EDIT: So this video's gotten a number of new views, and with it... comments. While you can read all my thoughts in the community tab here (ua-cam.com/channels/54SLBnD5k5U3Q6N__UjbAw.htmlcommunity ) I want to emphasize in this post too that Wuhan isn't some backwater town, one of the world's great food cities. Cracking jokes is a pretty normal and healthy way to deal with tragedy - the Chinese internet is awash with memes too - so even if I personally don't like some of the humor that's in this comment section, eh... whatever. We all got a different sense of humor. That said, there's a subset of these jokes that are either (1) in *very* poor taste or (2) super low effort. So while I usually am pretty anti-policing the comment section, there's just so much that kinda pisses me off here that I'm gunna go on a bit of a deleting spree. Note that thoughtful, in depth comments are never deleted, even if I disagree strongly with them. Hey guys, a few notes: 1. I screwed up and realized I forgot the dark vinegar in the narration. We added a half teaspoon per bowl. 2. Chili oil quantity is ultimately up to you. Again, homemade would be best, you're looking for something roughly between 'mild' and 'medium'. Some people eat it sans chili even, totally personal preference. I'd aim for anywhere between 1 tsp to 2 tbsp depending on what you like. We went with the lower end there primarily because the chili sauce we used there - Xianglajiang - is spicy as all hell. 3. Apparently after researching stuff for the written recipe, the proper term for "辣萝卜干" in English is 'spicy preserved radish' not 'spicy pickled radish'. Couldn't find it available on Amazon unfortunately. Again, Zha Cai would be a brilliant sub. 4. PLEASE taste your noodles as they're boiling and don't rely on our estimate of 'six minutes'. These were quite thick. If you're using Japanese ramen noodles (again, would totally be fine here), those're a little bit thinner so the time-to-al-dente would likely be a bit less. 5. As I've slept on it, I think I'm actually going to emphasize the importance of that lushui braising liquid. It's really a constant in all the good noodle shops I've been to in Wuhan and the fact that many vendors don't bother with it outside of Wuhan might be a small reason why this dish has a mediocre reputation among some. 6. As for the beef quantity in there, I'm guilty of basically eye-balling it all throughout testing. Basically, I've mostly used whatever's been cheap at the market. Having one bone with a good bit of marrow cracked open in it's quite nice and wholly recommended. Besides that, I used 100-200g of beef in each pot... some fat to the piece's ideal if you can swing it. I usually tossed a chunk of brisket in, and just ate it on the side because why not. 6. If you're a vegetarian, obviously feel free to skip the beef in the lushui. EDIT: This video's garnered a bit of attention, and there's many people that are complaining about how they'd never be able to buy the ingredients. I totally get it, sourcing's a variable. First off, if you're based in the West, check to see if you've got a Chinese supermarket in your area! You might be surprised - at least in the USA, Chinese supermarkets aren't just around the big cities on the coast, you can find some smaller grocers basically... anywhere. For all of our videos, we assume (1) a viewer that's not in China/Asia but (2) has access to a Chinese supermarket. Just the way we balance authenticity with... actually being able to cook the dish. There's a very specific Chinese supermarket in Philadelphia's Chinatown that we use as a basis - it's not the most stocked Chinese grocer (folks that have a Ranch 99, enjoy!), but is better than some of the general pan-Asian supermarkets you might see. But regardless, I get it. You might be asking if you could make this dish with stuff solely from a Western supermarket. The short answer's no (all of the dishes where that's true we put in our 'Western supermarket club' playlist), but that doesn't mean you can't make a tasty Reganmian-inspired noodle dish. Here's some potential alterations/subs... _______________________________________________ Make a lushui sub by combining water, soy sauce (Kikkoman is ok), and dark brown sugar. Add what spices you can find - I think most folks should be able to find whole cloves, bay, and cinnamon stick. If it's at all possible to find star anise and fennel seed... you'd honestly be good to go re the lushui. If you can't find all or some of those, add in a bit of powdered Chinese five spice (let's say... 1/2 tsp for each of those that you can't find). Use a bit of beef broth/beef bouillon/better than bouillon to swap for the 'extra beef' in there. Swap the wine for sake (preferably), or white wine/sherry