Category: How to Cook With Sesame

Yunnan Liang Mixian (Cold Rice Noodles)

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Sesame / Noodles / Plant / Poultry / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

No Sweet Sour: Yunnan Liang Mixian (Cold Rice Noodles, 凉米线)

Pretend You’re South of the Clouds Here’s a recipe for Chinese cold rice noodles from the land where they do liang mixian best, plus a trick for making dried rice noodles taste like the thick, bouncy fresh ones of Yunnan. Text and photos by Michelle Zhao Cold rice noodles (凉米线, liáng mǐxiàn) is a summer dish that Yunnan people are especially fond of. Every city has its own style of liang mixian, but my top three are from Yuxi, Dali and Kunming. The distinguishing characteristic of Yuxi cold rice noodles is...

Sichuan sesame noodles

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Spices / How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Noodles / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan) / Vegetarian

Sichuan Sesame Noodles in “Strange Flavor” Sauce (Guaiweimian, 怪味面)

Sesame Paste—Not Tahini or Peanut Butter—For the Win “Strange flavor” truly is the strangest name for the super Sichuan sauce on these guaiweimian noodles. If I were naming it, it would be glorious flavor, or addictive flavor, or just best flavor, because it takes the standard sauce for Sichuan cold dishes—chili oil, Sichuan pepper, soy sauce, vinegar and garlic—and adds nutty, toasty Chinese sesame paste, hitting every note in the Sichuan flavor spectrum in one life-changing pantry sauce that can be thrown together in minutes. Despite what McDonald’s would have...

Chengdu zajiang mian

How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / How to Cook With Tianmianjiang / Noodles / Pork / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Introducing Zajiang Noodles (Zajiangmian, 杂酱面), Chengdu’s Favorite Noodle

Just Don’t Call It Zhajiangmian As we learned in a guest post from Chengdu Food Tours’s Jordan Porter, zajiangmian is one of Chengdu’s most popular noodles. It is a heartier big brother to the diminutive dandan noodles, which is generally served in a small snack size, making the meal-size zajiangmian the more-common and more-loved noodle in modern Chengdu. But first, I want to share my closer-to-home inspiration: the zajiangmian at Mian, a real-deal Sichuan/Chongqing noodle shop in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley. Opened by Tony Xu, chef-owner of the incomparable Chengdu Taste, it has...

Chinese New Year / Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Sesame / Poultry / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Mouthwatering “Saliva Chicken” (Koushuiji, 口水鸡)

Chengdu Challenge #22:  You Know You Want It: Saliva Chicken Which name do you prefer for Sichuan cold chicken in red-hot chili oil? Saliva chicken (let’s translate it as “mouthwatering” chicken)?  Bobo chicken? Bon bon chicken? Bang bang chicken? From what I can tell from multiple Sichuan restaurants, cookbooks and the Web, the names are almost interchangeable, and there’s no real consensus on the ingredients and proportions in each. They are all based on homemade, high-quality chili oil (hong you), of course, and from there include varying proportions of soy...

Dan dan mian

How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / How to Cook With Tianmianjiang / How to Cook With Yacai / Noodles / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Sichuan Dandanmian ft. Yacai (Dandan Noodles, 担担面)

Chengdu Challenge #1: First Love Dandanmian was the first real Sichuan dish I ever had, when Grand Sichuan International, the first real Sichuan restaurant in Manhattan in decades, opened close to my home in Chelsea in the mid-’90s. I’ll never forget the moment when they sat it on the table. It looked like a plain bowl of boiled noodles with some ground pork on the top, but then I realized I needed to stir it up myself and began to turn the noodles and crispy pork  over in the pool of...