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Speaking of that clinginess, I ran into my first issue with the vegan version of the dish. Traditionally, the sauce base gets mixed with some rich chicken stock, which adds some natural gelatin and body to the mix. Plain old water or vegetable stock is lacking in that body, making the sauce a little too thin. It runs off the noodles instead of sticking to them. The tahini helps a bit, but my base needed a little extra help.
When the mercury rises, do you need to forgo spicy foods? Fortunately, the answer is „no.' Spicy foods can make you sweat , and your body cools as sweat evaporates from your skin. So if you're craving noodle food history|https://noodleinsight.com/ with some heat when the thermometer reads 100°, go ahead and set your mouth on fire with one of these 15 dishes. They may bring the heat to your mouth, but they won't bring the heat to your kitchen—none of them require turning on the oven.
The remaining aromatics are simple. A few tablespoons of chopped preserved Sichuan mustard root, some garlic, and a splash of Shaoxing wine to deglaze the skillet once it's all been stir-fried together.
On top of steak cooked on the stovetop, pile cold cucumbers, red peppers, and peanuts, then drizzle with a spicy sauce made with fish sauce and dried Thai chiles. Eat it right away or refrigerate it overnight because it's even better the next day.
(Image: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/65e0eb570b02ff0e18785bbd/6ddc8d4f-f847-45e1-8594-11fcb1c7bb48/meatball_8.jpg)If you were so inclined, you could do as the street vendors of Chengdu did: make the aromatics and sauce base in larger batches, store them together in a sealed container in the fridge, and have them ready to go at moment's notice whenever you want a quick snack. All you have to do is cook the noodles, add some starchy cooking liquid to the sauce base, pour it on top, and you're good to go. Due to its high oil, salt, and acid content, the pre-made and mixed sauce should stay good in a sealed container in the fridge for several weeks at least.
Done right, takeout fried rice is a thing of satisfying, well-balanced beauty. But it's frequently served clumpy and over-sauced, or, worse, bland and oily. Making it at home gives you more control over the final dish, plus it's a great way to use up leftovers. Our approach busts a few myths—no, your rice doesn't have to be medium-grain, or day-old, for that matter. While this version calls for vegetables, like carrots and peas, you can easily bulk it up with pork , kimchi and Spam , Thai-style crab , chicken, or your protein and garnishes of choice.
Here's another recipe in my quest to take the cute and cuddly animals out of all of my favorite foods in a no-BS, as-delicious-as-the-real-thing, good-enough-for-anyone kind of way. I'm particularly happy with this one, which makes sense, as it's a logical extension of my vegan mapo tofu recipe. I'm talking about the other great pillar of cheap-and-easy Sichuan cuisine: dan dan noodles.
The pork is the odd man out in the traditional recipe. Fortunately, much like with the beef in Sichuan mapo tofu, the pork is not the star player of the dish. Its role is mainly textural, adding a bit of meaty, bouncy chew that clings to the slippery noodles as you slurp them up. Having already addressed an identical issue when finding a suitable replacement for ground beef in my vegan mapo tofu recipe, I knew what I had to do here: I chopped up a bunch of mushrooms in a food processor, then employed the Chinese technique of dry-frying—cooking them slowly in oil—until they were mostly dehydrated, lightly shriveled, and deeply browned. The resulting little nuggets have great texture and a flavor that is not really pork-like, but savory and rich in its own unique way.
Dried and fresh Thai chiles, sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice make a bold and delicious dressing for this Isan-style salad. Toss the dressing with tomatoes, bean sprouts, and pork rinds that soak up the flavorful dressing.
There are all kinds of variations on the dish that you'll find in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. Some go the ultra-authentic, hardcore traditional route, while others remove some or even all of the heat from the dish, instead replacing it with a creamy sesame (or even peanut butter!) based sauce. To me, picking one version of dan dan noodles as the best is kinda like choosing my favorite Beatles album: It's a constantly shifting debate, even with myself. Best plan is to just pick a path and run with it. This time I'm going for the more traditional approach. Obviously, modifying it for my vegan needs is going to alter that approach in practice (though not in spirit).
J. Kenji López-Alt
Recipes abound for General Tso's chicken, one of the most iconic dishes in the takeout canon. All of them, however, seem to consist of chicken fried in a crispy shell, then tossed in a sweet, glossy sauce flavored with garlic, ginger, dried chilies, soy sauce, and sesame oil, among other ingredients. Our biggest complaint about the formula is that overly sugary sauce, which we balance in this recipe with a good amount of vinegar. A couple of tablespoons of vodka and a little marinade added to the batter result in a supremely crunchy, well-textured coating.