if you've got it on hand. Alternatively, if you wanted something quick and easy, you could probably just totally swap the lushui for a mix of water/soy sauce/a touch of sake or wine/a touch of beef bouillon/dark brown sugar/five spice powder... nuke it in a bowl for a few minutes until the sugar dissolves in. Again, you'd sort of be on your own re ratios but that'll get you something passable. For the sesame paste, use tahini. I'm in the camp (though there's some that disagree) that Chinese sesame paste = tahini. If tahini's hard to source, a natural peanut butter would also be fine. Use normal soy sauce (e.g. Kikkoman) in place of dark soy sauce. Balsamic vinegar isn't a universal sub for Chinese vinegar, but could be used here. In an ideal world I'd play around with a mix of balsamic vinegar/cider vinegar/water to sub the vinegar (ratio 2:2:1?), but for the touch we're using here, straight balsamic would be fine. There is no sub for the chili oil - you can make your own with spicy chili flakes (you could make your own with blitzed cayenne or arbols if need be) and peanut oil. Alternatively, you can use some of the ever popular Laoganma chili crisps in oil - it's getting pretty popular in the USA now, and you can also buy online. You'll end up using the condiment I promise, it's much beloved for a reason: jet.com/product/LGM-Hot-Sauce-In-Jar-Spicy-74-Oz/0cbe90f572114e98a7f8bd6c1646f61d If using Laoganma, no need to add MSG, the product already contains it. For the preserved vegetable, there's not really anything that the West has on offer that could sub. Just skip it, though if you happen to have access to some Korean Kkakdugi (crunchy radish kimchi), dice it and toss it in. Otherwise, yeah nothing you can do... just skip. For the noodles... fresh Japanese ramen noodles would be ideal, but you could also play around with the whole dried-spaghetti-cooking-in-baking-soda-water trick. I think with all those alterations it wouldn't exactly be Wuhan Hot Dry Noodles, but it'd be a very similar taste and at the very least a solid bowl of noodles :)
Don’t know if there’s an easier way to find out, but do you have a playlist/list of recipes that are the simplest or fastest to make? Or like a range from most complicated to least?
With you all the way here, except on Tahini. I have both in the kitchen year after year: Tahini is raw, Chinese sesame paste is from roasted sesame seeds, and tastes like the sesame oil you cook with. Tahini doesn't! I have often thought you could fry some tahini a little bit, but never got around to it. People often use Tahini to thicken stuff, it can take up a lot of liquid. I have seen recipes that use Peanut Butter as a substitute or addition to the more expensive and rare sesame paste. I would eat these noodles cheerfully in any variation that has been mentioned here, and also in improvised bachelor versions I've made myself out of noodles plus everything in the kitchen, basically.
For everybody, who feels a little overwhelmed with this dish, given that it is actually a quick breakfast (in the street shops it doesn't takes a minute to assemble all the prepared stuff), some things can be simplified here to make it "quicker": 1) obviously, if you have good stock, that will serve for plenty of dishes. Freeze some of it in ice cube moulds, you won't need more than one or two for each dish - alternative: stock powder. 2) Use dried garlic, for optimal efficacy from a grinder. 3) I know for some this might be food heresy, but you can skip the whole noodle-drying step! Just cook them through in one go, dry well and add the sesame oil later. There's only a marginal difference in texture and taste imho, and I think apart from that the pre-cooking and drying is mostly a thing that makes it easier for the hawkers to process customers and prepare your bowl more quickly. I used to study in Wuhan and really got to love this kind of snack, I had it for breakfast virtually every single day, and explored the different ways and styles throughout the city (I found that especially the stock differs from shop to shop - my favourite one used a strong beef stock similar to the one in this video, but chicken or vegetable stock works just as well). I still make these regularly at home, and often use the shortcuts above. Enjoy
Basically, this guy, compared to other cooking shows, is showing how to make everything 'extremely properly' - on a "gourmet" level. Every country's dishes are that complicated if you want to do them extremely well. People just skip steps that are not necessary. For example, making carrot soup - an european dish. You're *supposed* to first cook the ingredients without stock for 5-10 mins, but you can just leave that step out and cook everything in the broth. Minor taste difference.
