Hey, so a few notes: 1. First off, other two common toppings that we didn't add: kelp and shredded chicken. No real reason we didn't include them really, feel free to use either yourself! 2. On that note, this recipe's actually completely vegan-friendly! A rarity for us lol, I know. 3. Brief aside that that seasoned soy sauce mixture doesn't always contain spices - many people use a simple mix of sugar and soy sauce. We just like the spiced version better, what can we say? The 45 minutes of cooking really brings out the umami in the soy sauce too. In conjunction with the MSG, this has a really nice umami kick to it. 4. If you watch the Trevor James video (where I got that B-Roll in the intro, huge thank you to him btw for allowing us to freely raid his footage when needed haha), the vendor there adds like a whole mountain of MSG. With that cooked soy sauce we used you won't need so much, unless you're wanna put way more chili oil in there (MSG will balance the heat). 5. This stuff keeps... so prep the day before, toss in the fridge, preferably move to a cooler and bring to a barbecue or potluck. 6. Apologies for the... three times I muffed up the narration there. Just to emphasize, (1) those're mungbean sprouts, not soyabean sprouts (2) that's 50g of oil and (3) we added ~1 tsp sesame oil in there at the end. 7. If using Sichuan hongyou (i.e. the recipe in the card of the video), use unstrained hongyou if making it for this particular dish... or toss some chili flakes in there and let em soak in the hongyou a bit. This dish is nice with chili flakes. 8. You can also try the yellow mustard version of this if you like! Add in 1/2 tsp. Also, another addition that's quite nice is to add a couple drops of mujiangzi oil... it's prolly completely unavailable in the West, but it's from the shrub Litsea cubeba and has this really nice lemongrass sort of flavor to it. Lemongrass oil also has a similar flavor, so you could also play around with that. Both are quite strong, so a couple drops is enough! 9. Quick reminder that you should only mix the noodles right when you're ready to eat! Written recipe's coming, back to writing :)
Yep, just a happy coincidence :) Lots of Chinese dishes are pretty vegan friendly though with a slight alteration or two, so feel free to ask us for suggestions!
Excellent and in depth recipe. I didn't know the seasoned soy sauce element and now know why my home made tasted so different to the street stuff. Great job as always. So appreciate the effort you put into these.
Cheers! So not everyone uses the seasoned soy sauce - some vendors will use soy sauce sweetened with sugar and some just straight up use normal soy sauce. Especially if you get it in Shenzhen, that's often the case. The spices really make a nice difference as to the final taste though, we really prefer it :) I think the big thing that you almost always see vendors use that seems absent in many online recipes is the garlic water.
I've been making Chinese food for 55 years, starting back when you needed a trip to Chinatown to buy ginger root. Rarely have I encountered a recipe which made me taste something entirely new. Sand ginger and black cardamom as flavorings for soy sauce are the inventions of someone brilliant. Many thanks for all you've done! If you could restrain a bit of your prose meanderings, you could write one of the best Chinese cookbooks on the market.
Haha reddit as a medium tends to reward verbosity, so I'm definitely picking up some bad habits there. And yeah, the seasoned soy sauce mixture's awesome... really adds a lot of depth in our opinion :)
I am Vietnamese and a huge fan of Chinese noodles, love all your very imformative vids, thank you both for your great work. wishing you both the best of health and happiness. cheers
Couldn't stop in the middle. Must watch this till the end. Selected ingredients, cooking process are all authentic and thoroughly/clearly presented, much better than those 'KNOW-HOW PROFESSIONALS". Thanks so much for exploring/revealing those secrets. Keep up with more exquisite ideas and dishes.
I tired this for the first time at a restaurant and I loved it. I usually almost always get the handpulled noodles with broth at a Sichuan restaurant nearby but I thought let me try this. I wasn't disappointed at all and will eventually try to make this 😃
Great recipe, thanks. Indeed, all your vids are extremely informative, the best chinese cooking vids I've seen so far on RU-vid. Thank you. By the by, for this, I didn't have time to make the seasoned soy sauce so I dropped in one star anise and one cardamon pod to the boiling noodle water for 30 secs, and was very happy with the results.
