-How to Make Dan Dan Mian with Jet Tila _ Ready Jet Cook _ Food Network.

I'm about to teach you how to make dan dan noodles that originate from the Sichuan province in China. The sauce uses tahini, which you probably know from making hummus, but it also uses other umami packed ingredients that make these noodles irresistible. What's happening guys? I am Jet Tila and this is Ready Jet Cook, where I show you how to make some of my favorite Asian dishes All right, dan dan time. Let's do that first. You can't have Sichuan food without Sichuan peppercorns. They kind of look like red peppercorns visually, but once you grind them down into a powder, they have a very unique flavor. They're kind of hot like peppercorns, they're aromatic, they're floral, they're spicy, but they also have this very lemony flavor like sumac. And then they create this fun, tingly sensation, almost a numbing spice. So if you go to the Sichuan restaurant, you see that ma la word? It means hot and numbing. Next we have preserved vegetables. You're like, well what kind of vegetables? So this cool earthen jar is Tianjin preserved vegetables. In the north of China, you can't get fresh vegetables all year long, so they take these cabbages, they cut them, salt them, and then ferment them, and they hold them in these earthen jars, and that fermentation creates umami or savoriness that gives these Sichuan dishes a huge pop. All right, thin soy and sweet soy. The world of soy sauce is vast. I think the best note I can give you is match the country of origin that you're cooking. So I'm making Chinese dan dan noodles, I'm gonna pull Chinese soy sauce. These are the two primaries. Thin soy is Chinese all-purpose soy sauce. You might also see it labeled as light soy. They're the same thing. Next, sweet soy sauce. That's basically molasses added to Chinese soy sauce, so it coats well, gives you a nice sweet pop, and together these are gonna make delicious dan dan noodles. All right, pantry's done. This is a really fast dish, but it has some critical steps that we need to cover. Like always, we're gonna get the knife work out of the way, then we're gonna boil the pasta, and then concurrently make that really savory meat sauce, and then we're gonna tie it all together. Very classic Chinese ingredients here, ginger, garlic, and scallions. If you went to that specific culinary school with the three-letter acronyms, they call it GGS. Y'all know what I'm talking about if you went there. So with ginger, I basically break off the little fingers, end up with the big main stalk, and we're gonna do a quick knife peel, and the way I like to do that is to square one side off so it sits up straight, and I'm just gonna run the blade of my knife along the body of the ginger until I rub off the ginger skin from one side, and then I'm gonna do the same thing to the other. If this makes you nervous, just use a peeler or a spoon, whatever makes you most comfortable. I like to use the knife because I'm going to use the knife anyway for slicing, and I think it's just more efficient that way. So now that you have the ginger peeled, I'm going to cut one end off so it sits up straight, just like that, and then I'm going to cut eighth-inch tiles, and then lay those tiles on top of each other, and then come down with eighth-inch slices. My grandma always called this the blades of grass cut. So there it is, ginger blades of grass. Moving on with garlic. Anytime I'm adding garlic to a wok or a fry pan, I smash it flat, and you just give it kind of a rough mince. So flat garlic, join it together, and just a nice quarter-inch slicing pass. Give that a quarter turn, and then another quarter-inch slicing pass. So the Szechuan province grows really amazing chilies and garlic, so I'm not going to be shy here because this is really going to pop the flavor of the dan dan noodles. Lastly, I've got some scallions. I like to line up the roots, take off those root pieces, and what I'll do is cut them in half, line them all up, and efficiently just slice all the scallions together. So let's spend a little time with these preserved vegetables. So this is basically cabbage that has been salted and allowed to ferment in earthen jars like this. That fermentation does a few things. A, it preserves these vegetables, but B, it releases so much umami flavor. The issue is salt, because they've packed them in salt. We want to get to the umami and the deliciousness. We've got to rinse the salt out of them. So I like to put it in a bowl. I'm going to add water in here and just give it a couple water changes and squeeze out the excess, and that's the way to prep these preserved vegetables. So water into the bowl. I'm going to kind of wash it like I'm washing rice, and then I'm going to pour out the excess and give it a really good squeeze to get it as dry as possible because I want the umami flavor. I want the depth of these, but I want to rinse off the salt. There it