste. But wouldn't it be more flavorful anyway for the sous vide to use tomato paste? Yeah, definitely. We have some minced garlic. And throw in the rock sugar please. Okay. And give this a little mix in here just so all the flavors meld together. So next we're going to put all our meats in. Here is our beef shank right to the bottom. And then I'll put in our short rib. And on top I will throw in all of the onions and ginger. Normally with beef noodle soup it's beef shank but to up the flavor and up the texture we're going to also use the short rib as well. And don't forget to add in all the spices. The whole spice bag can go in. Make sure it's really in there. On this cook we're not going to close the bag because there's so much liquid in there. If you make your bag long enough you can just clip it to the side of your sous vide after you've submerged all the meat and all the liquid. So water displacement first and then clip the side. Exactly. And that's it for this portion. We're going to sous vide this for 12 to 14 hours at 167 degrees Fahrenheit. We're making the beef bone broth for the noodle soup. We have our hot water boiling. First we're going to put our bones inside to clean the impurities out. That's actually a very important step otherwise your broth wouldn't be very clear. And the reason why we separate the broth from the soup is so we can control the flavor and we can make it stronger or lighter depending on our preferences. We also don't put any salt in here because that will come afterwards. Let's put these bones in. So we will bring this back to a boil again for about two minutes and then you'll see a lot of brown scum that comes out. We don't want any of that. I'm going to prepare the other ingredients for the broth. It's very simple. We're just going to cut these in half. And the ginger you don't even need to slice it. All you need to do is wash it, smash it, and then... Are you okay? Yes, the onions are making me cry. Okay. But it's okay. So I'm going to smash the ginger. Yes, so to release the flavor. So after this step is done we can put this directly into our instant pot. You can also use a normal pot but the instant pot will quicken the process. To this I'm going to throw in the ginger, the onions, and two bay leaves. Here we have about one and a half kilos of bones. So usually to that ratio we should be putting about one to four. Put the lid on, close it up, and we're going to put it on high for one hour and thirty minutes. If you're doing it with a regular pot you would have to boil it for five hours. The beef has been in the sous vide for a while. The beef bones are almost done for the stock and so now we finish off the last topping that we need to do. Which is suan cai. And in Taiwanese beef noodle soup that is an essential topping. This is something that would cut down the fat and balance out with the beef. We've had this soaking for about ten minutes. We soaked it, we drained it, we wrung it out. And then we soaked it again. So we're going to just wring this out one last time. The reason for that is because suan cai itself is quite salty. So this is just to get rid of some of the salt. So these are mustard greens? Yep. Suan cai just means sour vegetable. So it's kind of like the Chinese version of sauerkraut. The root area you'll probably want to slice it thinner. This would be good for things like congee, plain tofu that you want to add some shazam to it. The leaves you don't need to dice, it's fine because the leaves are soft. But it's the stem that you don't want like a giant chunk. So to make this is actually relatively simple. You direct me? Some oil please. Now put in the chilies. The reason why we put in the chilies first is because we want the spiciness of the chili to be released in the oil. So that's how you get the hot oil. Fry these until aromatic. Next we put in the suan cai that we have diced previously. Wow. So big. I think the chilies are fragrant. Now we put the garlic last because we don't want the garlic to burn. So we've been to Taiwan for over, I think, across three trips. We've been there for 17 days. And for 17 days, it rained for 17 days. It was so cold. And we're from Canada. Just sucked in a bunch of chilly air. That's it. Simple, simple. It smells really fragrant. It's really nice smelling. Oh, spicy. Mmm. Nice. You want a piece of spice? It's spicy. It tastes really good, but it's really spicy. I suggested two chilies and Kevin wanted three chilies. Two chilies is enough? Is it not, like, burning all over your mouth? It's pretty spicy. Came out of the sous vide. Smells good. Although right now it's very difficult to smell because I kind of put too many chilies in there. Oh, man. This is still in my face. The air here has chilies in it. That's how spicy it is. So here's our short rib. It looks good. And then our beef shank, if you remember, was quite large. It is now this big. So we'll set this aside for now. So I want to strain this because I don't want all that stuff in my soup later. So I have one of these things. I forget what it's called. The oil strainer thingy? Yeah. I'm going to strain this into here. Yummy, yummy, yummy. So this sauce will be super flavorful and this is what we will use to flavor our broth as well. We just squeeze as much of this out as we can. There's probably a ton of juices still left in there. Many hours of work. But we can finally taste it. Yes. So we have our two cuts of meat. We have our beef shank and short rib. Oh, I didn't realize I did beef shank, short rib, beef shank, short rib. Good job. Let's try the meat first. Okay. It's very, very tender. Super tender. I think beef shank is my new favorite cut. I don't know if you guys can see it, but I bit this one, but there's like a nice meat on the outside. It's very tender. And my favorite part is actually the inside of the tendon. And it's super gelatinous. It's very creamy. Not creamy, but what's the word? Rich? Buttery? It's very buttery. I love it. Well, I have a piece of short rib and that is super soft as well. Usually I don't like beef noodle soup because the meat always gets stuck in my teeth. I have big teeth gaps. But this is soft and it doesn't get stuck in my teeth. Mmm. This is so buttery. Mm-hmm. I'm going to try this broth. The broth is very flavorful and it's light at the same time. Actually one thing I want to tell you guys is that the beef bone broth, when we tried it by itself, it almost tastes like nothing. But together, I think it adds a lot of umami flavor. I think that's the point of it. And because we didn't flavor the broth, we didn't do anything. So it's- It's only beef bones and onions, right? We did that because we knew that the stock was going to be really heavy. I wanted to flavor the meat. I wanted to make sure the meat was flavorful. I think I accomplished that. And then after we strained it out, we add it together, we mix it together, and you can come up with the perfect balance. If you want more light or more rich, you'll be able to achieve that by adding broth or adding more of the- Flavors like sauce, like a stewing sauce, I guess. Yeah. I'm going to try a little bit of the noodles with the sanchai. The sanchai is delicious as well. For what it is and how much I spent, it is very, very good. Yeah. I can't say that it's as good as nubaba. Well, nubaba spent like decades of his life doing this. But this is pretty good. This is just like 12 hours in the sous vide, so you can do this at home. Wet spices next. We're going to start with a little ginger. That's not wet. We're going to start with our wet spices next. That's not wet. We're going to start with our wet ingredients next.