So, I set off on my bread journey. Sunday’s first attempt produced something that was pretty close to what I expected to get. Which is cool! Yay! Thank you Dina! The recipe was for french bread, but I wanted bowls that I could scoop out and pour soup in, so I formed the amoebic forms you see above and hoped for the best. The end result was hard round boules with impossibly unforgiving crust with a soft nummy middle–much like the type of bread that comes swaddled in cloth napkins before dinner, that people hack and pull at, which is the main thing I associate with french bread, so something must have gone right.

It’s definitely a little yeasty though … I have consulted the master (Dina) and the takeaway points, as well as quick chili pizza, are after the jump.

So my dough baby became a dough monster, and I didn’t know to stop it.

When I finished kneading, I greased the bowl, plopped my big round dough ball in, turned once, and left it. I came back to it a bit later and it was already big! It passed the finger test! Cool! But … it hadn’t been more than a few minutes, so I thought, well surely it must sit for a little bit longer…?

Oh no dude. Dats not how it works. Apparently with bread dough, size is the important thing, not time. (If you know what I mean…). When your dough is doubled (or for french bread, triple), you are done rising. It probably took mine almost no time at all to double because 1. there was too much yeast in my recipe and 2. the water was rather warm. It didn’t kill the yeast but it made the dough super warm, and apparently warmth = quick rising. Slow rising = lots of yummy flavor. My bread apparently missed the flavor train.

Anyway I came back from errands and the dough had filled the bowl to capacity and was starting to deflate (which probably contributed to the bread tasting a little more yeasty than it should have). I shoulda punched it down and gotten on with it earlier, when it had just passed the finger pokey test. Ideally-for-next-time though, I shoulda used less yeast (no more than 4.5 teaspoons per 6 cups of flour, where my recipe had called for 5.5 teaspoons) — and, probably used cooler water. Not cold because that would slow the rising too much, just cool enough that it doesn’t double in 5-10 minutes. 110 degrees, prescribes Breadmaster Dina.

Anyhow, so thar’s be the lessons learned. Now here’s chili pizza.

Materials:
- zucchini, sliced into circles
- 1 tbsp butter
- bread
- fave leftover chili
- shredded cheese of choice
- diced tomatoes

Method:
- Preheat oven to 350

- Melt butter on stovetop at medium heat, add zucchini, let sit until they get a little softer – incidentally, I just discovered that I am absolutely INSANE for zucchini cooked in butter OMG

- Cut top off of bread (like a bagel) – assemble chili, cheese, zucchini circles, tomatoes

- Bake about 15-20 minutes

NOM.

strawberry pancake puffs! tart and tasty!

It’s a morning of a day on which you are blissfully free from work. You stretch out in bed, untangle yourself from the embrace of [beautiful person] with whom you collapsed in exhaustion the night before after a night of doing whatever it is people do the night before they don’t have work. (Was it the ultimate Smash Bros. Brawl showdown? Or did you go out and get yourself kicked out of a convenience store again? You don’t even remember, do you). Then it hits you … you’re starving. You crave the tart taste of fruit in combination with something sweet.. crisp yet smooth.. What do you do?!?!

Fruity pancake puffs, that’s what. Born from such a morning as above, after I had just read about aebleskivers (and really freaking wanted some), but had no aebleskiver pan… these pancake puffs are a quick and easy way to sweetly and crispily carry fruits to your mouth in a breakfast-like manner. They have nothing to do with aebleskivers, except that they are why I put pancake batter into a muffin tin. Sometimes you gotta cut corners by .. creating .. corners .. dangit I need an aebleskiver pan.

Anyway the puffs were great. Recipe after the jump..

Items:
- 1 cup flour
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 2 tablespoons baking powder
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup milk (I use 2% but you know how it is.. the richer the better) – to make this vegan, use soy milk. I don’t personally prefer this recipe with soy milk, but it works..
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- chopped fruit of choice
- caramel for drizzling/serving – we use the starbucks caramel sauce they use for caramel macchiatos.

If chopped fruit of choice is apple, here’s how to do caramelized apples:

- cube 1.5 granny smith apples (or other tart apple) into pieces approx 1 sq cm each side
- melt 1 tbsp butter and 3-5 tbsp brown sugar in pan over medium heat
- when caramelishness forms, dump in the apples, stir well, leave it on medium heat for a bit – it will get runny as the apple juice renders from your cubes, but just keep stirring
- when the apples start to be softer (but not mushy), take off heat.

apple puffs! these were the first attempt at fruity puffs.