Haha, that'll add some flavor to the water. But even if you're not making the soy sauce with spices, I'd really suggest you adding the sugar and water to the soy sauce, bring it to a boil and combine, the sugar is very important in balancing the taste.
One restaurant around here (in Sweden) adds chopped pickled Sichuan chilies if you ask for "extra brave" sauce. It's super spicy and indeed awesome. The place serves you a feast of liangmian along with fried dumplings for essentially no money.
Made this for a dinner party last night - it was a huge hit! A+ as always.. The youlazi was definitely spicier than I was expecting..! Good little clean-out of my allergy-ridden sinuses to go with my delicious dinner.
Haha, yeah, it really depends on the chili you're using. Some can be pretty fiery. But yeah, I really love this noodle dish and it's great for party or noodle bar.
Very helpful (+1). Btw, after finally learning (from you guys) that sichuan peppercorns are also WATER SOLUABLE rather then exclusively oil soluable, ive finessed my technique. Thanks again.
They are oil soluble :) Basically different flavinoids in Sichuan peppercorns are water soluble and oil soluble. Hot water'll give you the floral quality, hot oil gives the numbing quality.
I Had a similar dish locally to me which was so more-ish. I've made it at home though sometimes with a broth of chicken stock poured over. Both ways very delicious!
what you have done is pretty standard at a base level. you've added a bit of chili oil which is key and added a judicious amount of ingredients as per feeling + mustard oil. Liang Mian needs that bouncy, fresh and lip-smacking flavour. love your channel. great food (people who talk shit about your voice are just weird, love your clear, slow and methodical voice) and just an old round great channel.
Yep, it's one of those dishes that's kind of tough to give an overall recipe for, because so much of it's personal feeling and preference. The best we could do's give a recipe we like! And re the voice, I think we're sorta at this weird 'uncanny valley' of video professionalism. Not just some dude shooting with a cell phone camera (which always has a nice kinda natural feel to it), but also an enormous gap between this and, say, Binging with Babish. A lot of sins are forgiven if you're going in expecting the former, but if you're expecting the latter the quality difference between us and a professional's pretty damn stark :)
Steph and Chris. Holy crap! This looks so good. I mean drooling good! WOW 💖 Until I started watching cooking channels from China, Japan and other locales in the east, I had no idea how many dishes contain noodles! Like most ignorant westerners I thought the bulk of your carbs came from rice. I came to the realization that's not altogether true about 7 years ago. But it wasn't until the last couple years it was made clear exactly how mouth wateringly good they are. Think cup noodles. That was it in my lack of wisdom. Now my eyes have been opened and my ignorance changed to wonder. So I'm embarrassed that after I had been cooking for about 43 years this was new to me. 😔 But now at 50 years I'm much more familiar. Thanks to you and a few other channels who show authentic cuisines. Thank you. Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
Hmm... I would say that a very hefty chunk of carbs come via rice, especially in the south! Having some white rice together with a meal's like... almost a must when eating at home haha. Whenever we're cooking for ourselves the basic formula's a vegetable dish, a meat dish, and some white rice. So that assumption was certainly based in reality! It's just that there's also a whole bevy of noodle, rice noodle, pancakes, etc. Tons of diversity. Rice has about the same cultural significance that bread has in the West, I think... bread/rolls are super common with a large chunk of meals, but it's far from the only thing on the menu :)
Chinese Cooking Demystified Thank you Chris and Steph! 💖 Funny. I always complain about the lack of variety in our food here. Meat, potatoes and veg, lol. Replace rice with potatoes and it's the same there. Your variety is much more diverse than are ours I believe. Especially in veg and condiments. Still so very enjoyable to see different methods of cooking! Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
Hey Chris & Steph! Amazing recipe, tastes exactly like what I had over in China. I was wondering if you could do a recipe for sweet water noodles aka Tian Shui Mian? I had them over in Chengdu outside Wenshu Monastery and they were next level delicious. Found some interesting recipes for them online but would love to see your take on them. Also, do you think that its possible to jar up the liquid 'sauce' elements here in a big batch to add to noodles when I want them (I eat a lot of noodles) - would make it so much more convenient. Love your work, keep it up! (ps please write a book)
Yeah, tian shui mian, good idea~ would totally add it to the list. For the sauces, I'd jar them up separately, like the seasoned soy sauce (still got one jar in our fridge). You can use it in other things too. I think mixing them up together the shelf life would be really short.
