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Home-Style Dandan Noodles

Welcome back! 
Today, we have a delicious noodle recipe: Dandan Noodles! There are many variations on this dish, but its origin comes from the Sichuan Province in China. It's originally made with a spicy meat sauce and pickled vegetables, and with no soup. However, variations on the recipe can include soup, and many versions, including this one, include peanut butter, which we find to be a unique ingredient that works surprisingly well. Overall, it's very simple because it was originally sold by street vendors carrying the noodles with a pole, but it's still very enjoyable!

Home-Style Dandan Noodles

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:

  • About 8-12 ounces noodles, depending on how much you want
  • 1/2 pound ground pork
  • 2-3 tablespoons salted mustard green, chopped (optional)
  • 3 tablespoons green onion
  • 1 tablespoon garlic, minced
  • 1 teaspoon ginger, minced
  • 1 tablespoon cooking rice wine
  • 4 tablespoons sesame sauce
  • 4 tablespoons peanut butter
  • 1/2 cup + 1 cup water
  • 1 tablespoon crisp chili oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon Sichuan pepper powder
For garnish (you don't necessarily need all of them):
  • Sesame seeds
  • Chopped peanuts
  • Green onions
    The salted mustard greens


Directions:

  1. In a separate bowl, mix together the sesame sauce, peanut butter, and 1/2 cup of water.
  2. Heat some oil in a wok.
  3. Add in the ground pork until it turns white-ish/opaque.
  4. Add in the rice wine and stir.
  5. Add the green onion, garlic, ginger, and salted mustard greens, and mix.
  6. Add in the mixture of sesame sauce, peanut butter, and water, and mix.
  7. Add another cup of water and cook until broil.
  8. Add in the chili oil and pepper powder and stir.
  9. Cook the noodles.
  10. Blanch some veggies like bok choy and bean sprouts.
  11. Assemble by topping the noodles with the meat sauce and veggies, and garnish with the sesame seeds, chopped peanuts, and/or green onions.
This is a great, well-rounded dish to have all year round. It's simple to make but there's still a lot of nuance with the ingredients that you can experiment around with in order to find the recipe that you prefer; in fact, many versions opt to just use sesame paste and not peanut butter. However, this is our "home-style" that we developed after seeing a bunch of different recipes. We ended up with this really smooth but still thick sauce that balances the peanut butter with the rest of the meat sauce, and it's now a dish that the whole family really enjoys.

-Chefpo 
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