How to Make Chinese Fried Sauce Noodles - Zha Jiang Mian

Hey guys, happy holidays to ya. Today I'm in a super good mood because, again, it's raining. Whenever it's raining, I'm super happy. I don't know why I need to move to Seattle or Vancouver or something because it doesn't rain enough here in New York for me. I love thunderstorms, like lightning, thunder. I'm sitting at home with a nice, I don't know, cup of tea or some nice noodle soup and just hot sauce pouring in there, sweating, snot's coming out of my nose. It's storming outside. Then I put on a nice movie, maybe Forrest Gump, and I couldn't be happier. Today's another one of those days when you wake up and you're like, what am I going to eat today? And if you have been following my Instagram, and you should, it's right here. I've been eating a lot at the Flushing Food Court. I've been eating a lot of soup dumplings, eating a lot of noodles. And people are like, why are you eating the same things? Well, because they're super good. But today, since it's raining, I don't really want to go outside. I don't want to trek all the way to Flushing, so I'm going to cook some stuff in my kitchen right here. I didn't know what to make, so I'm looking around my kitchen, and I found enough ingredients to make one of my favorite dishes ever, zha jiang mian. Zha jiang mian literally translates to fried sauce noodles. It's one of my all-time favorite dishes. So I'm going to show you guys how to make my version of zha jiang mian, which has a few different ingredients, and also the mian tiao, the pasta I'm going to use, is ramen. So here's what you need to make zha jiang mian. First of all, you need the meat, which you guys know I'm a big fan of. So you need some ground pork. I like to put at least half a pound in each batch I make. This is about a pound here, so I'm going to use like half of that. You need some cloves of garlic. Usually two or three would be suffice, but I really like garlic, so I'm putting in a bunch. Scallions, or green onions, and you need some cucumbers. I have here some diced potato that I diced. Look at this, guys. I diced this really, really small, because you need this to cook quickly. Some of it is not very even, because I suck at dicing, but diced potatoes. So one potato in here. Some sprouts, bean sprouts here. It's trying to escape. There we go. You're not going anywhere. And these are really key ingredients here. This is sweet flour sauce, or sweet flour paste, tian mian jiang. You can get this at probably any Asian supermarket. And then you need this, dou bian jiang, which is soybean paste. You can either use this, or you can use the yellow bean paste, which that's more of a traditional Beijing flavor. This is more of a Tianjin flavor. So different regions of China will make this dish differently. I prefer the Tianjin flavor, so I got the dou bian jiang. Please, for the love of all that's good out there, do not buy that stuff that, you know that cup noodle stuff they sell at Walmart for like 10 cents a pack? Do not get that stuff. That stuff, when it touches water, it like disintegrates into like pure mush. You can't really go wrong with any Korean noodles. I really like the Xingramen brand, although it's like made in the US, but it's still good. Also I want to say, it's about 10 o'clock in the morning right now. I haven't had anything to eat. All I have at home are these, what do you call these, the Ferrero Rochers? All I have are these. And I feel so bad, because these must be like, what, 100 calories each? I've been popping these all morning, because I'm just like starving. Also, interesting fact, did you know, I don't know if it's changed or not, but did you know, the world record, I think, for eating these in a minute is like eight, or something ridiculous. Like go try it at home. Put eight of these together, I bet you cannot eat eight of these in under a minute. No water, just eat them one by one. Try eating eight within a minute. I don't think you could do it. So anyway, I'm going from a chocolate to noodle diet today. So it's probably not the healthiest day ever. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to cut up my cucumbers into long, thin strips. I'm not going to cook this. This is going to go on top of my noodles after my noodles and sauce is done. I'm going to cut up my scallions. I'm going to mash my garlic up, and then I'm going to dice that. Sometimes the recipe will call for ginger. I don't really like ginger, so I'm not going to use ginger. Everything is diced up, my scallions, my garlic, my cucumbers. So now let's get our cooking on. First thing you want to do is you want to prepare two pots. One is your typical wok or pot for your sauce. You're going to use the other pot to start boiling water because you want your pasta done at about the same time your sauce is done. Otherwise, your sauce could be done, your pasta is not done, then you got to go cook the pasta. Then your sauce is cooling or your sauce is not done, your pasta is done, then your pasta is getting soggy as you're cooking your sauce. That's like a nightmare scenario. That's stuff you see in horror movies. I haven't started on my sauce, but my noodles, they're going to get soggy. What am I going to do? That's like Noodle Mayor on Elm Street. Here we go. I'm going to start cooking my water for my ramen noodles, and in this pan, I'm going to start cooking my sauce. I'm going to go in with a little veggie oil. I'm going to turn the heat on medium-high, and I'm going to throw my pork in. There's my pork, and my pork is going in. I'm going to stir-fry this until my pork is basically cooked. When the pork is basically done, I'm going to throw in my scallions and my garlic. Garlic and scallions, oh my god, that aroma is wonderful. Awesome. Oh, it smells so good. