Name: Zhajiangmian
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 35 min
Total time: 55 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Chinese
Ingredients: 400 g pork belly, finely diced; 5 tbsp vegetable oil; 4 tbsp sweet bean sauce, tianmianjiang; 3 tbsp yellow soybean paste, huangdoujiang; 1 onion, finely diced; 4 garlic cloves, chopped; 20 g ginger, chopped; 2 tbsp Shaoxing wine; 1 tbsp caster sugar; 250 ml water; 4 spring onions, chopped; 500 g thick fresh wheat noodles; 1 cucumber, in matchsticks; 150 g bean sprouts, blanched; 1 carrot, in matchsticks; 100 g radish, in matchsticks; 150 g edamame beans, cooked

Zhajiangmian

Thick wheat noodles under a dark salty pork sauce and a heap of raw shredded vegetables that you mix in yourself at the table.

55 min total Serves 4 servings Easy

What Goes With It

Raw garlic cloves, traditionally
A cold beer
Smashed cucumber

Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Di San Xian, Green Bean Stir Fry, Hot and Sour Potato Strips.

Zhajiangmian, in preparation
Photograph credit: Dao xiao mian @ Zhajiangmian Noodles @ Fresh Noodles @ Rue Saint-Denis @ Paris by *_* · CC BY 2.0 · Flickr

How to Make Zhajiangmian

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Mix the two bean pastes with 100 ml of the water to loosen them.
Fry the diced pork belly in the oil over medium heat 10 minutes, until the fat has run and the meat is browned.
Add the onion, garlic and ginger and cook 5 minutes.
Add the loosened bean pastes and fry, stirring almost constantly, 20 minutes over medium-low heat, until very dark, thick and glossy.
Add the wine, sugar and the remaining water and simmer 10 minutes more, until the oil separates and rises.
Stir in the spring onions and take it off the heat.
Boil the noodles until just tender, drain and rinse briefly in cold water so they stay springy.
Divide the noodles between bowls, spoon the sauce into the centre and pile the raw vegetables around.
Mix everything together at the table before eating.

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Worth Knowing Before You Cook

Twenty minutes of frying the paste. Anything less tastes raw.

The sauce is meant to be too salty alone. The vegetables fix it.

Rinse the noodles so they stay springy under the sauce.

Changing the Recipe

Out of spring onions? A small regular onion, finely sliced, or a few chives stirred in at the end both cover the job.
If you only have ground ginger, a quarter-teaspoon for each tablespoon of fresh is the ratio usually given; it tastes warmer and less bright than the fresh root.
An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.

Keeping What's Left

The sauce refrigerates 5 days and freezes 3 months. Cook noodles to order.

What's in a Serving

No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.

Dairy-Free