@Jason Lee i spent a few months in Wuhan and also had this dish all the time for breakfast. very little spice to it most of the time. Especially compared to the other dishes you get used to eating in that region
@Jason Lee Many cultures include spice in foods for multiple reasons, I often eat a mango with raw Thai chilis for breakfast in the morning, its light and the pepper helps boost metabolism and causes you to sweat, I find its a great way to jump start my day.
I was in Wuhan from 12/26/2019 thru September, all through the quarantine lockdown. I live in Wuhan, Wuchang District most of the year. I tried every noodle shop in my area. This is the best recipe I’ve found, by far. Be careful to not overdue the Luchuan; it will make it Hot Wet Noodles instead of Hot and Dry. The proportions are critical. Also, a good chili oil to finish it, not store bought. Make your own chili oil.
So I made these noodles using this exact recipe for the first time in February 2020. I really loved the dish and so did my husband and friend at the time. However, having never been to China and having very limited access to good, authentic, non-cantonese Chinese restaurants where I live, I was left having no idea how good what I made was. Well fastforward to tonight, a new friend of mine that's actually from Wuhan took me to a small 'mom and pop' place where it's their specialty and I am delighted to report to you guys that your re gan mian recipe is SPOT ON. I would even dare say that the dish your recipe allowed me to make was ever so slightly more flavorful than the one from the restaurant. Anyways, kudos for your work! I love you so much guys.
Almost cried with this one. 热干面 was one of my biggest highlights of my years I used to stay in Wuhan. Definitely making it tonight since I can't find this dish in Guangxi. Thank you.
@@shimeih2287 . I'm from India. In my state Odisha the outbreak is quite under control. I want the government to extend the lockdown. It's hurting the economy at $8 billion per day.
Mate, thanks so much for taking the time to capture this in such detail. I’m in the crowd of people who got addicted to reganmian for breakfast while living in Wuhan and haven’t been able to find since, anywhere in the world - and I’ve kept an eye out in the rest of China, and Chinatowns in many cities & countries in the west! While it might be a fun weekend lunch to prepare everything “properly”, I reckon I can make most of the sauce with tahini & soys & pre-bought Chinese beef stock cubes in advance and have half a chance of actually making this for breakfast (boil the noodles, toss with sauce & add-ons). The only thing I’ll miss is grabbing a bowl of it in 2 minutes flat for ~50 cents equivalent on the walk to work 😭 All your substitutes and instructions are greatly appreciated, you’ve put so much more effort into this video post-posting, it’s awesome.
Cheers, yeah that's the thing with these sorts of street food classics. Do we (1) stay true to the original taste or (2) suggest shortcuts in order to stay true to the essence of the dish - i.e. something that shouldn't take an afternoon to prepare? We figure it's probably best for us to go with the former (because I mean shit... most recipes do that latter, and that's being charitable), but yeah it's obviously something that you've want to prep the components in advance if you want it for breakfast :)
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Makes total sense - I really like your "fundamentals" approach, as once you have experience cooking you start to know what subs you can make & what shortcuts you can take. I popped down to the market and found some Malaysian black sesame spread (something like shopee.com.my/Lohas-Organic-Black-Sesame-Spread%E6%9C%89%E6%9C%BA%E9%BB%91%E8%8A%9D%E9%BA%BB%E9%9D%A2%E5%8C%85%E9%85%B1-(270gm)-i.52694458.933260848) so I'll give it a go with that. Thanks again!