I tried them outside Wenshu Temple as well! Absolutely phenomenal. The locals told me to pour hot water into my bowl to slurp up all that sublime remaining sauce as a simple "soup." & there was a Sichuanese family in my Hong Kong hood that made Tianshuimian (that's where I first tried it). Sadly, one day they up & left & I have NO idea where they moved to. It's just some mediocre Thai restaurant there now. LOL. :-(
Excellent! I want to set up a only noodles restaurant in Dhaka main city. Inshallah, I will be able to set this with four months after finish the viruses.
Love it! Especially the part where you cool down the noodles while drizzling them with oil. Just like they do with sushi rice and vinegar mixture, right?
My favorite version of cold noodles is simpler and sesame paste based, but this looks delicious and I'll have to give it a try! It reminds me of Chongqing noodles. Do you guys have your own favorite version or recipe? I think it would make for a good video since you can make it so many ways and get across some basic flavor profiles!
Loving your channel! Keep up the great work. Any chance of doing a Xian style cold noodle? (liang pi). Simple ingredients but difficult to master in my experience. My wife tells me in China they add a glue, possibly poly vinyl acetate to get the noodles to not break. I've managed a semi-successful recipe using potato starch added to the wheat flour, but it's hit and miss. Sometimes the noodles are very fragile, other times they're a bit dry and rubbery. I nail it about 50% of the time. Even with advice over Wechat from the local Chinese community it seems random as to how the noodles come out. Would love to see if you can post a replicable recipe for this awesome dish. I'm not bothered about the toppings or sauce, which can vary, just the noodles.
Yeah! We've been wanting to do that, the lianggpi from scratch. Steph assigned it to me (Chris) and uh... yeah I gotta get to it. You definitely know more than me at this juncture, I still have to do a lot of research. I won't get to it this summer unfortunately, but it'll happen one of these days :)
Maybe you can try the traditional "washing the dough" method instead of straightup using wheat starch? Wheat starch just breaks so easily. Or you can try a method that's similar to making har gow (Cantonese shrimp dumpling) wrappers, use boiling hot water, pour onto the wheat starch while stiring it (it clumps up real quick). Once the starch is cooked, you can knead it into a dough once it cool down a little bit. This way it'd be a lot easier to roll out into a sheet, then you can steam it to cook it completely. This is not the traditional or correct way to do it, but it may help you solve the breaking problem for now.
Thanks for the advice Steph. I almost always use the washing the dough method. This has the added benefit of providing gluten as a by product, which I steam and add to the dish. I have tried 'cheat' methods with using various starches (wheat, potato, sweet potato) mixed directly in water and then immediately steaming, but this was no good - although the water was cold. I'll give the hot water and wheat starch method a try. BTW, made the Lion's Head Meatballs today from your video - turned out great! Will definitely make again.
Looks amazing! I have a couple questions -- re: this hard-to-source rapeseed oil: what other common dishes would this be ideal for, and will mustard oil still be an acceptable alternative in them? Also, is this the same oil you used in your chili oil video? Cheers!
