Quick and Easy Spicy Chili Oil Noodles

I also just have an obsession with spicy foods, if it's not evidence. I looked at the Chili's logo for a very long time to make sure that when my friend drew this for me that it would not look like the Chili's logo. Hi, my name is Cathy Chen. I'm from Wen Wen, and I'm here to make chili oil brown butter noodles today. So the first step is to make our chili oil brown butter. We're gonna start with this jar of ghee. It's like butter, but it's butter after you take the milk solids out, so you're only left with the butter fats. Now we're just gonna cut some aromatics to put in it. I generally do about five scallions, just the whites, and then a couple cloves of garlic. I'm also gonna throw in the Sichuan peppercorns right now. I prefer green ones. They just have more floral notes and a little more numbing sensation. They kinda taste better than red ones, I think. There's just more flavor in each of them. But also because ghee is a higher smoke point, you can do a pour-over chili oil with it, but just ultimately you get more flavors in a chili oil if you do a simmering version, where you simmer most of the ingredients beforehand. Let's also add some Thai chilies. And then we'll just let that go for a bit. I just wait till things kind of brown up a bit, things toast up a little. So while this is going, we should probably toast milk powder. So milk powder is basically dehydrated milk. So when you have butter, there are milk solids in it, and milk powder can kinda replace the milk solids, so you can add the milk flavor and make it kind of actual butter again. This only takes a few minutes, but it happens really slowly then really fast. And if you're gonna add back milk powder, you may as well toast it because it's just gonna taste a little better. It's kinda gonna look like graham cracker crumbs. When I did this in my house, when I was first making this recipe, I would toast it and I would leave it in a little bowl in my kitchen. My roommate just thought I had crushed up graham cracker crumbs just constantly. My parents own a restaurant back in Maryland, so I worked there a lot. So I guess I grew up in a restaurant. And then I worked at Winsun for a little bit, actually. And then I left because of COVID. And then while I was sitting in my room in Maryland waiting for a pandemic to end, Eric Z DMed me on Instagram and said, I'd like to offer you a job. And then he made me a chef. It was kind of crazy. I was very, very confused. I didn't even know he was offering me a head chef job. Physician. And this, you kind of have to be careful of burning. It's kind of like the same idea, I think, when you do brown butter normally. Like, you know, the milk part burns rather easily. So when it's like golden brown, slightly past golden brown, maybe, it's probably good to go. And it's gonna clump, but we're gonna like blend it into the chili oil later. Yeah, so we've got some like browning on the garlic. Some browning on the scallions. I'm gonna turn the heat off. I'm just gonna add a little bit of Sichuan chili flake while it's still hot. They add really nice color, really nice flavor. The tingling sensation that you're gonna get from this is just gonna come from the Sichuan peppercorns. The chili flake itself is just like heat. There are like a couple of really great things you can do with this. One of them being mac and cheese, the other being toast, the third being a chili oil noodle. The ghee is all like infused with everything and all the aromatics are toasted. We're gonna just blend it. Kind of just look at it, make sure like everything's like properly broken up. We're gonna cool down the butter. If you just put it straight into the fridge, it kinda is gonna let all the aromatics and chilies and everything sink to the bottom. If you do it like this, basically it's gonna cool down while you're moving everything and it's gonna set more like a compound butter rather than a chili oil. Theoretically, this should be like stable at room temperature. I say that, the take that was like a grain of salt. I don't do it just because I'm uneasy leaving things out at room temperature, but theoretically, because the ghee is shelf-stable, milk powder is shelf-stable, and all of these aromatics are in like oil, so theoretically, this should be, but it would not quote me on that. Yeah, it'll start setting up like kind of around the sides and then you'll just kinda like mix it back in. Yeah, so I feel like that's pretty good. Now we're just gonna make the steak, let it rest. I'll finish this with like the chili oil butter so that it's kinda like in every aspect of the dish. The noodle part is actually based off of the not-so-secret secret menu item at 886, the dry beef fat chili noodle, where we do like a chili oil made of beef fat that we toss into noodles. So this part is kinda like an homage to that slash directly stolen from that, but you know, Eric gave me permission prior to this. If I overcook this, you know, it is what it is. It's gonna rest. It's not the world's greatest cooked steak, but you know, we're gonna put a little bit of butter on it as it rests. These are actually just the noodles that we serve at 886 and 11. These are our thick cut noodles. You can definitely use any type of noodle. This is just kinda like what I had easy access to. I've done this with like ramen noodles and it's really, really good. Because they're thicker, they're like slightly chewier. It'll be like, you know, cooking a pasta al dente and like finishing in sauce pretty much. While that's cooking, we can kinda cut some garnishes maybe. Cilantro, scallions, and Thai basil. You wanna go with like kinda strong herbs just because it kinda balances out the butter notes. I'm gonna save this little purple leaf. We'll put it on top. Food should be cute. The noodles will be done pretty soon, so we wanna have the sauce basically like ready, so we can just throw it in there. We're gonna add a little bit of soy sauce. This is shallot sauce. It's kinda like shallots and oil and like soy sauce. It's like very salty, very onion-y. Little bit sweet. It's really nice. We're gonna do a little bit of sugar and then a tiny bit of MSG, monosodium glutamate, because it's good in everything. This is like, right now it's soy sauce and shallot sauce, like sugar, MSG, so it's very like salty, sweet, but then we're gonna add kinda like the butter at the end and finish it and it's gonna give us like buttery and spice and then we'll finish it with like a little bit of black vinegar and that's kinda gonna bring it all together, round out all the notes, let the noodles finish cooking in it a little bit. I feel like chili oil noodles in general are just something you can eat on their own very much. I will say with this one, since there's all this added butter that's gonna be in it, it's nice to have all the herbs that we're gonna have on top to kinda cut through that a little bit and then the steak is kinda just to make it more of a complete meal, more of a whole dish, just to add a little more pasta water because it's gonna thicken the sauce, kinda help when the butter gets added in, kinda let everything cling to everything and we'll add a healthy scoop of butter and this is like one of the reasons why it's important to have the butter cold because if you have it just like room temp or like just solidified, it kinda just melts too quickly and instead of emulsifying, you just kinda get a lot more just like oiliness. That probably looks pretty good. Gonna kill the heat and then we're gonna add just a little bit of black vinegar. We don't add it earlier because it kinda like cooks out the flavor if you do. I'm just gonna toss it in, mix it in and then we're gonna see if I overcook this. It's no whole de-boned BDSM chicken de-boned in four minutes and 35 seconds but this is my elevated college meal. So now we're just gonna plate the dish. We have all the components ready. We're gonna wanna fold them just a little. Fold them like you work at a ramen shop, I guess. Fold them up and then kinda like bring them down, fold them a little but do a slightly better job than I'm doing. Cilantro on one side, a little bit of Thai basil. So something like that. Ground butter, chili oil noodles. All right, it's actually really good. It's spicy, it's salty, it's a little bit sweet. You really get the butter notes at the end and kind of like the toastiness and the milk powder and the herbs really like kinda just help balance it all out. So for the recipe, please click the link below or visit me at Wenwen where I probably won't make this for you but we'll make a lot of really, really good things.