This is so authentic. FYI. Some people like to add pickled green beans as well. Thank you for showing my hometown dish to the world. For those who think it's too much of work, the easiest way might be just buying a flight ticket. Cuz even for me, this is too much of work...
Cheers yeah I really like those in it too, but we wanted to keep things possible-to-source and didn't wanna tell people to go pickle their own :) There's a lot of shortcuts you could take here - e.g. bottled lushui, using roasted peanuts - but we like to try to teach things straight up and leave the shortcuts to the cook. We feel there's so much hogwash that goes around the Anglosphere that it's helpful to provide a basis for people to work off of!
Lol. Absolutely! There was no doubt you did an amazing job presenting every step and almost made all the ingredients from the scratch. You guys must have done a good amount of research. Keep up the good work!
I actually use it when I just want a quick meal. I just mix all the ingredients in a bowl and then cook noodles and add them directly to the bowl. The only time consuming part is the lushui, but I make a big batch of broth and then freeze it in ice cube trays to use whenever I need a little.
I make this all the time now… hot dry noodle are a staple for me. The concept of a hot rather than cold noodle with a dry sauce is game changing. I make them in all different flavors with whatever I have around. This kind of obsessive attention to detail with all the context has helped me really understand dishes from the other side of the world without having visited myself, and it has impacted my cooking a lot.
I've had hot dry noodles in Wuhan several times and it's my favorite breakfast in China. The taste is so amazing to me. I wish I could eat it everyday. Thanks for showing how much effort goes into making this simple looking dish.
Wow, this brings back memories. It's been almost 2 decades since I last had this stuff. In the Wuhan of my childhood, there were hundreds of ma-and-pa eateries all over the place serving variants of this simple dish. If my late grandpa was to be believed, the history of Re Gan Mian would date back to the early 1920s when Wuhan was a bustling trading port on the Yangtze river. The army of longshoremen whose job it was to carry huge bags of cargo along precarious makeshift walkways all needed a cheap yet filling, high-calorie food to get them through half a day of hard labor. Re Gan Mian, an accidental invention of an anonymous food vendor experimenting ways to make use of his leftover noodles, turned out to be perfectly suited for their needs. Before long, this working man's breakfast caught on and became one of the signature dishes of the city.
Yeah, that's basically the story we see online too. But I also see that people say a person named "蔡明纬(Cai Mingwei)" is the inventor of Reganmian, and now the Cai family owns a Reganmian chain.
I see noodle dish , I make noodle dish. I thought nothing could top the Dan Dan Noodles recipe... I still don't know. Holy cow. I was not expecting such a flavor explosion. The lu shui does so much heavy lifting for this dish but it really is a symphony of flavor explosions. Flavor fireworks. Okay this dish is better than Dan Dan Noodles... just wow. Is it acceptable to use finely crushed garlic instead of garlic water if I want more pungent garlic flavor, or do you guys think it's critical to not overpower the other flavors?
@@ruedelta Well, our mutual friend Trevor James the Food Ranger has been to places where all the condiments are just sitting out on a table and you put it yourself!
I don't understand why some people are saying this is quite the effort. It honestly sounds just as labor-intensive as making pasta alla bolognese. Hell, it even takes less time (90 minutes to braise the broth vs. 3-4 hours cooking the bolognese sauce). There's this perception that dishes with exotic/multiple ingredients are difficult and that's so weird. Look at the process. You're just cooking noodles. Putting a bunch of spices in a broth and letting it cook for an hour and a half. Then assembling everything together. Making bolognese (again) takes more skill, if we're being honest. This is a great, simple dish that you can enjoy. Nothing difficult about it.
lol no one said that bolognese is quick....as a westerner I think we just view it as difficult because we aren't familiar with a lot of these dishes and ingredients. i mean i haven't eaten anything like this, really. and i don't live in a place with a chinese supermarket/or any other...so i can't get my hands on the items.
