- Hey guys, my name's
Alvin and I love noodles.
They're delicious, they're comforting,
they're super, super fun to eat.
You really can't go wrong
with a bowl of noodles
no matter what time of day it is.
I think it's a great
thing to be able to cook
no matter how much time
you have on your hands.
So, I brought in my friend Chef Eric
who's gonna show you guys how
to make a one-minute,
one-hour, and one-day noodle.
Take it away, Eric.
- What's up, everybody?
My name is Eric Sze, I'm the chef owner
at 886 Taiwanese Restaurant,
and today I'm gonna show you guys
how to make a one-minute,
one-hour, and one-day noodle.
You know those days when you
just don't feel like cooking
at all or you're super hungover
or you gotta run to class or something?
So the one-minute noodle is super simple.
It's just a noodle and a sauce.
The reason why the sauce is so good
is 'cause it has all the basic components.
It has sweetness, it has
acidity from the vinegar,
and it has savory from the soy sauce.
So this noodle was my go-to
recipe during college.
So my roommate, he would always be hungry
and be like, "Yo Eric, can
you cook me something up?"
And one night I just took whatever we had
in the pantry and I threw
it all together and bam.
And now for the noodles.
All you have to do is put
the sauce into the noodles.
It's about half a cup.
You mix the noodles real well
just so the sauce really
incorporates into the noodles.
Honestly, whatever noodles
you have left over,
as long as it's thin, really.
All right, so this is ready to plate.
Pretty up these noodles a little bit.
Now we sprinkle on a
little bit of sesame seeds.
Make sure they're toasted.
It provides a nice little crunch.
The scallion.
Here we have some minced garlic
and last but not least we're
gonna use some chili oil.
Any Asian supermarket
you can find chili oil.
Lao Gan Man is everybody's favorite.
I prefer our own chili oil
that we use at the restaurant.
So here it is, the one-minute cold noodle
with Chinese black vinegar,
soy sauce, and sesame oil.
So to eat this bad boy all you gotta do
is just mix it up real well.
(slurping)
Man, kind of miss it.
Get over here.
Now for the one-hour noodle.
This noodle is called zha jiang mian
which literally translates
to fried sauce noodle.
It's super traditional, it's
found in China, Taiwan, Korea.
First thing we're gonna start
off with, scrambled eggs.
For me, I like the eggs kind
of charred on the outside.
Like a nice, thick crust.
It's not found in western cooking a lot,
but it's the more Taiwanese
way of doing things.
For this recipe I feel
like it works better
because it provides the
caramelized flavor of the egg.
And my mom used to
always make this for me,
and the egg is ready.
So now we're gonna get
to the fried sauce part.
So there's really just
two types of sauces.
You wanna caramelize them both.
So the first one we're gonna use
is a fermented yellow bean paste.
Make sure you hear that slight sizzle.
The second one, it's
called the tian mian jiang.
So these sauces you can really find
in any Asian grocery store.
The yellow bean paste,
it's kind of like a miso
but a little bit funkier
and the sweet sauce is,
essentially, sweet and blue.
So it's nice and, well, sugary.
By frying the sauce you
caramelize the sugars inside
and brings an extra depth of flavor.
Transfer the sauce into the bowl.
Well into any separate corner.
I'm gonna add this to the
pork a little bit later.
So now we're gonna turn
the heat up real high.
Shallots, or as Gordon
Ramsay says, shallots.
Some garlic, some ginger.
And here you just wanna kind of fry them,
get the water out a little bit,
have the natural sweetness come through.
I want to feel like we can see
it becoming more translucent
and also you can smell that the flavor,
the aromas are coming through.
Chinese food is the trinity.
Ginger, garlic, and scallion.
We don't have scallion
here, we have shallots.
Kind of the same thing but not really.
Put in the pork.
You can use any protein,
you just wanna make sure
there's a good fat content.
Right here we have about
80, 20 ground pork.
The goal here is to caramelize the pork
So we get that nice, meaty flavor.
So this dish takes a
little bit more of a prep.
You have to cut your garlic,
shallots, your ginger.
Make sure they're nice
and fine so then they can
cook evenly within the sauce.
It's about these extra, small steps
and the details of these small steps
that really makes the
dish that much better.
It smells like my mom's kitchen.
I wouldn't say mine's
better, but it kinda is.
Yeah.
All right, so it's been
about 10 minutes-ish.
The pork is nice and brown,
you can see the dark bits.
All we have to do is put
the caramelized sauce in.
Add some of the soy sauce just
so it gets a little bit
more color and now we stir.
Make sure the sauce is
very evenly incorporated.
Give it a little bit of
time to marry with the pork.
This part you have to be really careful.
You don't want it to burn.
Right, 'cause your sauce is caramelized,
your pork is nice and caramelized.
Now we just gotta add
the cornstarch slurry.
Oh!
Now we're talking.
So we just need to add
a little bit more water.
So now you see that the sauce.
It's not super sticky,
but you can see that the cornstarch
has gotten really
incorporated into this sauce
and it will really coat
the noodles super well.
So the noodles I actually
brought from the restaurant.
You buy it from a purveyor here
in Chinatown, New York City.
They make it fresh every morning,
but if you're making it at home,
store bought ones are fine.
Noodles in.
For these noodles I cooked
them for two minutes,
and this recipe is obviously my mom's
so every time I cook it I taste
her cooking and it's always
that sense of nostalgia
that always brings me back.
So when you're cooking noodles,
you really wanna interact with it.
You wanna look at how it expands
and becomes slightly more translucent.
We're just gonna straighten this guy out.
You wanna make sure you get
rid of any excess water.
Flip of the wrist.
Oh shoot!
(laughing)
That was not pretty.
Let's plate it.