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put in my dou bian jiang. I'm going to put in about half a cup of dou bian jiang. It's getting all into that nice pork and garlic and scallions. Mmm, that looks great. Now I'm going to turn the heat on low. I'm going to put in about a cup of water. Mix that around. And now I'm going to add in my potatoes. I just want to say that traditional jajangmyeon recipe don't include potatoes, but I love potatoes so much, I have to have potatoes in my jajangmyeon. So the reason I add my water is so that I can actually cook these potatoes. And that's also why I cut them super small, so they can actually have a chance to cook inside this liquid. If I cut them too big, they're not going to cook in time. So I'm going to let this go ahead and simmer on low heat for about 10 minutes or until the potatoes are really soft and nice. So I'm just going to cover that up and let it sit in there. It's been about 13 minutes. I've let it simmer a little longer than 10 because I think my potatoes, it took a little longer to get done. Look at that. Oh, that smells incredible. That smells amazing. All right, let's try this potato and see if it's done. Mmm, oh, that is awesome. The sauce is in the potatoes. Mmm, it is so good. Now, it's almost done. This whole dish is almost done. This is just one of the simplest dishes to make. Now, I'm going to do jajangmyeon sauce. Sweets, flour, paste, sauce thing. Half a cup. Half a cup in there. Mix that in. And what that's going to do is it's going to really thicken up this sauce. It may give it a little sweet flavor. Look at that. How much do you want a bite of that right now? Mmm, oh, this is going to be so good. You don't need to add any salt. You don't need to add anything. This is going to turn out perfectly. Let this sit on low heat for just a minute while we cook the ramen noodles. I don't think I need to show you guys how to cook the ramen noodles. Basically, whenever you use ramen noodles, you need to boil it first. Even if you're eating the ramen noodles as a soup, never just like put this into hot water, then mix it in and drink that because this thing has so much preservatives on it. This is really nasty. So if you're making ramen noodle soup, you boil it, then you take the noodles and put into a new batch of water, new batch of soup, and that's how you consume ramen noodles without all the nastiness to it. So this stuff is going into my boiling water that's already waiting for it. And the spice that came with it, you don't need this. Toss this away. This stuff is not really good for you. I use ramen noodles. You don't need to use ramen noodles. You can use any form of pasta like Chinese noodles, any sort of Chinese noodles. You can even use like linguine because this sauce is going to make anything taste awesome. This sauce at this point is perfect. It is done and it is wonderful. There's only one thing missing from this. You know what it is, guys? You know what's missing from this right now? Hot oil. Yeah, we're going to add hot oil to that. And that's going to make the dish complete. Let's go ahead and add our favorite ingredient. Oh, yeah. Get that in there. Oh, that's not enough. Two. Let's do it for two. Let's go for two. Should we do one more? Yeah, let's do one more. Yeah. That, my friends, is how it's done. Oh, there's some peanuts from the hot oil in there too. See, that's all getting all mixed in nice. This thing is now molten lava and it's delicious. My ramen noodles are done and there's one more final cooking process. Remember those sprouts that we had laying out? We don't want to just eat these raw because they might be dirty and disgusting. So we're going to blanch this real quick in the boiling water that we used to cook the ramen in. This is called efficiency, people. Now we're going to put the noodles together. So the ramen goes in. Let's go ahead and break that up a little bit. And then we're going to put our awesome sauce on the ramen. Oh, this smells incredible. I wish you guys can have some of this. You can put as much or as little sauce as you want. I like it a little, you know, saucier. Then you would take your sliced cucumbers, throw that on the side. I'm not an artiste with food, so this might seem a little messy. It's definitely not, like, something I'm good at. So the cucumbers goes on the side. And then you take your sprouts. You put that on the side. Finally, toss a couple of green onions on top. I don't really have enough green onions now. So there's my big bowl of noodles. I've already started to mix this up. You've got to mix all the ingredients together, the cucumbers, the sprouts, the sauce, and the noodles. It's meant to be eaten like that. The way that this dish came about is kind of interesting. Because back in China, back during the Ming and Qing dynasty, there was a lot of noodle soup dishes in China. And these dishes were very hard to, like, eat quickly because they're soups, you know? You don't want to burn yourself. So there was no noodle dish that was really quick and convenient, especially for travelers who are trying to hurry on the road. And that's how this dish was created. I'm going to go ahead and take a bite. Let's see how this is. Oh, man. As I'm talking to you guys, I'm so hungry, I'm, like, salivating. Alright, that's a nice bite. Alright, you like that? Let's see how it is. Oh, my God. That is so good. You know what? The potatoes are an excellent touch. You really should add potatoes to this dish. It gives it a nice texture. Nice melt-in-your-mouth, potato-y texture. Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, that's so good. You get the crunch from the cucumbers and the sprouts. Oh, man. This dish is so good. Oh, my God. You guys gotta try this at home. It's amazing. And there's, like, a Korean version of this, too. And you go to these places and this dish is, like, what? At a Korean restaurant, like, 12 bucks. It's really just some noodles and some sauce. I have so much sauce left over I can, like, just drop in a couple more bags of ramen later in the day and just have dinner. I'm talking and mixing at the same time because there's so much stuff on my plate it's kind of falling off almost. It's kind of hard to mix. You can find the sauce I use in probably any Chinese or Asian supermarket. Again, don't have to use ramen. You can use any noodles you want except for, like, I don't know, macaroni. Like, don't use macaroni. Why would you use that? Alright, guys, thanks for watching. Go try this at home. If you want to know my hot oil recipe it's one of these on the screen somewhere. You can take a look at that. Happy New Year. Happy Holidays. See you later.