Handmade Noodle Nirvana, aka Northwest China

This is another in our series about making famous Chinese restaurant noodle dishes not with the usual freshly made noodles but with premium dried noodles. If you have the time and skill to make hand-pulled, hand-ripped or knife-cut noodles on the regular, then you can stop here. But if you haven’t mastered Chinese noodle making and still want a damn good homemade version of spicy, tingly cumin beef on wide, ruffly noodles, then all you need is some high-quality dried mian in your pantry.

Previously I wrote about using our dried wide rice noodle made by a specialist in Guangdong to stand in for fresh ho fun noodles in beef chow fun. For this cumin beef noodles recipe I’m using our dried wide wheat noodle called daoxiaomian, which can replace fresh daoxiao or biangbiang or other hefty noods in various dishes.

Daoxiaomian originated in Shanxi, where noodle masters hold a large chunk of dough and slice or shave the strips directly into a pot of boiling water at a crazy fast pace. The noodles, whether narrow or wide, have a chewy bite and uneven, ragged edges that hold into sauce. The ones we carry at The Mala Market are (partially) handmade by noodle obsessives in Chengdu, who use a very high-gluten wheat for chew, repeated natural proofing for fine gluten structure, and eight hours of sun-drying instead of shortcut frying.

The Land of Handmade Noodles

You find hand-pulled, hand-ripped and knife-cut noodle all across northwest China,  particularly in the provinces/regions of far-west Xinjiang, Gansu (capital Lanzhou), Shaanxi (capital Xi’an) and stretching east to Shanxi. Because we haven’t been able to travel to China for so long, Fongchong and I instead chased down some of these handmade noodles this past summer in NYC and LA.

In Los Angeles, we had Shanxi-style daoxiaomian at Laoxi Noodle House. The knife-cut noodles were medium wide and thick, served as a stir-fry with pork (inexplicably, we didn’t take photos). The other places we sought out were Muslim Chinese and featured beef and lamb, including LA’s LAN Noodles, where you choose between six different shapes and sizes of noodles, numerous meat and veg toppings and whether you want it as soup, “dry mixed” (sauced) or stir-fried (chaomian). In NYC, we returned to Xi’an Famous Foods (Chinatown location), where the biangbiang hand-ripped noodles were super wide and chewy and were served both dry and in soup.

I’m not gonna lie, the just-made noodles were what pushed all these dishes over the top. Being a fan of big, fat noodles, I always swoon at XFF, and I frequently turn to the famous restaurant’s cookbook for inspiration. But I still stop short of pulling or ripping my own noodles. Here’s what Jason Wang, the restaurant owner and cookbook author, has to say in the book about making them:

“Having these pulled to order isn’t a gimmick, though; you simply cannot pre-pull these fuckers. They’re finicky. Hold pulled dough for too long and the noodles will lose their shape and stretch. Once cooked, the noodles should be eaten immediately, or they’ll stick to each other and get mushy. In a perfect world, the dough would go straight from being pulled into a pot of boiling water, before being dressed and devoured. So while these wide, thick noodles are great—perfectly chewy, raggedy vehicles for sauces and spice—they can be a pain in the ass to make…”

He goes on to assure you that it is indeed possible to master this skill with a lot of practice…but I’ve got a dried noodle in my pantry that will do just fine, thank you very much. They’re not as heavenly as handmade, but they’re easier by multiples and will definitely scratch the itch.

The Home Version

With visions of XFF noodles dancing in my head, I used our wide daoxiaomian and did a riff on the restaurant’s spicy braised beef. We found the recipe below to be just the right amount of spicy—from a heaping helping of 3-year doubanjiang, a generous amount of our just-ground Xinjiang cumin and, finally, from ground Sichuan pepper added at the last minute for a fresh, tingly punch.

One could use really any braised meat for these noodles. The key is remembering how to layer all the ingredients for a perfect bowl of noods:

• Start with a base of sauce in the bottom of each serving bowl: XFF uses their own premade Noodle Sauce, which I quickly approximated by using 1 teaspoon each soy sauce, black vinegar and oyster sauce, mixed with 2-3 tablespoons of the cumin beef braising liquid
• Cook some cabbage (or other Asian green, or even cubed carrots or potatoes) in with the noodles and add the noodles and cabbage directly from the pot into each bowl, shaking off most of the water before plopping them in
• (Alternatively, make it into soup noodles by adding a ladle or two of clear broth or noodle water at this stage)
• Top the noodles with the braised beef and some of its sauce
• Garnish with your choice of fresh and/or pickled veg: green onions, Chinese chives, minced celery, zhacai pickle, suancai pickle, long bean or other pickle from the paocai jar, etc.
• Add a final drizzle of homemade chili oil or chili crisp
• You’ve reached Noodle Nirvana

This recipe will make enough for 5-6 servings, depending on how much meat you like on your noodles. I froze the leftovers in individual servings that are going to make someone very very happy someday when they ferret through the fridge for something to eat!

When researching this recipe, I also rewatched the Food Ranger’s Xi’an episodes, where he gets an insider’s look at Muslim Chinese cooking. (I didn’t exactly have kitchen access when I visited Xi’an myself.) That reminded me that the dried wide dao xiao noodles would stand in exceptionally well for the hand-ripped noodles usually served with Xinjiang’s dapanji, or big plate chicken, making the perfect bouncy bed for a festive spicy chicken stew.

One last note on noodle choice: There are no noodle rules! Chinese noodle shops often let you pick both your noodle and your toppings, mixing and matching as you please. Use whichever quality dried noodle you prefer to stand in for fresh.

But what about refrigerated noodles, you might ask? Some of them, particularly egg noodles, are good, but some of the “fresh” wheat noodles in the Chinese supermarket have something in them that makes them last for months on end. It’s our opinion that you’re better off with one that has been freshly made and immediately sun-dried by the noodle masters of China.

Want to learn more about composing noodle bowls? This story on our blog from early 2017 tells you all you need to know about how dry and soup noodles are served in Chengdu.