Chinese Takeout Recipes
Colorful bell peppers—red, yellow, or orange—cooling cucumbers, and bean sprouts are the base of this vegetable salad with noodles. It gets heat from ground chili sauce in the dressing, plus optional Thai bird chiles that you add to the fresh vegetables.
Once you've mastered our technique for a crispety, crunchety coating on takeout-style fried chicken, you can easily replicate a number of favorites on the buffet line. To turn our General Tso's recipe into sesame chicken, we simply change the sauce, adding extra sugar and sesame oil and omitting the chilies. Be sure to toast those sesame seeds before adding them, and sprinkle them both throughout the sauce and over the finished dish.
Once the mushrooms are ready, I add a handful of chives. These particular ones are flowering Chinese chives, but you can use regular Chinese chives, yellow chives, scallions, or even thinly sliced onions. Stir-fry them just long enough to tame their raw bite, but leave them nice and crisp. The shrooms and chives join the cabbage in the bowl on the side.
"For slightly sweet dishes like mushu pork, I would recommend full-bodied whites or reds. Juicy red varietals include Zinfandel, Merlot and Syrah. Rich whites would be like Viognier. ( Try L’Ecole Merlot and Mark Ryan Viognier!)"— Lee Spires, AQUA by El Gaucho (Seattle)
Perhaps the biggest key to making excellent dan dan noodles is to make your own roasted chile oil. When done right, it gets a rich, fruity, smoky flavor that none of the store-bought stuff can touch. It's really quite simple. Toasted Sichuan peppercorns have a sweet, citrus-like aroma with a mouth-numbing quality, while roasted chile oil brings on the heat.
Smoked low and slow on the grill, this chicken marinated with Scotch bonnet peppers puréed with other fresh aromatics and spices tastes incredible. It's an 11 1/2-hour process (about 10 of those hours are hands-off while the chicken marinates), but the flavor is beyond worth the effort.
Add remaining sauce, vegetables, and pork to noodles and toss well over heat to combine. Transfer lo mein to a platter and sprinkle sliced green scallions all over, along with sesame seeds, if using. Serve right away, passing sambal oelek at the table if desired.
To make sure the pork stays nice and tender, even when smacked with the high heat of a wok, we first soak it for 15 minutes in a baking soda solution. This is a trick we picked up from Cook's Illustrated , and, having tested it side by side with unsoaked pork, we can confirm it makes a huge difference. Thanks to the alkalizing effects of the baking soda, the pork retains more moisture and tenderness, even as it browns and crisps on its exterior—an important step for building flavor, but one that can toughen up the meat at the same time.
Shao's recipe suggests you cook the noodles for three minutes, then shock them under cold running water. This works just fine, but I prefer to take the easier route: I blanch them until just tender (about a minute), then transfer them to a bowl and toss with a little oil to keep the noodles separated. The residual heat from the water will keep cooking them until they're perfectly al dente and ready to stir-fry a few minutes later.
Dried and fresh Thai chiles, sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice make a bold and delicious dressing for this Isan-style salad. Toss the dressing with tomatoes, bean sprouts, and pork rinds that soak up the flavorful dressing.
The first great thing about making dan dan noodles at home is that you can customize it however you'd like. Personally, I like the chile oil of the Sichuan version, but I also love adding crushed roasted peanuts to the top. Who's to stop me? Some hardcore versions of the dish have the noodles quite literally swimming in a bowlful of chile oil. I like my oil to coat the noodles and pool up a bit in the bottom of the bowl.
If you've eaten a typical dish of takeout orange chicken any time recently, you might recall an orange-tinted sauce with very little resembling fruit flavor. Here, we create better, more complex flavor in our orange sauce by incorporating citrus three ways: fresh orange juice, grated zest, and dried peel. That last ingredient adds a depth that you can't get from fresh juice and zest alone.
Wipe out wok. Add remaining 1 tablespoon oil and heat over high heat until smoking. Add noodles and cook, tossing and stirring, until hot. Add cabbage, mushrooms, chives, and minced garlic. Cook, tossing, until garlic is fragrant, about 30 seconds.
Add 1 tablespoon (15ml) neutral oil to wok or skillet and heat over high heat until smoking. Add pork, spreading it out in a single layer, and let cook on one side until crisp and brown, 2 to 3 minutes. Continue to cook, stirring and tossing, until just cooked through, about 1 minute longer. Transfer to plate with vegetables.
The array of flavors and textures you end up with—sweet and crunchy charred cabbage, tender chives, meaty mushrooms, and slippery noodles—makes eating your way through a plate into a fun Noodle game missions|https://noodleinsight.com/ of who's-gonna-find-the-best-piece-first. (Hint: It's the person with the longest chopsticks.)