Yeah, I think it'd work. I was a bit down on the potential sub because if you taste caiziyou and the Indian mustard seed oil side by side the latter has this really strong nose kick. After you heat it up, it becomes pretty subtle... so I think we think it'd definitely be a better general all-purpose sub than peanut!
Would this still be good if i make it in bulk for the week? How long would it keep fresh? Id like to make this for my lunches. My friend's mom used to make this dish and its delicious.
Noodles: ~2 days Youlazi: ~1 week, or longer if you don't care about botulism Seasoned soy sauce: Like, forever Peanuts: A couple weeks Mungbean sprouts/sliced cucumber/scallions: One day, max So you could make it for a couple days lunch but mid week you'd need to sort some noodles again. The veg you could potentially skip, but if you like you could prep the night before right before bed
Sorry to break it to you, but Mustard seed oil is banned for human consumption in the US, Canada and the EU due to higher-than-permitted levels of Erucic acid.
Ah got it, apologies for the short reply :) We're looking at doing a cumin lamb dish this month, though it'll be NW-style and not strictly Xinjiang style
The channel name's "demystified" would imply that Chinese cuisine wouldn't be that complicated but then I see the recipes and they have more ingredients than there's parts on a space shuttle
It's not so bad once you get used to it. At least it's not like my Great grand parents day, when everything was made from scratch from raw ingredients. I'm half Korean and like the Chinese and other Asian Nations that have complex culinary traditions sauces take at least months if not years, even generations to be at thier best. So cooking is time and labor intensive and requires many steps, even food for peasants. Now, at least things are produced on an industrial scale for convenience and all you have to do is buy and mix chop and pour. That's if you like cooking, or you can just go to a restaurant and each like a rich person.
Yes, I think so. I've never made ramen myself so I couldn't say 100%, but I believe they're the same. At the very least, any differences would be subtle and fresh ramen noodles would absolutely work here.
Alkaline noodles (碱水面)... the ones we used in the Lo Mein vid were the thin wiry dried sort. I think these alkaline noodles we used here are the same thing as fresh ramen noodles, but I'm not 100% on how they make the ramen noodles in Japan? At the very least, fresh ramen noodles would *totally* work here too. No egg, but you could use egg noodles too. This's super flexible :)
Your video appeared mysteriously on my screen, September, 2024. My goodness, a lot has happened worldwide and in China in the past 6 years. I hope you folks are alright!
We're not quite expert noodle-makers, we still gotta practice a bit more before doing it on camera! You can absolutely use fresh ramen noodles with this, there's a bunch of videos online for them :) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fnrW4oan_Mo.html
The ways of handling noodles are different, seasoning ratio is different, dan dan mian uses pickled mustard green, this one doesn't. They may look similar but its actually quite different.
I love this style of noodle, and make something similar. my only major divergence from tradition is I'm not a huge fan of black vinegar in this dish ... I usually swap in a little mirin for the black vinegar and the slab sugar. Tip: mustard oil is very perishable, and tends to go rancid in a few short months or less. best to buy in the smallest glass bottles you can find. Storing in fridge after opening would probably help too.
We really wanna do a Youtiao video, but it's something that we gotta learn so it'll be a bit. I think we'd prolly do it in conjunction with making soy milk, just because that's such a classic combination.
Haha yeah, we definitely need to do that. Just a bit of a pain of a recipe to test, we'll get to it :) From my understanding of the dish (still gotta do more research!), the Woks of Life recipe looks quite legit: thewoksoflife.com/2014/09/steamed-shanghai-soup-dumplings-xiaolongbao/ ^ that blog can be kinda variable, but from the looks of it they nailed that one :)
Help us out :) So Teochew is another way to write Chaozhou, and they got a mountain of different noodle dishes there! It seems like in SE Asia there's a specific dish called 'Teochew noodles' but I can't really find what it is. They use quite a bit of misua (i.e. mianxian) noodles there, but there's a number of different ways you can eat em... mixed, fried, or soup noodles. Fried misua: static7.orstatic.com/userphoto/photo/7/5Q9/014QPY013123681D4E38C6px.jpg Soup Misua, i.e. mianxianhu: cdnnews.sinchew.com.my/sites/default/files/sciLife/files//2013/03/09/tys13030901.jpg If there's something SE Asia specific, that I think'd unfortunately be outside of our area of expertise :( It's more difficult for us to recreate diaspora dishes, mostly for the simple reason we don't live there!