Yeah, it's something that we get a lot... we really take pride in showing no-holds-barred recipes *attempting* (not always succeeding, of course) to mimic best-in-class restaurants/vendors/cooks here in China, so I do kinda get it. A lot of these ain't weeknight dishes. That said, I've thought about this quite a bit. I think there's three reasons why people have the 'this is difficult' impression: 1. *People unfamiliar with a cuisine have no cultural background to know what's easy/what's difficult.* It's a bit more understandable complaining about intensity for a dish like this, which you can see the vendors in Wuhan whip up in front of you in like 30 seconds (though of course that's hiding all the work they did the night before). What puzzled me is why there seemed to be so many people complaining about the intensity of something like Char Siu Bao. Like, of *course* Char Siu Bao is hard. It's fuckin Char Siu Bao. It actually bothered me for a bit - Steph worked so damn hard perfecting that recipe. And like, if you look at recipes on UA-cam for homemade sourdough bread, the comments are full of people saying stuff like "oh, so clear!" and not "too much work, I'll just buy my own, thanks". But really... to be fair, it makes sense, doesn't it? I'm pretty unfamiliar with Turkish cuisine. You randomly pick a Turkish dish out and ask me how difficult it is to cook. I've done a lot of recipe writing at this point so I might guess better than the average bear, but I bet I'd get a lot wrong. 2. *People expect foreign cuisines to 'come to them' on 'their terms'.* Imagine you wanted to open a NW-style Chinese restaurant in America. Roujiamo, Biang Biang noodles, lamb skewers, so on and so forth. You want to serve Dapanji - big plate chicken. It's a classic NW dish, and you want to show people how awesome it can be. Do you serve your Dapanji properly, cleaved across the bone? ...probably not. Even long term expats in China have issues with boney poultry dishes. Hell, it even took *me* over a year to warm up to them. People've got a lot of options for food, and maybe they'd rather choose the restaurant that *won't* require them to do some work on their end to enjoy it. The same is true of recipes. People are *way* more likely to get into someone that'll fit into their schedule on *their* terms - e.g. smashed cucumber. So that's why when you see a lot of other channels/blogs promoting Chinese food, they'll have "EASY" and "QUICK" or "SIMPLE" right there in the title. And while sometimes I'll find myself shaking my head at some 'simple' versions of dishes that *shouldn't* be simple, they're just playing the game - working with the hand they've been dealt. *We're* the stubborn ones for swimming against that current. 3. *Unfamiliarity with ingredients and techniques.* Suppose I told you "knead the dough for five minutes". Immediately, you get it. Even if you've never cooked before, it's part of the larger cultural consciousness what 'kneading' is. But suppose you grabbed a tribesman from the Andaman islands and told them to 'knead'. They'd have no idea how to attack it (note: making some assumptions here). You'd have to explain the motions step-by-step and why precisely you're doing all that. Similarly, suppose we have something like the 'rolling cut' for Chinese food. For Steph, she never had to 'learn' what a rolling cut was. You see it around you, you see your parents do it, you see it on TV. Here, I feel lead to explain what this stuff is. This's compounded by (1) unfamiliar ingredients (which may take a second to process - 'can I find that?') and (2) the way I edit these. I aim for 4-8 minute videos with pretty quick cuts... feels about right for a UA-cam video. But while it's an *efficient* way to digest a recipe, it's not necessarily the most *approachable* (which's why the written recipes are novellas haha). ...the interesting thing, of course, is that the inverse of all of this is also true - talk to a lot of Chinese people about Western food, and a number of them will talk about how overly complicated it is. A number of years back, I made homemade tomato sauce with fresh noodles from scratch for my ex and her kid (the kid loved the Italian spaghetti you get here in China). Her nanny was scratching her head the whole time - her whole reaction was "all this work for *this*?!?".
If you already have some stock, it seems pretty straightforward, most of the ingredients are in a jar or something. I live in Central Florida (which is nowhere) and can easily buy all these ingredients in more than one place. If I couldn't, I could just go to the nearest major city (Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando) to have many choices!