Method:
- Preheat oven to 360

- Combine dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt), whisk/stir together

- Add wet ingredients to the dry (milk, oil), whisk together until all dry ingredients are wet and smoothish in a batter-like consistency. Don’t overmix.

- I personally like to let the batter sit for a few minutes at this point – I don’t know what it is but the batter seems to firm up or … do …. something. (Maybe nothing) but I just like it better after it’s sat for a few minutes. This is a good time to get your muffin tin ready – spray it w/ whatever it is you use, or rub it down with butter or oil. I like those silicone muffincups – spared me having to excavate the puffs out of the tin after baking.

- Spoon batter into prepared tin – probably 2 heaping spoonfuls each. Scoop a heaping spoonful of fruit into each cup. Drizzle remaining batter over the fruit bits.

- Bake for 20 minutes, then kick the temp up to 385. Bake for another 20 minutes. (I do this because I don’t want a scorched outside with gooey insides, but the last 20 minutes at 385 are to give it the crispy shell all around).

- Let cool if you can wait, pluck out of tin, drizzle with caramel, and nom.

enjoy!

millet toasting

Grains can be a fun alternative to cooking with beans while still providing fulfilling nutrients and satisfying meal. There are many popular grain including barely, quinoa, buckwheat, rye and millet. Each grain carries its own taste, texture and stars in its own best meals.

Millet is rarely served to humans in the United States – here, it’s the grain most often found in bird feeders. Yet it’s the leading staple grain in India, and is commonly eaten in China, South America, Russia and the Himalayas. Millet is probably not a common guest in your kitchen but I encourage you to invite it to your dinner plate soon!

Millet has a mild flavor and is often mixed with other grains or toasted before cooking, to bring out the full extent of its delicate flavor. Its tiny grain can be white, gray, yellow or red. Millet should be toasted before soaked with water. The toasting process makes the tiny grains pop in the air like an old-fashioned popcorn show and this toasting should prove to be entertaining for any little helpers!

I recently mixed my millet with feta cheese, toasted almonds, parsley and lemon wedges and it was definitely second-helping worthy! Try cooking with a grain today!

How to prepare millet feta dish:

Toast 1 cup of dry millet over medium high heat for or until the grains start to turn golden brown and you can smell a nutty aroma

Add 2 cups of boiling water to the toasted millet and simmer for 20-25 minutes or until the millet has soaked up all of the water

Add 4 ounces of crumbled feta, 1/4 cup of toasted almonds and a small handful of parsley to the millet; mix and serve with lemon wedges

millet meal

From the producers who brought you the critically acclaimed egg simmered in soy sauce, comes a riveting companion piece about the marbled cousin of the salty ovoid snack.  The version of soy-flavored eggs that I’ve known has always been the tea egg.  The eggs are boiled with the shell gently cracked so that soy sauce  seeps through the cracks to ink a marble-like spiderweb pattern across the egg white.  For my version, I’ve decided to approximate the hours-long simmering that street vendors do by using a pressure cooker.

A pressure cooker is an indispensable tool in my family’s kitchen.  It parboils tough cuts of meat before red-braising and until I was in high school, all the daily rice was cooked in the pressure cooker.  Although we use electric rice cookers now for the set-and-forget convenience, my parents insist that the pressure cooker rice was much stickier.  Cooking at over 20 atm of pressure and 120+ deg Celsius, the pressure cooker really brings the flavor.  It’s what brings out the glutens that make sticky rice so sticky, making for a much quicker way to cook zhongzi than simmering for hours in a big regular pot.  It also makes incredibly rich chicken stock out of a roast chicken carcass in only 30 minutes, which is the basis for my tea egg recipe.

When I go to BJ’s, I always get one of their fresh roast chickens.  A combination of thorough brining or marinating and rotisserie roasting over an actual flame oven yield makes their roast chicken the best I’ve ever had from a restaurant or store.  As I eat my way through the bird over the course of a week, I keep all the bones in a tupperware in the freezer.  Once all the bones are collected, I throw them in my 6 qt pressure cooker and 30 minutes later, I have almost 4 quarts of stock that makes the perfect base for a hearty pot of chicken and dumplings.  But that is a story for another day….

