If You Can't Stand the Heat--Eat Cold Noodles
When it's too hot to be in the kitchen, having some fried sauce on hand is the secret to a quick home-cooked meal. On a 1-10 scale of White Boyfriend friendliness, this dish rates around a 7. He may not write home about it, but he'll clean his bowl, and that's good enough for me.
This recipe makes a massive quantity of sauce, which can then be used to make fried sauce noodles | 炸酱面 whenever you want all summer long. It keeps very well in the fridge--forever as far as I know. The other good news is that these noodles go very well with raw garlic, White Boyfriend's favorite. In fact, at Old Beijing Noodle King restaurant in Beijing, where fried sauce noodles are their specialty, every table has a basket full of heads of garlic. Just peel, eat, and repeat.
This recipe begins with pork. I've made it with only ground pork, ground pork and pork loin, and finally, the most decadent option: ground pork and pork belly. As long as you have about a pound, you can use whatever combo of pork meats that you want. Just make sure to chop up whatever is not ground into as small of pieces as you can before your knife hand completely cramps up.
The key ingredient to this recipe is the black bean paste. My family has found no better substitute in the states, so we always use this exact brand. It's readily available at any Asian grocery store.
This is an easy recipe to make, but does require an hour of mindless stirring. It happens after you get the ginger, onion, and pork browned in the wok, and the black bean paste goes in with the oil and water.
When the stirring commences, the bean paste mixture will still be very watery. But soon it'll begin to splatter brown specks all over your nice white kitchen cabinets. It's basically Asian spaghetti sauce. Don't wear your Sunday best. Do be prepared to adjust the stove temp frequently when the sauce hits the fan--sometimes literally. The goal is to get the sauce from step 3 to step 5 in terms of consistency. White Boyfriend describes this final stage as "crude oil".
While the sauce is cooking--and depending on your multi-tasking skills, you can prep the other ingredients that go into making fried sauce noodles. The necessities are cucumbers and noodles. If you want to get fancy you can add cilantro, green onions, edamame beans, watermelon radish, daikon radish, bean sprouts, and/or chili oil. It's like the Chinese equivalent of a taco bar. You can invite your guests over and they can build their own noodle bowl!
The beauty of this dish is in the summer you can serve it with cold noodles and in the winter you can do hot noodles. Whatever the season, just toss your ingredients together and dig in (with raw garlic in hand).
For the straight-up Fried sauce noodles recipe, click here.