Thank you for such a great recipe. It was my favorite thing in Sichuan. I'm so sad that I will never set foot in China again because of their garbage gov and kidnapping politics.
An ice water bath would remove the irregular outer layer of starch from the noodle - i.e. the noodle would be too smooth, and the sauce wouldn't cling as well to the noodle.
To be honest, just use brown sugar for the soy sauce. The original Chinese language recipe we adapted it from used brown sugar... we used slab sugar basically just because we were fresh out of brown sugar :)
I believe you can buy it from most larger US cities. In Canada, they are in International (or Asian) food section. The difficult part is finding right kind of noodle in North America, Good luck.
I know it's sort of a tradition to add msg but wouldn't all those lovely ingredients cover the bases and soy sauce bring the umami? Seems unnecessary to me to add extra. Great recipe nonetheless!
Adding extra MSG is a flavor level balance thing, like any other ingredient or seasoning. Just like soy sauce is already salty, but he added a bit more in to get the salt level where he wanted it. The goal in every dish is to get the right balance of sweet/sour/salt/bitter/umami. Every dish I make I taste and decide if I need to bump any note to get it to where I want it. I may add more or less salt or garlic or vinegar than he suggests - I make it to my taste. I suggest you experiment with MSG - make a dish without it, then try adding 1/8 tsp and see what it does for the dish, then try bumping it up. You can then decide if it makes the dish better or not for your preference.
To echo b minor, MSG is for balance :) Just as the sweetness of sugar can balance the tartness of vinegar, that sort of raw umami you get from MSG balances the spiciness of the chilis. So if we used double the chili oil, we'd use more MSG... and if we didn't include chili oil, we probably wouldn't use MSG here at all. Obviously, soy sauce is a pretty umami rich ingredient, but it's generally more of an... undertone if that makes any sense? If you want soy sauce with a bit of a more obvious umami kick (i.e. something that could potentially balance spiciness), you'd need some really nice quality (and pricy) first press soy sauce. I think some people think of MSG as some sort of magical 'yummy' ingredient, as a cheat or something. It's not, it simply brings umami the way salt brings salinity or sugar brings sweetness! I know a lot of people don't like MSG, so you can obviously skip it. Just know that its inclusion isn't mindless :)
Haha we'll try to do a simple cumin lamb by the end of the summer... though if I'm feeling rich (lamb ain't cheap in Shenzhen) I'd really like to do some NW-style roast lamb chops haha.
Awesome recipe! There's a new Australian documentary called Destination Flavour China which is set to air later this year and I think you might be interested.
Haha it was a success! Caiziyou has always been tough for many people to get their hands on outside China, especially in America we're there's a ban on unprocessed rapeseed oil ostensibly due to it's Erucic acid content. Mustard seed oil faces the same ban, but Indian grocers in the USA tend to get around the ban by selling it for "topical use only" (wink, wink). It's not completely the same, but hits a lot of the same notes and totally works in this dish :)
You mean like the Northwest, Xi'an/Xinjiang/etc? We got a couple videos and we wanna do more... it's mostly that we got more resources for Cantonese/Sichuan. We try to work around the country though :)
Yes. I was fascinated by Xi'an and Xinjiang cuisine mostly from watching Trevor/Food Ranger. Two dishes that stood out to me was the lamb and rice pilaf, and Spicy Cumin lamb with hand pulled noodle. I have made the pilaf twice using an Uzbek plov recipe and I love it so far. There's a Xi'an noodle shop here in Seattle and I went there quite often for the cumin lamb noodle, but I also want to make it myself. If you have any materials/recipes on these dishes please send it my way. I would surely appreciate it!