Like Eileen, I also have fond memories of tea eggs.  Growing up in northeast China, the busiest roads would always have tea egg vendors with cart-mounted stoves simmering big inky vats of their salty, tannin-laden treats.  But like everyone else concerned with all the dirt and pollution choking the industrial city air, my family never  bought from street vendors.  Instead, we cooked our own tea eggs at home where we could assure cleanliness.  A month ago, as midterms approached, I realized that I didn’t have any convenient filling snacks on hand.  One curse of being an avid-yet-frugal cook is that I don’t so much buy food as I buy ingredients.  But one source of protein I always keep on hand is a carton of eggs and not finding egg salad particularly stimulating, I realized tea eggs were a great way to turn hardboiled eggs into something quick, snackable, and tasty.

ingredients

1 roast chicken carcass

1 onion, halved

1 tbsp salt

a few black peppercorns

1 dozen hardboiled eggs, unpeeled

4 bags of black tea (orange pekoe, etc)

2-4 cloves of star anise

5 sichuan peppercorns (prickly ash)

1 large slice of ginger root (a cross-section with the thickness of a graham cracker)

1/4 cup dark soy sauce

1/2 tsp white pepper

2 tsp salt

- Put chicken bones, onion, 1 tbsp salt, and black peppercorns into pressure cooker and fill up with ~4 quarts of water.  Seal lid, affix regulator, and bring to boil on high heat; and reduce to medium heat when steam pressure has built and is hissing loudly from valve.

- 30 minutes after hissing has begun, take off stove and place under a moderate stream of cold water from the faucet.  When the safety interlocks have dropped loose, remove the lid, then strain out and discard all solids.

# Pour out 2 quarts of surplus chicken stock into separate pot and let cool to room temperature.  Chill in fridge and skim off congealed fat solids on the surface.  Pour into two 32 oz yogurt tubs,  cover w/ double layer of plastic wrap under lid, and transfer to freezer.  Be sure to lay each of the tubs with the bottoms directly on the bottom of the freezer where they won’t wobble or spill.  After a few hours when the stock is frozen solid, you can stack them.  NEVER freeze in a glass jar because the water will expand and shatter the jar when frozen into ice.

- Bring the chicken stock still in the pressure cooker back up to a boil, reduce to medium heat and add tea bags.  Simmer for 10 minutes and remove tea bags.  Squeeze tea bags w/ spatula against side of bowl and pour tea back into the pot.  Add all remaining ingredients.

-  Lightly tape the outside of each egg with the curved back of a spoon to gently crack the shell.  Turn the egg as you do so and make sure spiderweb cracks are visible over most of the surface.

- Place eggs into pot and add some water if the broth isn’t fully covering all the eggs.  Cover with lid, affix regulator, and bring to boil with high heat.  Reduce to medium once steam is regulator is hissing loudly and simmer for 30 minutes.

-  Run lid under cold water again and let stand to room temperature.  Store in repurposed 32 oz glass jars in the fridge.

# The longer the eggs marinate in the broth, the deeper the tea can penetrate to the yolk.  The tannins from the tea enhance the richness of the yolk, which I’ve always found to be disappointingly dry despite being the colorful heart of a hardboiled egg, shining brightly like a treasure to reward eating through the boring white.

#  When I took a tour of the old fort in Quebec City, the guide showed us the ammunition bunker, which had a domed roof.  This rounded shape, she told us, served a double purpose.  Its concave face on the inside ceiling side was structurally weak from inside forces so powder explosions would be released out and skyward.  Conversely, the domed roof was especially tough against forces on the outside, so enemy cannon shot would be repelled.  This is the same principle for the eggshell.  It’s tough enough on the outside to withstand the hen sitting on it but is weak enough from the inside from the newborn chick to crack its way out.  However, since the tea eggs have been spiderweb cracks all across the surface, the massive pressures inside the pressure cooker (up to 25 atm) really loosen them up.  This is a huge boon to anyone who has tried to peel a hardboiled egg and found the intransigent shell to detach in small segments with huge chunks of egg white still on the inside.  My tea eggs came out of the pressure cooker with the shells so loosened that they readily disgorged the egg while remaining more or less intact.  (just like in the photo above)

# Don’t forget the 2 quarts of lovely stock still in the freezer!

Then, when I spent 6 weeks in Beijing, these eggs became both the start and usually the highlight of my days. By the bus stop where I waited to go to work, there would always be a food stand with [a bunch of stuff that I don't remember and] these EGGS. They were “wu mao” per egg (fifty Chinese “cents”) — which makes them about $0.07 apiece.