@@ChineseCookingDemystified i've been looking into chinese cuisine (aswell as others) and let me tell you finding the ingredientes is the harshest part. I enjoy learning new techniques and approaching new ingredients, it's exhausting but exhilarating. However.... finding those ingredients IS PAINFULLY difficult and time-consuming, so much so it pulls me back. It's just increadible how inaccesible some of the basics are. I live in Spain so double the difficulty...last day i searched in Amazon for fermented Bean paste.... They don't deliver It to Spain!!!
@@number1neek no, I'm sure it makes it! I'm always suspicious when I see Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese cooking that omits this! Ah, this specific bowl of noodles looks really attractive, it's nice to put everything neatly on top so you can see it, even if you will then mix it all up.
@@leonardpearlman4017 My thoughts exactly. There's a phobia of MSG because it's overused in processed food, just like salt is and it also has an E number. But MSG actually has a much lower sodium content than salt and it's minimum lethal dose is way lower than salt too. People should be more scared of salt 🤷♂️
@Seán Pretty sure I got this thrown at me because I liked a comment of yours on A Different Bias and you also commented here. Hope you don't mind the freaky shit I watch clogging your recommended now.
That depends on how good of a cook you are and how good your ingredients are. It could be the opposite as well, where the finished product could be so good that it felt like you're cheating. There is a lot of areas that give room for failure with a complex dish. If you do everything well, you'll go to food heaven.
I'm going to my local Chinese store right now to buy whu shang du and bing bang shon while reading the labels in Chinese. My other favorite local stores are from South Sudan, North Korea and Iceland. I live in the middle of nowhere, but these shops are all over the place.
I'm definitely gonna make this when I study in the UK. It's the icon of my city and I'm not ready to lose it yet. Thanks for the video. I really appreciate it.
Having spent my foreign semester in Wuhan, I thought re gan mian was a national dish, cool to see it's Wuhan specific! Crazy that this costs only 4-12 yuan, depending on toppings
Its a breakfast dish from my hometown. Its the best noodles of entire world. Forget spaghetti, rigattoni or any kind of other asia style fried noodles. Nothing to compare with this one. Simply the best! Re Gan Mian, i love you more than myself haha
I've been living in Wuhan and never seen they actually put peanuts there. The missing common ingredient is dou jiao, and they usually put MORE sesame sauce than that, trust me it's wayyy more tasty
Fabulous! I followed your suggestion and I was able to show to my family how amazing Wuhan HDN is. I've been to Wuhan a couple of times and this noodle experience was out of this world!
Haha in Shenzhen there's a *ton* of people from Hubei, and when we were swinging up that way the first thing everyone says is to be sure to eat some reganmian. Food in Wuhan's really quite awesome though... like, just in general. Everyone talks about reganmian, but I think Hubei food is super underrated as a whole - not just abroad but in China as well.
Feel so lucky to be able to eat this here in italy in the traditional restaurant where i work, my boss is from the city of Hubei and this dish is a best seller!
Thank you! My first year as an expat in China was in Wuhan, and reganmian from an alley shop was my breakfast almost every day. And then, after that year, I moved out of Wuhan and never found these noodles in any town in China again! I tried to re-create it, but I clearly didn't realize how many ingredients there were!
I've got that same issue. First year in China was in Wuhan and reganmian was an absolute staple, then I moved to Chongqing and I can't find it anywhere. They've got their own traditional noodle dish, xiaomian, but it's not even close to being the same. Every time I go back to visit friends in Wuhan, reganmian is practically the only thing I eat.
I love watching your videos, but I've never felt such a need to make the recipes (as most have sesame in some form and I'm allergic). This has changed that! i guess it's time to work out an alternative for sesame oil and tahini. This video is beautiful, as usual, and brings some positivity to the type of publicity Wuhan needs right now. Thank you.
