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Szechuan Meat Sauce Noodles a la Yenching

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For the seven years of my life I spent in Cambridge, Mass., a significant portion of the calories I consumed came from the kitchen at the Yenching Restaurant by Holyoke Center in Harvard Square. A high perecentage of those calories came from one dish served there: Szechuan Meat Sauce Noodles. (The picture below is from my visit to Cambridge last month — the dish is still on the menu, almost unchanged, though the spice-fire seems weaker than I remember.)

For $4 (almost twice as much today!) you got a small mountain of big noodles topped with a spicy shredded pork, celery and carrot mixture. The gravy would collect in the bottom of the bowl (or take-out carton) to replenish the coating on the pasta.

I loved it, and when I moved to the West Coast I missed it. So as I became more adept at Sichuan cooking — schooled by my masters, Mrs. Chiang and Fuchsia Dunlop — I began to experiment with duplicating the great Yenching Meat Sauce Noodles experience. After much experimentation, I think I’ve perfected it.

Full recipe after the jump. Have a great weekend!

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Elvish brews

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We drink a lot of craft beer around here, particularly around the holidays. I have a strong bias in favor of local beer, not just for the usual reasons — support local businesses, reduce the carbon footprint, and so on — but also because, with most beer, freshness really does count. While wonderful beers are being made abroad, by the time they get here you can never be sure they’re in decent condition.

But I couldn’t resist buying a tasting run of the entire line of Ridgeway Brewing’s holiday line, which I found by happenstance at the local Beverages and More. Here’s what I got:

Bad Elves brews

I knew the names and art would delight my kids. I couldn’t know, but found out, that these brews were excellent. Turns out Ridgeway is a project of the brewer from a beloved brewery in Henley-on-Thames called Brakspear that recently shut down.

Anyway, the Ridgeway line — Bad Elf, Very Bad Elf, Seriously Bad Elf, Criminally Bad Elf, and Insanely Bad Elf — are escalatingly stronger beers, from 6 percent alcohol to over 11, ranging from a sort of British take on an American IPA (Bad Elf) to a monster barleywine (Insanely B.E.). I loved them all. The hops and barley varieties Ridgeway uses are quite different from the ingredients typically used by American microbreweries, and, after years of drinking West Coast beers, I enjoyed venturing afield.

(If you’re into beer, I recommend William Brand’s California Craft Beer newsletter and blog.)

Kung Pao-er

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Since my last post on the elusive perfect home-cooked Kung Pao chicken, I have pursued this grail a half-dozen more times, and I believe I have achieved my goal, or as close as I expect to get in this lifetime.

I started working from a recipe I found here — the photo looked somewhat right, and the ingredient set was close to my preference for a simple chicken, scallion and peanut dish.

I tried out a variety of modifications, including the use of hoisin sauce instead of sugar for the sweetening, but in the end found the simpler white-sugar approach, combined with a switch from light to dark soy sauce, did the trick. I added scallions, eliminated some extra salt, brought the cornstarch level way down (I’ve never been able to put a whole tablespoon of cornstarch into any dish without ending up with muck), and tinkered with the sauce ingredients — adding rice wine and black vinegar. The result is just what I was after. Here’s the full recipe.

Chicken delight

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Enough with the turkey, already. My palate belongs to Szechuan food, and this weekend, after the leftovers were gone, I returned to a quest I have sporadically pursued for years now. I have been seeking to duplicate, in my home, the experience of the perfect Kung Pao Chicken — a dish I have occasionally, but less and less frequently, enjoyed in restaurants.

The dish I seek is a simple-looking but complex-tasting stir fry of small cubes of dark-meat chicken lightly dressed in a thick but scant dark-brown sauce that clings to it — without forming a soupy, goopy pool on the plate, as so often emerges from inferior Chinese restaurant kitchens. Mixed in with the chicken are some quarter-inch scallion rounds from the thicker (white) end of the plant, and, of course, crunchy peanuts. The sauce has flecks of ginger, a touch of sweetness, a hint of sesame richness and a slight vinegar pucker. A half-dozen or so blackened whole red chilis complete the picture, or rather, set it aflame. This, to me, is Kung Pao Chicken — gongbao ji ding, also sometimes called Szechuan Chicken with Peanuts.

A recent article in the New York Times by Howard French provided some interesting background to the dish from a restaurant in the city of Guiyang. In Guiyang, unlike in the neighboring province of Szechuan, it seems they do not believe in adding peanuts to the dish at all, nor do they use dried peppers. I certainly have no idea which regional variation deserves the “most authentic” label, and I don’t doubt that the restaurant French profiled might be worth the visit. But I can tell you that the recipe the Times provided — gooped up with way too much arrowroot starch, and relying on chili paste rather than whole peppers for the bite — offered nothing like the experience I seek.

I have made the recipe from my favorite source of Chinese cuisine knowhow, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook, and it is tastier, for sure; it provides the essential tip that you should buy raw peanuts and fry them in the wok (so many restaurants simply toss in a handful of cold dry-roasted Planters nuts at the very end of cooking — feh!). But even Mrs. Chiang’s offering ends up a bit gloppy, not quite right.

I recognize that my run-of-the-mill home range simply doesn’t provide the level of heat that a high-powered restaurant-kitchen wok can use to flash-fry ingredients, seal in flavors and produce the right consistency in a sauce. But I’m still convinced there is a good recipe out there for what I’m seeking, and I’m going to continue hunting for it, and experimenting with adapting the recipes I have, until I achieve kung pao perfection. At such a time I will share my findings.