Eggs and soy sauce are already a magical combination. Hard boiled, fried, whatever – drizzle soy sauce over a cooked egg and you are in bidness. However, simmer a boiled egg in a soy sauce-drenched broth for a few hours ……… that’s where the magic happens.

Anyway, I got mom to squeal her method, so here it is!

Materials:
- eggs
- enough chicken stock / bouillon / whatever to juuust cover the eggs in a small pot
- 1/4 cups soy sauce (give or take, to taste – but keep in mind, you’re not drinking the broth, it just has to soak into the eggs, so it must be pretty strong)
- 1 tbsp (ish) ginger root
- 1 star anise

Method:
- Boil the eggs. The way I do it is, put the eggs in a pot, fill with water to cover the eggs, bring to a boil, turn off heat, cover and leave for 17 minutes. (Give or take. I could not swear to being that exact).

- Put the eggs in ice water until they cool down (this is supposed to help keep that green film from forming around the yolk too), then peel the eggs.

- Put the eggs back in the pot and add the appropriate amount of bouillon for how many cups you put in, or replace water w/ chicken stock. Add soy sauce, ginger and star anise.

- Bring to boil, then reduce heat and let simmer for 2-3 hours. When the color is like below, you are done!

Yay! Soy simmered eggs! Enjoy!

Artist’s Secret #1: Pre-heat the pan. Don’t get lazy and slap your pan on the stove and crack your egg into it right away. Give your pan a couple minutes to heat up on medium-high. Then go ahead and melt your tablespoon of butter or spray your cooking helper right on in there.

Artist’s Secret #2: Be gentle when cracking your egg. A gentle hand will help to prevent your egg from spreading to0 thin or running all over the pan.

Artist’s Secret #3: Wait until your egg has cooked through all of the clear center yolk before attempting the flip! Waiting for the egg to cook to the right consistency will produce a firmer egg upon flip therefore reducing your chances of botching your flip due to a slippery egg.

Artist’s Secret #4: A fast flip. Once your egg is mostly white, carefully slide a thin and flexible spatula under the egg, jiggling the egg onto the spatula if necessary and don’t waste time getting that egg turned over. If a corner of the egg happens to fold under act fast to repair the damage and no one will know but you!

Good luck in your egg flipping adventures!

Let this be a lesson in what not to do…

I can’t really pinpoint when the curdling happened, which might be the very first problem. I can’t remember if it happened at the cheese stage, at the onion stage, or some other time. It’s just that suddenly it looked grainy.

I thought at first that it was because the cheese hadn’t melted properly, so I increased the heat. That is definitely not it. Especially if you used shredded cheese, cheese does NOT need to be at too high a temperature to melt. Actually it would probably be a good idea to let the bechamel sauce cool a bit before you add the cheese (due to the proteins coagulating or something. I’m not a chemistry person, I haven’t the faintest idea what this means, but that’s what the internet said, so that’s what I’m telling you).

Actually the internet did say to add an ice cube and whisk until smoothness. This did not work.

I also read that squeezing in some lemon juice would cause the lumps to break up. This also did not work. I then read somewhere else that acids such as lemon juice could cause it to become yogurt-y. Oh dear! In any event, none of that happened – it didn’t uncurdle, and it also didn’t become yogurt-y (until it cooled down a mite). It did give the sauce a lovely brightness to it.

I also read that you definitely should scald your milk before pouring it into your roux so that the milk doesn’t curdle. But I read somewhere else that it doesn’t matter, you can pour cold milk onto hot roux. I had skipped the scalding step last night, but I will say that it heated up fine and thickened fine and stayed smooth all the way til it got hot and I started to add things (at which point I can’t really say for sure).