UA-cam and it's crazy algorithms!! That looks so tasty.. I don't think I'm ever getting hands on half the ingredients mentioned in there.. But I'm definitely giving this a try. Hope you're doing good.. Wish you the best
Tried it - bought the ingredients from the Budapest Chinese District. Turned out AMAZING! Now it's at par with the dan dan noodles to be my favorite noodle dish
I love the way we use the same IKEA pots (365+) and obviously chopsticks also. ;) Thank you for this wonderful channel. It's a well of inspiration that never runs dry, especially for those of us who can only "visit" these places in their kitchens.
Haha our entire living room is like a damn Ikea catalog, only plus pots of bamboo. And yeah, that was always something that I'd think about watching food travel shows (e.g. Bourdain) and such in uni... all of the awesome stuff they ate seemed like distant fantasies. That's why we do try to focus on replicability without sacrificing authenticity - I want people to have the same experience and love for this cuisine that I got when I first started traveling here.
Lu shui, is that like red cooking? It seems similar. I have a gallon of that broth in my freezer I break out for red cooking every couple of months. Is that the same thing or an acceptable substitute? Beyond that this seems pretty straight forward and much less complicated than people are making it out to be. If you like Chinese cooking, a braising base in your freezer for soy sauce chicken or red cooked anything only gets better with use. And simplifies a dish like this.
Sure, extremely similar. Basically, the only difference is that (1) in red-braised stuff the sauce is thickened by reduction and (2) it uses a tangse caramel. Sometimes there's a bit of a different spice mix in lushui, but we went with the simplest bog-standard one here, so not much difference there either. You could absolutely use your leftover braising liquid for this as well.
Haha it's not too bad really, if you get yourself organized you can start and finish by the time the lushui's done. No one step's difficult per se, but it *is* a number of steps. Common sort of story with street snacks :)
OMIGAWD! You have 76,000 subscribers! I'm just so proud of you both. That's wonderful. See? Being great cooks, producing superb videos and both of you being so personable is being rewarded. I could just weep with joy. Those noodles look stunning! A perfect nighttime meal. I'm thinking I'd really love this. I adore really well made broths. I love making them with different meats or veggies. Yours is a must try~as are the dry noodles. Again~congratulations for growing so much. Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
Cheers, thanks Jenn! Growing bit by bit. These noodles could obviously be eaten any time, but the most classic's in the morning. Imagine a cold winter morning with a bowl of these in front of you, with a side of ‘egg wine' soup (think egg drop soup with some rice wine, roughly as alcoholic as a beer). Nice way to warm up before you start the day :)
Is sherry an okay substitute for Shaoxing wine ? I'm sure it's not as great but I've read it's an ok substitute if you can't have or can't find shaoxing wine. I can't find it where I live and I've read sources that say it contains wheat/gluten, which I can't have. Thanks so much... excited to make this
When making the braising base, is it acceptable to add some beef bouillon (or maybe store-bought stock) to the liquid instead of cooking the bones and meat? I mean, the flavor will probably not be quite as deep, but I think it should add at least SOME "beefiness" to the liquid. I dunno...it just seems that using the bones and meat scraps is a bit too obsessive for me, especially if it's possible to replicate the result without going there.
Sure, totally. I know a lot of beef stock in the West is heavily flavored with aromatics and such though, so just make sure it's not adding too much other stuff to the mix.
The recent comments are incredibly ignorant and stupid. Local food is local food no matter what the crisis. Looks like a lot of effort goes into making even this "street food" Thanks for the recipe and good luck dealing with the trolls who can't deal with the fact that UA-cam recommended them a video and they watched it.
Those looked like biryani spices--cloves, bay leaf, cardamom, cinnamon, star anise... Yay! I can now buy these spices because of the overlapping recipe ingredients!
@Raj Neo In England, at least, the extent of most peoples' cooking is putting something in the oven for half an hour, or browning some meat in a pan and mixing it with a premade carb and a jar of sauce etc.
