Dan Dan Mien

There are some recipes that take you by the heart, and for me Dan Dan Noodles has been of those.
It’s one of the first authentic chinese recipes I cooked, and the starting point for my love of chinese cooking: the dish itself is simple and don’t require too hard to get ingredients.
The dish itself is of humble origin: the dan in the name refers to the carring pole that street vendors used to carry the noodles in one basket and the sauce and toppings in the other.

The dish was initially served as small portions of noodles and sauce, appealing to everybody from the student to the nobleman, and seems like the dish was originally vegetarian, while the pork mince topping came later, when the dish reached richer regions and cities, like Chengdu: the story wants that the dish was first made by a man going by the name Chen Baobao, native of Zigong, around mid-eighteenth century.
As of now, from Sichuan the dish spreaded in all chinese regions, particularly in Hong Kong, but also abroad, especially in Japan, where is known as Tan Tan Men and it’s made with ramen noodles, and the sauce turned in a spicy sesame based broth, and in the US, where instead it’s become more of a traditional style pasta dish, with pork sauce on top, for sure a mellowed down version of the chinese fiery chili oil sauce.

In my various cooking of the dan dan mien, reaching once a week at a certain point, I tried most of the common and less common variations, tweaks and ingredients for the recipe: starting from the noodles, I tried with authentic chinese noodles, egg noodles, and when I had nothing else thin spaghetti boiled with a pinch of baking soda, and for what concerns the sauce every attempt is a bit better than the previous one thaks to the improvement to the chili il, the stock, the ratios or sometimes a bit of luck.
For the other toppings too I tried various solutions: I found both zha cai and ya cai in the Chinatown I usually go to, and tried to both cook them together with the meat or serve alone on top of the dish (like in the photo), or skipping them; same goes for the spring onion slices and coriander leaves while toasted peanuts are instead a staple of my dan dan mien together with the greenies, for which I usually use spinach leaves, but I also tried pak choi leaves when available, both boiled and pan fried.
The funniest part has been the meat topping: since I don’t usually use pork, I go for chicken thighs, or turkey, but very often my vegetarian girlfriend craves dan dan mien, and I perfectioned a mix of tempeh and seitan, cooked exactly like the pork mince is usually cooked: the end result is really amazing, and if you are curious about it don’t hesitate to ask!