My best guess, and my lesson that I am taking away from this, is that your bechamel shouldn’t be too hot before you add your cheese, because of .. chemistry. I don’t know, I got it from this article about Curdle Hurdles someone had with their Mornay. I shall try it next time and see what happens…

—-
ADDENDUM OF 2.24.2010: IT WORKED! I made the bechamel as I normally do, waited til it could coat the back of a spoon, then salted and peppered it. (Then I added some cinnamon and sugar, which worked out awesome!!). Then I turned the heat off and let it cool down for a few minutes before dumping in a couple fistfulls of cheese, which melted fine. I then kept it on low heat just to keep it warm. It was smooth as can be, and quite tasty.

I didn’t do onion/scallion this time, so that is still an uncertain variable, but as I’ve seen recipes such as this one which calls for cooking onion in milk, I can’t imagine that could have been it?

I was attempting tomato sauce with butter and onions from the Smitten Kitchen, except instead of canned whole peeled tomatoes I tried blanching my own. (I couldn’t tell you what kind of tomatoes I used … big red ones?). The sauce was awesome. I could eat cups of just the sauce.

TIP: A potato masher can be effective for breaking up the tomato pieces while they’re simmering (before adding the onion).

I used it on fettuccine and paired it with one of my favorite vegetable recipes – yeaaaaah BRUSSELS SPROUTS! I’m tired of people hatin’ on brussels sprouts. You always see them pictured in a wet pile in front of a frowning child, as if you’d really ever steam a quart of brussels sprouts plain and expect anyone, child or adult, to eat the whole bowl for their whole meal.

So I set off on a quest to concoct THE brussels sprouts recipe to convert haters.

I don’t know if I’ve really achieved it yet – I had never had brussels sprouts before this endeavor, so there wasn’t anything to compare it to. All I know is that as a result of my efforts, I now randomly crave brussels sprouts almost as something to snack on, while as far as I can tell, my sprouts-hater boyfriend still just pushes them around his plate. Alas… My only other idea at this point is to pour a bechamel or mornay sauce over them, or toss them in a creamy pasta dish. There’s just something about the taste. You either like it or you don’t, but you can’t do anything about the fact that it’s still definitely a leafy green vegetable. At most you can soften the edge, give it some crispy and distract from or complement the distinct taste with salty or nutty things, but it’s not going to turn them into chicken thighs or anything.

For now, here is the recipe for what I consider to be delicious brussels sprouts that I personally just can’t get enough of. If I ever come up with one that wins over non-believers like my boyfriend, I shall post that then. If it ever happens. If.

Materials:
- brussels sprouts (eyeball it … they do shrink in the oven but estimate maybe 1/3 cup per person at least)
- olive oil (enough to comfortably coat the sprouts upon tossing)
- salt and pepper to taste
- parmesan cheese, freshly grated, to taste
- a small handful of ground/crushed brazil nuts (or other nut of choice)

Procedure:

- Preheat oven to 400 degs. Cut the stems off each brussels sprout, discard the outer leaves (which will likely fall off naturally when you slice the stem). Cut each sprout in half (top to bottom, not side to side).

- Toss sprout halves in olive oil with liberal sprinklings of salt and pepper.

- Roast in oven uncovered for 30-40 minutes. Keep your eyeballs on them so you can achieve optimal browning, and shake the pan/dish somewhere halfway through. (In the picture above, that’s the kind of browning you want, but I didn’t shake the pan that time, so some parts didn’t brown).

- When they’re properly browned, take them out and toss the sprouts in liberal heaps of grated parmesan and crushed nuts.

- Promise your children that they can have as many sprouts as they want, as long as they at least try to save some room for dessert.

I couldn't wait and tore a leg off before realizing I should take a pic.

I adore me some roast chicken. Growing up, one of my favorite meals was when mom would get a rotisserie chicken from Costco. I’d sit in the breakfast nook and gnaw on it to my heart’s content while my mother looked on with bewilderment and pity. “Well, enjoy your banquet. To think, $5 at Costco and you can be so happy.”

Ever since I got the hang of roasting my own bird at home (having learned the hard way what the difference is between a “baking hen” and a “whole chicken.” Don’t bake a baking hen. Go figure! (well i mean, you CAN, it’s just .. er, tricky. But anyway, I digest)) – I’ve been trying to come up with more things to do with a whole chicken, particularly involving generous helpings of alcohol. Why? Because the taste of chicken + alcohol is awesome, that’s why! My first foray using dry white vermouth gave the chicken an extra kick of flavor.. kind of sweet.. very nice.

This time, we did a generous helping of dry rum.

