Today I want to share a traditional food with you guys——Hot dry noodles, also called ReganMian, one of the most famous ten noodles in China. Invented in Wuhan and became most famous food in Wuhan, it has been the favorite choice of breakfast for Wuhan people.
The tastes of it are mainly salty, spicy, sour, and Umami.
The ingredients are special noodles made with baking soda, dry radish, green onions, fried peanut, Tahini( sesame sauce), soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, oyster sauce. The cooking procedures are sort of easy, compared to other Chinese food:
1. Prepare all the ingredients: chop the green onion, fry the peanuts, buy the special noodle( that’s faster lol).
2. The key step: dilute the sesame sauce. For this step, you need a cup of warm water, pour the water into the sesame sauce little by little, and stir it in a same direction. You can choose clockwise or counter-clockwise. It totally depends on you. But keep in mind you should always follow the same direction. At the start, you will find that it’s getting sticky as you stir it, so when you feel that you can’t stir it just add some more warm water and continue stirring. Keep stirring until the sauce could drop like silk. Then add some sugar and salt. That’s how the secret sauce is made.
3. Add some sesame oil into another bowl and mix it with our secret sauce. Then add two teaspoon of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of oyster sauce, 1 teaspoon of spicy chili oil.
4. Then cook the noodle for 20 minutes, and put it in a bowl without water. Add the sauce, radish, and peanuts.
The procedure were told by a old chief, specialized in hot dry noodle, who also told me about the history of hot dry noodles, which I actually was going to do research on. In the beginning, due to the hot weather in Wuhan, people had the habit to add some baking soda into noodles in case the noodle would go bad. That’s the ancestor of hot dry noodle. A clever Chief Cai found that his soup noodle was very popular so that costumers need wait for long time. So in order to make the noodles faster, he invented a way of cooking: first cook the noodle median-well, cool the noodle with frozen water, and wipe the oil on the noodles. In this way, selling noodles was faster than before. Suddenly one day, Chief Cai saw workers threw the sesame sauce, which produced extraordinary delightful smell, away after they extracted the sesame oil from it. A thought hit Cai that why didn’t he add the sesame sauce into the noodles? The he bought lots of sesame sauce and tried lots of times. Here came the hot dry noodles.
I spent time in Japan two summers ago, and I never realized the cultural differences around the world that dealt with breakfast foods. In America, we enjoy a bowl of cereal, eggs, bacon, pancakes, or something along those lines. But other countries eat what we consider “lunch” or “dinner” foods such as soup and pasta.
I enjoy learning about the origins of foods, so if you continue your blog in exploring the histories of various foods, I will definitely be interested in reading more!
I really like that you incorporated both how to make the noodles and the history of them. And the pictures look so good. I definitely think I found something new to try.