is. That's what I'm talking about right there. So the veggies are done. Let's build the dan dan sauce. From the pantry is sweet soy sauce, light soy sauce, sambal or chili garlic sauce, and with the sambal, if you love spicy, you could go a little heavier. Black vinegar. The tahini is actually my addition to this dish, because in China, you would use ground sesame seeds, which all tahini is is ground sesame. So I think you get better flavor and a better viscosity using tahini. And then finally, we took those Szechuan peppercorns, we ran them in a little spice grinder, and that's how you get this beautiful powder. So with all the ingredients in, I'm just going to whisk this until it comes together. With any of the dishes that we've cooked together, if you find a stir fry that you fall in love with, just take the sauce recipe and multiply it up two to ten times, put it in a container, label it, and you've got stir fry sauce at your disposal. With all my prep done, it's time to get cooking. So I preheated this wok for about one to two minutes until it gets nice and hot. If you don't have a wok, don't worry about it. A nice heavy skillet, like a enamelized cast iron pan, or any pan that has wide sides that gets very hot is going to do fine. So I'm always starting out with a high temperature, low flavor oil. Peanut, canola, grapeseed work. Anytime I have ginger and garlic in a stir fry, they're going to go in first. I always want to fry up my ginger and garlic because that's going to help perfume the oil and get the pan ready for the ground pork. This recipe is very similar to a pasta and meat sauce, right? We're going to cook this meat sauce with all these aromatics and liquids, and what's going to happen is we're going to cook our noodles, and then we're going to bring it together in the bowl. And you can see the ginger and the garlic and the ground pork marrying together, and I'm going to brown that very well to really release flavor out of here. With the pork halfway, I'm going to add these preserved vegetables because I do want to saute them into that hot oil. I know I'm about five to eight minutes away from the meat sauce. I'm going to drop the noodles now so they meet up at that perfect time when the noodles are nice and still starchy and it'll suck up the sauce. As for the noodles, these are just simply Chinese wheat noodles. If you can't get the Chinese noodles, use pasta. I think linguine or spaghetti or angel hair, any of those would work deliciously in this dish. I really wanted to show you how to make dan dan noodles because I really think they're the next big noodle dish. I mean, if we look at the evolution of noodle dishes, I would say lo mein, and then pad thai, and then pad thai became khao soi, and then I think dan dan are the noodles that are going to kind of be all the rage, so I really wanted to make sure to cook this with you. And just like our European counterparts, deglazing with wine is something that's been done in China forever. In China, I would use a shaoxing or rice wine. I'm simply using a little sherry to deglaze this meat sauce. As the sherry deglazes, it's the perfect time to add the spinach to get wilting. Once the sherry has deglazed, meaning it's actually evaporated almost 100%, I'm going to add the sauce that we made. I'm going to let this sauce bubble up a little bit. All those flavors in the pan are going to marry together. Right before you plate up is your last chance to kind of check your flavors and adjust them before you actually get them to the plate to your guest. It's rich, it's spicy, it's savory, and I always want my dan dan sauce on the stronger side because you're putting it right onto just plain pasta. I want my noodles just al dente. I don't want them too far cooked, and I'm just going to drain them. No need to rinse them. Just like the Italian pasta rules, you don't want to rinse your noodles because you want all that delicious starch to work together and suck up that sauce. We'll just give that a quick toss to get the residual moisture out. I'm going to bring my plate over. I'm going to get a portion of my noodles into the bowl, and you can do this either individual or just a giant family platter. Either one will work. Then I'm going to come over the top and smother these noodles with my dan dan sauce. Scallions are the perfect garnish. A tiny bit of the Szechuan peppercorn, a little pepper. It's also really nice. And there it is, guys. You know, the Italian culture and the Chinese culture are not that different. Noodles and meat sauce, but the Szechuan version is going to be a lot spicier and a lot tangier. Let me give that a shot there. It's that tangy craveability that pops, but what's fun is that little numbing spice of the Szechuan peppercorn. Well, there you have it, family. We made dan dan noodles together. I hope next time you go out, we get you from lo mein into dan dan, and we'll see you next time on Ready Jet Cook.