Conclusion: Cook with rum and you will taste a bird that definitely got a little wasted on its journey to your plate. That said, it’s never an overwhelming alcohol taste (we’re not talking Drunken Chicken here), but it’s there.

Things to remember for booze infused chicken:
- 375 degrees, covered, for about an hour, then 425 degrees uncovered for about 15-20 minutes.
- booze boat under the chicken

Parts:
a chicken, giblets removed
1 lemon, quartered (if desired)
1.5 Tbsp olive oil
minced garlic, if desired
salt and pepper to taste
chili powder
cumin
paprika
1/4 to 1/3 cup dry rum
thyme

Method:
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

- Prepare your chicken however you normally do your roast chickens. I like to stuff the cavity with quartered lemons, brush it all over with olive oil mixed with 1-2 cloves of garlic minced, and then sprinkle seasonings liberally all over it. The combination of salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin is like my Happy Mix of seasonings – when in doubt, I go with the happy mix. Paprika is also good here. Then truss ‘er up!

- Make a rum boat. Take a piece of foil and fold it so that it is about as long as the chicken. Then fold up each of the four sides and pinch the corners up so that liquid can’t get out. Put rum in the boat and put the boat underneath where the chicken is gonna be on its roasting rack. Like so:

- Cover the chicken with foil (don’t worry about sealing the chicken in the roasting pan, just make sure the body of the chicken is covered in foil) and bake for 1 hour. This is where I must own up to a mistake, and also raise a caution flag. According to Yang, rum, being 40% abv, evaporates rather quickly. Alcohol is also an excellent organic solvent for “flavor molecules,” as he called them. What it meant was that within minutes of putting the chicken in the oven, the incredible, tantalizing, seductive scent of roast chicken was wafting, nay, billowing through the house. This was another dish I unfortunately started while hungry, and what followed was the longest hour EVER. I ended up cutting it short at about 50 minutes at 375 and figuring “what the heck, it can finish cooking in the browning stage.” It did not. (And I learned the disappointment of carving into raw chicken. It was weird, the thigh joint read 180 as it should, but the innermost part of the breast wasn’t done, d’oh). It ended up taking me even LONGER to cook it all the way through (putting it back in, pulling it out and checking it etc etc) than if I had just sat patiently and waited it out. In the end, the extra time above 400 degrees made the outermost parts a little tough.

- After you have patiently and virtuously waited the hour, pull it out, take off the foil covering, and sprinkle it with thyme. Crank the oven up to 425 and put it back in uncovered for about 15-20 minutes, or until a thermometer inserted into the thigh joint reads 180. What the heck, check the breast too – it should read 160 at least. The skin should have crackled into a nice crisp, and your rum boat should be filled with nice drippings with which to make gravy!

慢慢吃!

but, why is the rum gone?!

Noodles!  I love noodles.  You can serve them hot or cold, mild or spicy,  sweet or salty.   You know Chef Louis and les poissons?  That’s me and noodles.  My grandfather was from Shaanxi province where they ate a lot of noodles and wheat flour; and I’m convinced the affinity has been passed down to me genetically.  It’s like the Lysine Contingency — if I don’t satisfy my periodic noodle cravings, I keel over like a velociyangptor, go into a coma, and die.

The dining hall at Andover used to have two big theme nights each year — Italian Night in the fall and Chinese New Year in the winter.  While all my American friends loved the potstickers they served up in vats, I found them disappointing every year, the side effect of having grown up in a household with parents who loved to cook.  The one thing I did like was the slightly nutty-tasting dipping sauce that they served with the potstickers.  When I got my own food processor last year and was able to cut down prep time on chopping vegetables, meat, and kneading dough, I found myself cranking out 100 dumplings at a time.  Making potstickers w/ the leftover dumplings, I was reminded of the Andover dipping sauce and set out to recreate it.  Never one to skimp on the good stuff, I used way too much peanut butter and ended up with a creamy, tangy sauce that I realized was perfect for tossing with noodles.