Oh, and I love the way you try to explain things scientifically instead of anecdotally. I think that's what made you stand out against other Asian cooking channels. Keep up the good work!
So for what we got out now, we have: Roujiamo (Xi'an): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yKY2J5syT_g.html Dapanji with Kudaimian Pulled Noodles (Uighur version): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yFicazAu-x8.html I know that's a pathetically small list lol, we just like to be confident with what we put out :) We're gunna put out a cumin lamb video (the stir-fry, probably) later on this summer, and I'd really like to get to a NW style roast lamb ribs video (the technique's quite cool... they braise *then* roast it so it's super tender). I'd also really like to put out a shouzhuafan/polo video... but I've had a devil of a time trying to recreate it using the uighur method. I think it's the rice (apparently they use northeastern rice, which makes like no sense to me because that stuff's super sticky). Unfortunately, the shouzhuafan/polo at our favorite Xinjiang restaurant in Shenzhen isn't their best dish, so we might actually need to go to Xinjiang to check it out! ... which of course means it'll be a while lol If you want something to scratch that itch, whenever I've made that dish for myself, I honestly just follow this Uzbek plov recipe... it's not 100% the same but it's super similar: arbuz.com/recipes/uzbek-palov-osh-recipe/
What do you think about the rice? I've been using paella rice and it was quite good. I think I might try basmati next time. Since you mentioned that they actually use a kind of sticky rice Xinjiang, I wonder if arborio or even some kind of glutenous short-grain rice might work here. Gosh, I wish could just try the authentic version for once so I could think out a good alternative.
You know you could earn lots of dollars? By helping to source those ingredients! Become an affiliate at alibaba (idk if possible) or amazon. For each sale you gain a dollar or two. Even if every 100th person cooks, you would have like 570 potential buyers with your 57k subs. And people would be thankful because they could cook their favorite dishes worldwide, with ingredients brought to their door. I'd love for your channel to grow (and someday show this hand pulled noodle recipe:) and that's why I think this is a good idea for having the means to develop.
We've been mulling over doing the Amazon affiliate thing. Even if we don't make too much out of it, I think it'd be a nice value add for people to have a sort of 'one stop shop' sort of thing in the comments. The slight complication is that we don't live in USA/abroad/whathaveyou, and we'd really want to be able to heartily recommend the products we put up there, so we'd really want to differentiate between 'brand we really recommend' vs 'something we just found on Amazon as a glorified lmgtfy lol
It might become a whole business if you think of a way to do it right. RU-vid is a good advertisement for your own or affiliated products. A general idea from the top of my head would be to source the products in China and become sort of an agent for exports to a company (abroad/US/UK), which would then sale the products you source to their own costumers and/or to your channel visitors. In order to keep count of orders you could make a website, which would accept payment, that you then forward to your UK/US/whathaveyou seller. It seems complicated, true, but with the quality of material you make it's just a matter of time until this thing or another thing happens. Plus there's a lot of companies making their buck for being a single contact middleman between you and 5-10 companies, which do all the work, while the middleman manages things and gains a percentage. So in the end you won't be doing much yourself, except running the channel and counting the money. In my point of view it's either this or some brand(s) will someday buy product placement at your channel. This amounts to much less for the viewer than what I have described above. And definitely much less for you in terms of gaining passive income.
ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eMJk4y9NGvE.html Nah but seriously, all of this stuff is available abroad at a Chinese supermarket. In order to balance authenticity and replicability, we basically assume a viewer that is (1) not in China/Asia but (2) has access to a Chinese/Asian supermarket.
All recipes are there as a guide. By all means make them according to your tastes and dietary requirements. MSG is naturally found in alot of foods, such as tomatoes, cheese and seaweed to name just a few.