How to make China’s famous Beijing Fried Sauce Noodles at home | Zha Jiang Mian | Marion’s Kitchen

Super-rich, savoury, porky sauce tossed with thick, chewy wheat noodles. Ah! This is like a Chinese Bolognese sauce you need to know how to make, my friends. This is my version of jia jiang mian. The secret to this whole dish, it all comes down to the sauce. So a few little tips and substitutions here for those of us who can't get all the really traditional ingredients but it's still going to be really delicious. So I'm going to start off with, first of all, with something called soybean paste. So this guy gives you like all the salty, umami, kind of savouriness that is really characteristic of this noodle dish. You can find Thai or Chinese soybean paste. So just look out for it in like your Asian grocery store or just search for it online as well. It's pretty common and easy to get. The next ingredient that you should be adding here traditionally is called tian mian jiang. So this is a sweet fermented sauce, sweet fermented bean sauce, actually. But I just could not, for the life of me, find it in my local area here in Australia. So what I did was I've substituted hoisin sauce. It's not quite the same. Hoisin sauce is a little bit sweeter. But I figured if I'm having issues, you might be having a problem finding it as well. So I think it's a really good substitution here. And I'm going to add in a couple of spoonfuls of hoisin. Now I also want some dark soy sauce here. The dark soy sauce is really going to give us that really rich mahogany kind of colour. And then I want some regular soy sauce here to give us a salty kind of flavour. I also need some Chinese rice wine and some water. I just give that a mix. So for the sauce itself, I'm going to be using pork mince a bit later on. But I also like to add mushrooms here. It's kind of like a go-your-own-adventure when it comes to this sauce. You could add different vegetables. You could add tofu. So there's a few different options there. To get the sauce going, I just want a really high heat here. Some oil. And then I really think anytime you're cooking or stir-frying ground or minced meat, you really want to have a bit of a strategy going here. Because I think it can tend to be quite flavourless. And you can release a lot of moisture and then the meat kind of starts simmering in there. So the key is a couple of things. One, wait for that pan to get really, really hot so that as soon as the meat hits, it's sizzling and frying rather than kind of steaming in there. And then two, I think you really need to let the heat do its work. So put your meat in and then just spread it around and make sure that it gets a nice sear on it before you start messing around with it. I'm going to put my pork in. Just kind of spread it out there. Spread it out a little and then resist the urge to touch it. Now while that pork is doing its thing, I'm just going to get a couple of other things ready. So I want some ginger. And some garlic. OK, now let's come and have a look at the pork. And I'll just flip it over. So the reason why you want all that colour on your meat is that that's really intensifying the meatiness. It's giving you that porky kind of, you know, flavour rather than just kind of simmered, bland pork flavour. Now I want to season that pork with a little bit of white pepper. Then I'm going to go in with my mushrooms. Now I really like the mushrooms here. And the reason is that I love that they kind of really soak up a lot of the saucy flavour. And I think that things like chopped tofu do the same thing. That would be really great to put in here as well. Just kind of want like a flavour soaker, if you know what I mean. That's looking pretty good now. Let's go in with the aromatics. So my ginger. Just going to grate this straight in here. Now the benefit of doing this now and not at the start when we were hard searing that pork is that you won't burn your ginger or your garlic. And add some star anise. Now we can go in with the sauce. Now what happens here is we start out with a loose, soupy sauce kind of consistency. I want to let that pork really simmer down, make friends with the sauce and all of those aromatics and things will get nice and thick, concentrated and yum. Now for the noodles, traditionally you would use like a lovely sort of hand-pulled wheat noodle or something like that. But just for ease and noodles that I think you guys will be able to find easily, I really think these Hokkien noodles, the fresh ones, work really well because they have that lovely, thick chewiness to them. And that's really kind of like the gist of what you're going for with the noodles. Now you just need some boiling water. Pop those in. Now the sauce is nearly there. I can see that it's starting to look a little thicker. That pork definitely looks really yum. But I want to just kind of thicken it up and make it a little bit more sticky and glossy. So I'm going to just do some corn flour, a little bit of water and add that in. Now magically, you are now going to have a very thick, glossy and concentrated sauce here. Oof, look at that. Now my noodles are done. Now scoop out some of that lovely, thick, glossy, porky kind of sauce. Now the really great thing here is that we've got kind of crunchy, cooling bits and pieces to put on to our noodles here. So I've got some carrot, some cucumber. And there you go. That is my version of jjajangmyeon. And I think it's a really great way to try out this dish if you haven't tried it before. A few little ingredients there that you might need to search out. But all in all, what we're really going for here are some porky, salty, savoury noodles. Okay, this is good. I like it. What's so good about that is that so many different flavours going on. Salty, savoury, just slightly sweet. But the main point is that is some good porky noodles. Yum. So good. 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