While I started out with the intent of making a peanut-based sauce, I knew that the liquid components would be significantly different to align with my personal tastes.  Whenever I eat dumplings, my dipping sauce tends to heavily favor vinegar; and not just any vinegar — Shanxi Mature Vinegar.   Shanxi Mature Vinegar, also known phonetically as Lao Chen Cu (“Aged Chen Vinegar”), has a unique fragrance from being made of sorghum and having been aged in earthen vats for 1-8 years as sunlight-driven evaporation and winter ice formation removes water from the solution.  Unlike distilled or lighter bodied vinegars, the light acidity of Shanxi mature vinegar allows it to be used straight from the bottle without dilution.  However, I’ve been eating this stuff straight for over a decade and my palate has always had a high tolerance for acidity, so I’m probably exaggerating how mild it seems.  Luckily, this peanut sauce is an oil emulsion so that your taste buds will be more than protected as a first time introduction to Shanxi mature vinegar.

ingredients

16 oz creamy peanut butter

2 cups Shanxi Mature Vinegar

1/4 cup soy sauce (you can use dark soy if you prefer deeper color)

1/2 bulb garlic, peeled and finely minced

2 tbsp Sriracha chili sauce

1/2 cup corn or peanut oil

1 scallion, finely minced

sesame oil or sesame butter (can be found in glass jars in some Asian grocers beside soy bean pastes)

- Heat oil in a small saucepan to medium or medium high heat until it’s past the shimmering stage but does not smoke.  Add scallion and remove immediately from the burner.

# This will infuse the scallion’s aroma into the oil without destroying the delicate flavors.  When removed from the heat, the oil cools itself as it lightly sizzles the scallion, never overcooking and retaining some of the spicy “bite” of the fresh scallion.

- Mix vinegar and soy sauce together in a convenient pouring vessel like a large measuring cup.  Put peanut butter in a medium-large mixing bowl and pour the vinegar-soy liquid around the peanut butter.  Using a sturdy whisk with a thick handle, make slow yet firm whisking strokes along the edge of the peanut butter, slowly mixing it together with the liquid.

# Make sure you use small motions so you don’t splash yourself.

# Once your peanut butter is completely blended with the vinegar-soy mixture into a thick liquid, the entire mixture is now homogenous enough to emulsify the scallion-infused oil.

- Add the scallion oil, garlic, and chili sauce and beat with whisk until wholly homogenized with the sauce.

- If using sesame oil, add it in small drizzles and whisk into the sauce, tasting it with each incremental addition.

# This should yield enough to fill a 32 oz repurposed glass pasta sauce jar (like Classico brand).  But there is always enough extra to sauce one serving of noodles right then and there!

# While I’m sure it would be much quicker and easier to use a food processor or blender to mix the unwieldy peanut butter and vinegar and pretty much damn near everything else at the same time, I feel like I’d lose just as much time washing out the equipment afterwards.  One whisk and a bowl or all that pesky scraping and scrubbing of a food processor/blender?  In fact, I have a large Pyrex measuring cup in which I sometimes like to make this peanut noodle sauce and then I just use it to pour directly into the jar!  Afterwards, I add noodles into the measuring cup to sop up all that leftover sauce.

On Noodles

I like to use Gourmet Master brand Oriental Dried Noodles.  They have enough chewiness without being gummy and come in pre-measured bundles tied off w/ paper rings.  One bundle is perfect for a snack while two bundles makes a very filling meal. While I prefer the regular spaghetti-width noodles for versatility, the thicker Medium-Width noodles stand up nicely to heavier sauces like this tangy peanut emulsion or black bean paste-based sauces such as Zha Jiang Mian.  However, the cooking instructions on the package have never been very accurate or useful, so here is what I’ve found to be a reliable cooking method…

- Once you’ve immersed the noodles and brought the water back up to a boil, lower to medium high heat, and time the regular width noodles for 6 min while the Medium width noodles take 10 min.

- Drain in a colander and fill the pot back up 1/3 to 1/2 with cold water.  Dump noodles back into cold water and whirl it around quickly before draining back into the colander.  Give the colander a few tosses to loosen any water still collected between its bottom and the noodles.

# Whirling the noodles in cold water rinses sticky starch off the noodle surface, giving it the slick, slippery, slurpiness.  It also cools it down so the internal heat doesn’t keep the cooking the noodles and turn them gummy.  When you’re serving a warm sauce, make the rinse very fast so the noodles aren’t cold.  And if you’re serving it in a hot broth, you can probably dispense with the rinse entirely so the noodles don’t cool down your broth.  But since this peanut sauce is meant for cold noodles, it’s fine to swirl and rinse for a longer period of time.