After a year-long hiatus, I am happy to be back to making national dishes. The other content on the site is great but National dishes seem to generate the most excitement.
Beef noodle soup is a dish I have wanted to do for a long time. However looking at the ingredients, I was always intimidated. After spending an hour gathering the ingredients at H Mart, I understand my past apprehension. Some of the ingredients, I was only able to find by looking up the image on Google then finding by the labels(which are super cool!).
Using meat cuts that are not common is something that always intrigues me and makes any recipe more difficult as I have to search for the specialty cuts. Asian grocers are great in this regard as they almost always have offal. I really like the concept of not wasting any part of the animal but my love of this concept was put to the test in this recipe due to the tendons.
Comparing the two types of meat, the shank had a beautiful deep red color while the tendon looked like creepy grey fingers. What was surprising was the lack of smell that the tendons emitted. Having previously cooked pork bones(which smell terrible) it was a welcome change when browning the meats.
The smell emanating from the pot was so inviting. I would have been happy to just eat the vegetables alone.
With everyone ready to go, we threw the ingredients together and waited a long time. The recipe said this should only take three hours but reading up on Tendon’s online, figured it would be better to cook for four hours for maximum tendoness(see what I did there).
After four hours, the meat was so tender and just fell apart when I tried to cut it. Slicing the tendon was like slicing meat jello.
The broth turned out to have this amazing deep red color.
Last step was to add everything back to the pot. After the trip to H Mart, I had to consult the receipt to make sure I had bought baby bok-choi and not some other vegetable.
The flavor was amazing, the sichuan peppercorns add this spicy tingle that is hard to describe. All the spices melded together in a nice medley that was not too spicy, or too savory, but instead just right.
The shank was to die for, it was so tender and juicy that it fell apart when I went to cut it. As for the tendon, its was like eating plain jello. It didn’t really have much of a taste and if you took a bite with the noodles, you would not know the difference between the two.
Proud dad of Beef Noodle Soup!
Recipe is available here.
Thanks again for the chance to sample some of this stuff! (And by sample I mean get fed two heaping bowls of it). As a Taiwanese American who spent the first 23 years of his life living in Socal/Los Angeles, I’ve had a lot of beef noodle soup from all sorts of places. This was some authentic beef noodle soup, not even considering this was your first try!
I’d love to see you take on trying to make your own noodles by hand. When you make them from scratch and stretch them by hand the traditional way, you can get a thicker and more irregular noodle, which gives you an overall chewier and varied bite. The dish really comes together when the noodles can stand up to the broth.
Let me know next time if I can join you in the kitchen 🙂