noodsletter #.0011
Xi'an Famous Foods (the cookbook), return to XFF, biang-biang
Hello! Happy New Year!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually at the end, with everything else on top. This week there’s no new recipe, but I’ll be talking about:
Xi’an Famous Foods Biang-Biang*
As ever, I welcome your feedback! Leave a comment, send an email, whatever; you don’t have to be positive, you don’t even have to be nice, just be humane.
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Book
“Vial, don’t you think they’ll like my sauce with the little chickens? Four little chickens split in half, beaten with the flat of the chopper, salted, peppered, and anointed with pure oil brushed on with a sprig of pebreda? The little leaves of the pebreda, and the taste of it, cling to the grilled flesh. Look at them, don’t they look good!”
Vial looked at them and so did I. Good indeed! A little rosy blood remained in the broken joints of the plucked and mutilated chickens, and you could see the shape of the wings, and the young scales covering the little legs that had only this morning enjoyed running and scratching. Why not cook a child, too? My tirade petered out and Vial said not a word. I sighed as I beat my sharp, unctuous sauce, but soon the aroma of the delicate flesh, dripping on to the charcoal, would give me a yawning hunger. I think I may soon give up eating the flesh of animals; but not to-day.
From Break of Day by Colette, translated by Enid McLeod.
If anyone knows what “pebreda” is, please let me know! I have searched the internet to no avail; the only results are… from Break of Day!
Mid-Covid Return to Beloved Restaurant Chain Review Haiku
The cold skin noodles,
Better than I remember.
The warm tofu, worse.
“News”
The story of our shared world, told through dive bars.
In To Paradise, as in A Little Life, sex is often portrayed as an inconvenient compulsion; eros is reserved for food. At every possible juncture, Yanagihara describes the food on offer, including a mouthwatering array of cakes: peach cake, lemon cake, several different chocolate cakes, polenta cake (“its surface glazed with candied rounds of orange”), cake made with “pureed apples that had been whisked into the batter” or with “real strawberries swirled into the batter.” The characters seem to approach the world with a running catalogue of their friends’ favorite dishes and jams and varieties of cheese. When they have trouble making conversation, their go-to topics include “yeast-free baking.” They teach lovers to eat marrow, escargots, and artichokes, and long to introduce grandchildren to shrimp, sea urchin, and figs. Even the people who don’t care about food seem to give it an exhaustive amount of thought. “Food did not interest him,” it’s said of one David, before he recalls the ingredients of meals he sampled decades earlier.
Kitchen renovations are a fraught subject because we’re all engaged in a kind of guerilla class war.
This old article about Helmut Kohl and Bill Clinton being gluttons is incredibly dated, if only because the dinner that’s described doesn’t seem so outrageous (unless Kohl ate the bread bowl).
Fiction centered on a grandmother loving Filet-O-Fish? That’s a click from me.
Who says food trend writing can’t be wry? Not the Times:
She and other food industry leaders in the United States say 2022 will be another pragmatic, roll-up-your sleeves kind of year, shaped by the needs of people working from home and by the culinarily-astute-but-fickle Gen Z, whose members want food with sustainable ingredients and a strong cultural back story, prepared without exploitation and delivered in a carbon-neutral way — within 30 minutes.
Hamsters, nature’s alcoholics.
I honestly do not understand this piece about defiantly eating raw flour products. The whole “gritty sugar flour tastes good to me” seems like a really weak argument!
Guy in this piece about the Eminem-backed and -themed Mom’s Spaghetti restaurant concept says “Today’s spaghetti tastes better tomorrow.” No!
Food media, folks: It’s bad. All of it.
Recipe (Thoughts)
Biang-Biang* from Xi’an Famous Foods
New Year is prime noodle time for a lot of people (ok, Asians) and so I figured it’d be appropriate to focus on noodles for the first 2022 edition of noodsletter. Specifically, the biang-biang noodles made famous (for me, and I suppose a lot of New Yorkers) by homegrown mini restaurant chain Xi’an Famous Foods.
Last year, Jason Wang, the owner of Xi’an Famous Foods, and the writer Jessica K. Chou published Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop, and I doubt there’s another restaurant cookbook out there that I’ve been more excited to own. If you’ve eaten at any of the branches of Xi’an Famous Foods and liked the food, I strongly recommend you buy the book, since there are recipes for all the hits: the liang pi, or cold skin noodles, and the yeasted seitan they’re served with; the biang-biang slapped noodles with spicy cumin lamb, or Mt. Qi pork, or spicy and tingly beef…it has it all.
That being said, as I’ve used the book I’ve found that there are some odd instructions in the recipes, and I can’t figure out whether I am being fussy (definitely possible), I am wrong (most likely), or if I have hit upon a kind of awkwardness in translating restaurant recipes to a book for home cooks. I don’t mean that the recipes don’t work—not at all, as the recipes work just fine; rather, I mean that making the recipes as described will likely yield inferior results until you make them a couple of times. For example, for the Mt. Qi pork, the recipe instructs you to fry star anise and Sichuan peppercorns in oil in a hot pot, then add scallions and ginger, and then add a fair amount of cut up pork belly and then says to cook the meat until it is “evenly browned” on the outside. Depending on your definition of “evenly browned,” you might end up with browned meat and charred aromatics or pale meat and nicely bloomed aromatics, and I don’t really see any alternatives in between those two. I now fry the spices in oil and then sear the meat, after which I add in the more delicate scallions and ginger, yielding deeply browned meat and nicely bloomed aromatics as a kind of compromise.
