In order to submit an essay before his 5 p.m. deadline, my friend got up at 4 a.m. and began his work without breakfast or lunch on Friday. When he finally submitted his work, he was craving food.
Since there was a bottle of yellow bean paste at his home, we decided to cook fried sauce noodles — a traditional and quick-cooking homestyle noodle dish from China.
In China, we call it Zha Jiang Mian. Besides Peking duck, locals will always recommend this dish to you if you travel to Beijing. You may also find it in Korean restaurants, where it is called jajangmyeon, a Korean-influenced flavour of the same dish created by Chinese immigrants.
Yellow soybean paste is the most important sauce in this dish; you can find it in any Chinese supermarket. This dish finishes cooking in about 20 minutes and tastes sweet and sour. I hope you will like this recipe!
Ingredients
- ½ pound of minced pork
- 2 tablespoons of cooking wine
- 1 centimeter fresh ginger, chopped into small cubes
- 1 tablespoon of white sugar
- Small amount of vegetable oil
- 3 eggs, stirred in a bowl
- 1½ tablespoons of salt
- 1 pound of noodles
- 1 small bag of bok choy
- 1 tablespoon of soy sauce
- 2 tablespoons of yellow soybean paste
- 1 cucumber, julienned
Instructions
1. Put the minced pork in a large bowl and add cooking wine, ginger cubes, and sugar. Stir for 3 minutes and set aside.
2. Add oil to a pan. Heat the pan on high heat until hot. Add stirred eggs and salt — make sure that the eggs are in the shape of a flat crepe. Pan-fry until golden brown on both sides. Take egg crepe out and cut into thin strips.
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3. Boil a pot of water for the noodles. You’ll need about 10 minutes to cook the meat and paste, so depending on how long the noodles will take to cook, plan accordingly.
4. Boil a pot of water for bok choy. Cook bok choy for 1 minute in the boiling water, then set aside.
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5. Add oil to a pan. Heat the pan on high heat until hot. Add prepared pork and soy sauce. Fry until the pork is just cooked, then add in the yellow soybean sauce and sugar. Stir-fry for 2 minutes.
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6. To serve, put some noodles on the bottom of the plate and cover with veggies and the meat and soybean sauce.
7. Enjoy!
Photo by Julie Zhang
Soybean sauce should be the hero. 1 tablespoon is too little.