Just kind of pour it into the bowl.
For me, I like to make it nice and pretty.
Pull it up a little and fold.
We have our pork sauce.
We have the cucumbers.
Last but not least, scrambled eggs.
There you have it, this is
our one-hour zha jiang mian
with caramelized pork sauce,
cucumbers, and scrambled egg.
So, we finished our noodles
and it's time to eat.
So yeah, mixing it,
it's gonna be a little bit
messy but that's what you want.
It's always served premixed.
Oh, premixed, before mixed, unmixed.
It's always served unmixed.
I know I should be saying
something, but it's so good.
It tastes like my mom's cooking.
I feel like I'm back home
and I was 15 years old,
just finished tennis practice.
Alvin, you wanna try some?
- Hell yeah.
I'm gonna take this.
- Take it home with you.
- All right.
- All right, we're here.
This is the one-day noodle.
So we're making the
Taiwanese beef noodle soup.
You start with oxtail and shin bones.
These you can get at any butcher shop
or any Asian supermarket.
So a short rib has a lot of collagen
that's gonna break down into gelatin
and it has a lot of intermuscular fat,
so it stands up to braising.
So while the bones are boiling,
we're gonna toast some spices.
Here we have coriander seeds, star anise,
Szechuan peppercorns.
We're gonna toast the spices
until they're fragrant and aromatic.
I'll just take these guys out, yeah.
Now the next step is to
caramelize the doubanjiang.
So this is a fermented fava bean.
It's spicy and it's from
the province of Szechuan.
So by frying the sauce
you caramelize the sugars
and, of course, when caramelizing sugar
you have a greater depth of flavor.
You wanna be careful not to burn it
because this is a little bit dryer.
So it's been 30 minutes.
The bones have been blanched.
So this step is to get rid
of the metallic flavor in the beef.
So if you skip it, you'll have
that weird penny-tasting
broth, nobody wants that.
So as you can see, there's quite a bit
of stuff on the table,
but since it is a one-day recipe you might
as well go all in and every
single ingredient provides
a certain flavor.
Taiwanese beef noodle
soup, every household,
every restaurant has their own recipe.
Don't freak out if this isn't your recipe
or whatever you're familiar with.
So this specific recipe is
for our restaurant, 886.
We wanted it to have a slightly sweeter,
more subtle vegetable flavor
than just straight-up
beefiness or spiciness.
You have the apple and the celery.
So these fruits and
vegetables all contribute
to the sweetness and
different levels of freshness
that you'll eventually get from the soup.
Now we're gonna add in the tomatoes.
In Taiwan you would get literally stalls
that focus on tomato-flavored
beef noodle soup.
That's what I like to recreate.
Now we're gonna add the garlic.
We have the doubanjiang.
We have all the toasted spices.
So rock sugar is basically
sugar that tastes better.
You get the subtle notes of cane sugar.
Time for the savory.
We have soy sauce.
So dark soy sauce offers color,
but it doesn't overwhelm the taste.
If you wanna do this at home,
you could essentially hit up one really
big Asian supermarket and
have everything bought.
You just wanna fill it to the brim
so all the ingredients
are covered in water.
So now that everything's in here,
we're gonna give it
about six hours to braise
just so all the ingredients
can yield it's flavors
to the broth and about halfway
through we're gonna take out
the meat so it doesn't overbraise.
Then we're gonna have
to chill it overnight.
It is a very long time
for a bowl of noodles,
but trust me it's gonna be worth it.
It is now day two and
I've strained the broth
and taken the meat out.
So as you can see, there's
a layer of fat on top.
We're just gonna take that out.
It smells like beefy, tomato-y goodness.
So I'm taking the fat out so later on
when we're making the noodles, actually,
we're gonna portion the fat to each bowl.
All right so we're gonna
portion out one bowl of soup.
All right, so the broth is portioned.
Now we're gonna cook the noodles.
So these are the same noodles
as the zha jiang mian ones.
Fresh, chewy, and springy.
You're boiling your noodles,
you're almost there.
Hard days of work, it's gonna be worth it.
Finish line.
Noodles in here.
So now we're gonna add the bok choy
into the water that we're
cooking the noodles with,
and bok choy really just takes
about 30 seconds to cook.
We'll strain out any excess water.
Gently place them.
So now we have the hot pan
and this is the short rib
I took out from the broth.
Cut it off the bone and portioned it
into semi-bite sized pieces.
So we're just gonna start
by caramelizing them.
It's really like finishing a steak,
so you get the best of both worlds.
Since the short rib has been braised,
it's really nice and soft on the inside
and by searing the outside
you have a nice, caramelized crust.
So now we're reheating the broth.
We're gonna add a little
tiny pinch of salt.
This is where it all comes together.
One day of work for this one
bowl of beef noodle soup.
I promise it's worth it,
and to finish, a little
bit of sliced scallions.
And so putting in all this time and effort
you'll really understand why
people go out of their way
for a good bowl of beef noodle soup.
There you have it, one-day
Taiwanese beef noodle soup
with seared short ribs and bok choy.
(upbeat music)
(slurping)
I've probably had about 10,000 bowls
of beef noodle soup in my
lifetime, but it never gets old.
I'm gonna go home, you enjoy.
- All right, bye Eric, thanks.
All right, and there you have it.
That was a one-minute,
one-hour, and one-day noodle.
I hope you guys learned a lot.
Chef Eric is amazing and
if you really wanna eat
the one day one and you
live in New York City,
you should go to his restaurant, 886.
There's amazing Taiwanese food there.
I hope that inspires you guys
to go try some noodles.
They're really fun,
they're really delicious,
and you can really have
them any time of the day.
And remember, there's always time to cook.
So until next time, peace.
(upbeat music)
