The first great thing about making dan dan noodles at home is that you can customize it however you'd like. Personally, I like the chile oil of the Sichuan version, but I also love adding crushed roasted peanuts to the top. Who's to stop me? Some hardcore versions of the dish have the noodles quite literally swimming in a bowlful of chile oil. I like my oil to coat the noodles and noodle game walkthrough|https://noodleinsight.com/ pool up a bit in the bottom of the bowl.

There are all kinds of variations on the dish that you'll find in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. Some go the ultra-authentic, hardcore traditional route, while others remove some or even all of the heat from the dish, instead replacing it with a creamy sesame (or even peanut butter!) based sauce. To me, picking one version of dan dan noodles as the best is kinda like choosing my favorite Beatles album: It's a constantly shifting debate, even with myself. Best plan is to just pick a path and run with it. This time I'm going for the more traditional approach. Obviously, modifying it for my vegan needs is going to alter that approach in practice (though not in spirit).

Beef with broccoli is usually the worst offering at a Chinese buffet—who wants a dish laden with bland, overcooked florets of Western broccoli? Our version of the dish replaces them with Chinese broccoli, which has a more complex, mildly bitter flavor. Once you've got that ingredient, the rest of the dish is simple—just shallots, garlic, marinated beef, and an oyster sauce–based sauce.

Heat reserved 1 tablespoon of mushroom oil in a large skillet or wok over high heat until shimmering. Add chopped Sichuan vegetables, fried mushrooms, and garlic. Cook, stirring and tossing constantly until fragrant, about 45 seconds. Add Shaoxing wine and stir to combine. Transfer mixture to bowl with sauce.

Transfer noodles to serving bowl and top with pork mixture. Stir vinaigrette and spoon over and around the noodles (you may not want to use all of it). Sprinkle with roasted peanuts, Sichuan peppercorn, grated garlic, and scallion greens. Serve immediately.

This recipe applies a Chinese technique to two decidedly Western ingredients, kale and frisée, with surprisingly good results. We cook them like any other hearty greens—adding the stems to a hot wok, followed by the leaves. There's no need for blanching, which makes this recipe super quick and leaves you with one fewer pot to clean.

Return pot of water to a hard boil and add noodles. Cook, stirring regularly to prevent noodles from sticking to each other or the bottom, until barely cooked through with a springy bite, about 4 minutes. Drain, reserving 3/4 cup of cooking liquid. Add cooking liquid to bowl with sauce and stir to combine.

Here's another recipe in my quest to take the cute and cuddly animals out of all of my favorite foods in a no-BS, as-delicious-as-the-real-thing, good-enough-for-anyone kind of way. I'm particularly happy with this one, which makes sense, as it's a logical extension of my vegan mapo tofu recipe. I'm talking about the other great pillar of cheap-and-easy Sichuan cuisine: dan dan noodles.

The prototypical street food, dan dan noodles are an ultra-simple dish of cold or warm noodles placed in a bowl with a ladleful of highly seasoned sauce poured on top. Flavored with minced pork, preserved pickled mustard, black vinegar, fermented broad beans, garlic, and plenty of chili oil, the dish is eaten by swirling the slick noodles through the oily sauce, picking up bits of meat and pickles as they go.

Anyone who's spent a significant amount of time in or around New York City should be intimately familiar with scallion pancakes, the flaky, savory disks studded with chopped scallions and fried. We use a laminated dough here (much as you would if making puff pastry) to create layer upon layer of very thin sheets of flavorful pastry. Frying them in oil is traditional; for a puffier, crispier experience, try cooking them on the grill .

Cooking fresh Chinese wheat noodles in a big pot of water doesn't produce a high enough concentration of starch to be effective, but cooking it in far less water than is recommended (I cook eight ounces of fresh noodles in about a quart of salted water) yields you a pot full of silky, semi-opaque liquid that combines marvelously with the sauce base.

Every cook seems to have a certain piece of cookware that they keep coming back to, day after day. It could be a trusty stainless steel skillet , a well-seasoned carbon steel pan , or an enameled cast iron Dutch oven , but for many of us at Serious Eats, it's unquestionably a wok—one of the most important tools in our kitchens.

The answer came when I was reading through Fucshia Dunlop's books, in which she mentions that in Northern China, the starchy water leftover from boiling noodles is often drunk like a silky soup or added to sauces to thicken them. It's exactly the same way an Italian cook will save some pasta water to add to their sauce—the extra dissolved starch thickens the sauce, binding it and helping it cling better to the noodles.