Now, obviously this is a minor quibble; make it the way the book describes, taking care to observe the frying times, and you will produce very delicious Mt. Qi pork, but I believe the way I’ve come to make it tastes a little better, with just a slight adjustment in process. This is a matter of degrees of deliciousness, rather than achieving the fact of deliciousness itself. But one of the many obstacles a cook faces when cooking out of a cookbook is deciding whether to not to persist in refining their technique in the face of so-so results. Many cooking processes require an acquired proficiency before a cook can consistently produce good results, and a less-than-ideal first attempt can and will turn many home cooks off of attempting to acquire that proficiency through repetition. (This has never been a problem for me, personally, but my relatively brief experience in food media suggests that others suffer from this debilitating defect of personality.)
This problem is particularly acute for simple but physically strenuous activities like making noodles and bread, and one of the biggest draws of the cookbook is the biang-biang noodles. The first time I made them, following the instructions as best as I could, they were good but noticeably inferior to the ones I could pay a little over ten bucks for at one of the chain’s locations, barely worth the effort beyond that little burst of dopamine that “wow, I made this thing” provides. I chalked it up to that lack of physical proficiency, but after making the noodles many, many times, I feel that the book’s description of the process is a little bit to blame, and I have one tip for anyone who has or plans to make the recipe, and that’s to give yourself, and the dough, a lot of rest time.
The recipe calls for mixing flour, salt, and water in a stand mixer using a dough hook until a dough forms, then turning that dough onto a work surface and kneading it until a smooth-ish ball forms. It then says to rest it for five minutes, knead it for one minute, and then repeat the knead-and-rest process three times, for a total of 15 minutes of rest and 3 minutes of kneading, which should produce an elastic ball of dough, which can then be portioned out then rested for another hour (and up to three days) before slapping and stretching your way to making the biang-biang.
First of all, I find the use of the stand mixer and dough hook for mixing the dough mystifying; it doesn’t work, or if it does, it takes far more time than necessary. It is far better to just use your hands to mix the dough, or, alternatively, to use the paddle attachment, which will make the dough come together in about two minutes instead of…well, I don’t know how long the dough hook takes because I gave up almost immediately. The stand mixer makes sense to me as a kind of artefact of the bulk process used by the restaurant chain’s central kitchen, but in the context of three and half cups of flour, it doesn’t make sense at all.
But, most importantly, I think the total of about 25 minutes for kneading the dough, including the rest times, while it may be effective, requires that the cook be proficient at gauging the gluten development in the dough, and requires that the cook have a fair amount of upper body strength. I am not proficient at gauging gluten development, and I have basically zero upper body strength, so this recipe as written does not work for me. However, I’ve found that if you commit to just kneading the dough for a minute or so every 45 minutes over the course of a couple of hours (or a whole day!), with a fair amount of patience but very little effort you can produce a perfectly elastic dough that can be stretched quite easily and produces noodles of comparable quality to what you can order at the restaurant’s many locations.
The one drawback to doing it this way is you need to be able to be puttering around your kitchen all day, which is only really possible on lazy, snow- or rain-bound weekends or for people who are lucky enough to be working from home.
But if you can devote a lazy day to poking and prodding a ball of dough every forty-five minutes, this is the lowest effort way to produce excellent biang-biang that I’ve found, and the noodle quality really is exceptional.
I won’t provide a recipe, as Jason Wang and Jessica K. Chou worked hard on this book and you should reward that effort by buying the book, but here is the method I suggest you use:
Place the bread flour in large mixing bowl and add the salt water solution in three additions, mixing thoroughly between each one with your hands to ensure even hydration. Once all the water is mixed, begin kneading the dough until it starts to come together; if there are large amounts of dry flour that don’t seem to be getting hydrated, you can add the up to 1/4 cup of extra water in small increments until a dough ball comes together.
Turn the dough ball out onto a work surface dusted lightly with flour and begin kneading it. Knead until the dough ball is relatively smooth. Wrap the dough tightly in plastic wrap and let it sit on the counter for 45 minutes. Knead it for 1 minute, then rewrap it and let it sit in the counter. Repeat this process until the ball of dough is very smooth and takes on a stiff putty consistency; this will probably take 4 to 5 iterations of this process. Not sure if it’s the right consistency? Do it a couple more times. After the final 45-minute rest, portion the dough as instructed and let it sit for at least a couple of hours, preferably overnight, and up to a couple of days.
Does this draw out a process that’s described in the cookbook as taking about 2 hours at a minimum to basically half of a full 24-hour day? Yes. But I swear it’s worth it!
Jell-O really suffered from pressure to be performative in its last hey-day of the 1970s. When all it really needs to be is good juice presented as dessert. I think Pinterest foods when through a similar life cycle in the early 2010s, so maybe there's hope that in 50 years those will reincarnate in a better form too.
More on the topic at: https://borschtforbreakfast.substack.com/p/9-how-tasty-videos-became-millennial-aspic
I found that using bread flour instead of AP works a lot better for the noodle dough! Referenced in this video - https://youtu.be/8qRkGGia3PI?t=26