Andrew Zimmern Cooks: Cold Peanut Sesame Noodles

[Music] i'm hard-pressed to find a dish that is as universally loved and as seldom cooked in a home kitchen and i think the reason it's not cooked at home as much as it should be is that some of the ingredients are a little confusing so i'm going to cook this recipe for you but i also want to kind of go through the ingredients a little bit and and demystify it in the hope that you will make this tonight at home so the first thing to talk about is the noodles right there are dry noodles which i keep in my house there are many different kinds they they do have yellow dyes in them and i know that's a big concern to a lot of people health-wise in this country and you can see the brand that has more in it even though they say it comes from the eggs it does come from certain dyes versus the ones that are plain yellow that have and i should say that most noodles like this have a certain bite because of a food safe sulfur that is added to them i happen to love this brand available in most asian food stores but just look for a nice fresh nested noodle with not a lot of broken pieces and the paler the color on the dry noodles the less chance it has a lot of yellow food dye in it every neighborhood in america has an asian market and you will find all kinds of different noodle sizes um the really thickish white ones are not chinese those are japanese udon noodles and if you want to use udon noodles for this dish i've done it before it's delicious i like a chinese thin egg noodle which means that lo mein noodles while i'll use them in a pinch they're a little too thick for me what's called here a thin egg or wonton noodle are roughly interchangeable i go for this one every time and the reason is a large bundle of noodles like this just hopped into the bag tells me that these people care more about their product than these people do so i'm gonna go with this wonton noodle and you find what works for you yeah these are beautiful they're nice and fresh they're laid in there in probably 200 gram or 100 gram loads smell fresh and delicious when i gently gently roll them in my hands they come undone which i'm going to want to do before i cook them two portions these can go in a ziploc bag back in my refrigerator and before they go in the water because they're not gonna take very long to cook i just wanna go through here maybe there's a clumpy dried end stuck together that's a beautiful noodle so a handful of salt [Music] into a large volume of rapidly boiling water and the salted water should taste like seawater let's make sure we're on high here there we go and then my already aerated and separated noodles and i'm just continuing to manipulate those with my fingers just they're easier to work with afterwards just like italian pasta the most important thing is once they go in is that first gentle stirring so nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan all right so now we're at about we're at about two and a half minutes in there needs about 15 more seconds i'm spreading the noodles out and by using the right piece of equipment and by agitating those the right way i now have all the noodles out of there so now i can go to the sink and rinse these with cold water so i'm just gonna stick these over here and let them dry a little bit more before i stick just the barest amount of oil on them i ran these under cold water and just kept massaging them with my fingers like this as the water sort of pounded down on them and they are they're now cold as you're about to serve them chill them down right away and then at the last minute before you make your sauce and or plate just put a teaspoon or two of peanut oil on them the oil will actually help the water drip off and the oil will help keep the noodles from not sticking together but also keep them moist and from drying out while you make your sauce so that literally can sit there and it will be in that condition 10 minutes later when we return to it to plate our dish first thing that i want to put in here is my szechuan peppercorns we toasted these in a little pan i'm gonna let the uh pureeing of the sauce sort of break them up some more i'm just obsessed with smelling them they're both ma and la uh numbing and spicy so we'll just put those into our blender a little sesame oil because i want that sesame flavor soy sauce sugar toasted sesame oil so i'm guessing that first one was probably peanut oil rice wine vinegar and mirin all right this is toasted sesame paste this is the the as peanuts are to peanut butter so our toasted sesame seeds to this paste and you cannot make this dish without it otherwise they're just peanut butter noodles they're not cold sesame noodles now i like the peanut flavor in there so i actually use both so now it's time to add the rest of our solid ingredients i want to add a shallot some shallots i want that fresh alum flavor that leeks shallots onion garlic they all belong to the same family right of alums and i don't need much from this but just a little bit goes quite a long way and i want to use some fresh hot chili let's take half and throw it in there i want to use a little bit of garlic and again because it's being blended i can bang it with my knife and that was a pretty big clove so i'm going to use about two-thirds of it in there you don't need much and then uh ginger time um we'll play a little game at home can anybody tell me what this is wrong it is not a spoon it is a ginger skin peeler if you take it against the ginger this is a very old piece of ginger the paper is dried and brown and leathery you can literally once you kind of get adept at it go in between the fingers of even the tiniest little pieces of ginger i mean there's no knife work is going to get you in there and i just want to show you that's what a spoon can do in 45 seconds you only need this much for this recipe i'm just kidding uh i'm actually gonna put the whole thing in and i actually now that you know something that's probably the right amount next thing we want to do is our garnish i'll leave the center of this for the cook that doesn't know what to do with the knife and the cucumber um but oh didn't see that all right let's work around it right there are no problems in the kitchen just challenges and opportunities stack these two or three at a time i chose a two and a half inch length for a reason i cut them in eighth of an inch thicknesses so that i make perfect eighth of an inch batons of cucumber and the reason that that's important to do and it's i mean i'm using the rounded edges so i can get per snickety and take bundles of them out but the idea here to having such perfect little cucumber strips is that that's going to be just you know one of the few things that people see when they eat this dish and you don't want it to fight against the texture and the size of the noodle right next thing that i want to do again it's just you and i cooking let's just make some thin little threads of chili let's get some scallion 45 degree angle the antiseptic sulfuric flavor of scallion in this dish and its importance cannot be underestimated garnish part seven some sprigs of fresh cilantro let's just throw a little bit of that in there so we have a little cilantro flavor in there as well let's blend and assemble the last time i used the oysterizer 1 10th horsepower classic was back when dwight eisenhower was president mrs and i mrs eisenhower loved it when i would go over and cook this dish for her i can taste the peanut oil i can taste the ginger i can taste the garlic yeah it's perfect you can see the consistency of my dressing is not thick and clean and nasty right this is the super fun awesome part the noodles are just exactly in the same shape they were when we left them and i just pull i mean remember in asia noodles are a sign of good luck and good fortune they are meant to be as long as possible so oftentimes unclumping them to do a small portion just requires another level of patience now in chengdu a city i spend a lot of time the noodle shops there that serve this dish serve them in portions that are this small but a bowl this size is sometimes consumed five times a week uh by most folks living in chengdu now you you may ask me why i have my turkey bulb baster out and it's because it's just a giant vehicle for me to see how much sauce i have and to place it only over the noodle because part of what makes this dish so wonderful is the pristine quality of it and i've put all of this efforting into it so why on earth would i want too many dribbles or problems or put too much sauce over it i just want the perfect amount right so we'll just put a sprig of cilantro on each one a little sprinkle of scallion i think a little fresh chili on each one and then just a little bundle of cucumber when you get a little bracing shot of fresh chili and szechuan peppercorn and then you get that wonderful sort of refreshing bite of cucumber i just think it's really fun eating and i'm using english cucumbers with beautiful thin edible skin am i being too fancy with this i don't think so this is one of those easy ways to take a simple noodle a simple sauce do it the right way garnish it the right way and have your friends and family or just yourself alone in the kitchen say wow that that's that's perfect that's perfect cold sesame peanut noodles call it whatever you like it's delicious

Channel: Andrew Zimmern

Views: 32,836

Keywords: andrew, zimmern, Cooking, Culinary, Literacy, Kitchen, instructions, How, to, Yum, delicious, favorite, eating, meal, Travel, Channel, family, azcooks, sesame, peanut, noodles, recipe, easy

Id: w7yuqmzW31c

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021