This looks really good! If I can't make the beef soup/broth from the beginning, is it ok to use regular beef stock? I know it's not very authentic but I don't wanna waste food if I don't end up using it all (edit: I read the pinned comment and I can just make it in a smaller quantity :p should've figured that out, but I'm not the smartest lol)
I know I’m a year late -but when I make stocks (beef, chicken, seafood etc) I do larger batches and then I freeze the room temp stock in ice cube trays. Once frozen, I will store the cubes in gallon zip bags in my freezer! After that, I can just pull out and melt down however much stock I need for a dish.👍💖 (The stock will last about 6 months in the zipbag…but I typically do a BIG BATCH of stock and will put 1/2 the frozen cubes in a “food saver” airtight bag. The stock cubes will last well over a year in one of those bags!)
"Mom! Can I have some Wuhan hot dry noodles for breakfast tomorrow?" "Sure thing, honey! We just have to wake up at 1:30 am to get it ready." "Umm, never mind, mom, I'll just have Boo Berry cereal."
The braiding liquid should be available because you want to cook large batches of braised meat as side dishes and snacks for months, or for a decade in my case, for over 100 years in certain restaurants’ cases
Lovely looking recipe. Quick question, when separating and cooling the noodles, you coat it in sesame seed oil, but later on you dip it in water to re-heat the noodles. Would the noodles lose their sesame seed flavour, or is it more to help keep the noodles separated?
So while the noodles are cooling and resting, the oil gets absorbed a bit into the noodles. The final effect is subtle, so you could use peanut oil (Steph insists that if using peanut it must be heated first) if you prefer! The oil also helps keep the noodles separate as well.
Many thanks for the informative reply! I'm currently living in Japan and tried this at a Chinese restaurant, the owners are a Japanese/Chinese mixed family. This is one of the dishes I tried there and it was amazing! But I never knew the name because my kanji reading is terrible. Thanks for doing this one, I will definitely be trying his at home!
Hey this looks like an interesting simple dish I could make right now! Let me grab my, uhmmm, fan? Shit Im out of sesame oil. Damit, liu cheng (?) braising liquid. Don't have that don't know what it is. Oh great! Theres a recipe for it. Damit, peanut oil.......guess I'll pull out my grocery list. Ok, sesame oil, peanut oil. Got it. Ffs, sesame paste now? Ok, sesame paste it is. Next! Went to buy everything I needed for this, after hour I gave up and ended up eating at my local restaurant.
Make your own sesame paste from toasted sesame seeds. Always have sesame and peanut oils on hand, loads better than that "neutral" tasteless stuff. Liu cheng isn't really necessary, you can just use bouillon + ginger-garlic paste + grated scallion in water.
Hi, love your videos, always a trusty source for Chinese food contents online! If I can ask something, I'm really excited about la luobo gan and Chinese preserves in general. Do you know of any books or other sources that I could use to learn how to make some from scratch and get a better understanding of Chinese pickles? Thanks!
Just swap out the beef, totally fine. Most other recipes online I've seen in Chinese don't include beef, that was just sort of our personal obsessive approach to try to mimic those noodle shops... the lushui will be real tasty sans beef too :) One nice thing about doing this without beef is that you can much more easily scale down the lushui. It'll also only take about an hour for the spices to infuse into the broth.
I'm allergic to sesame... Are there any alternatives that you can suggest to use? I'm thinking peanut oil might be ok, but wondering if there are other oils that might be good to try.
That's got an insane amount of ingredients. While I would never make it myself, I would def try it if I saw it. I usually walked past them as I wasn't sure what all the stuff they put in it was.
Thank you so much! This looks super yummy. I want to make this dish tomorrow in honor of Dr. Li, but of course, I'm stuck at home and can't get ingredients for braising liquid and pickled veg. Would a dash more of vinegar help sup for the veg? For the braising liquid, could a soup stock with some spices possibly work? Thanks so much! I love your channel!
@@WumaoAnnihilator Go eat Bat Soup, bigot. Prove to me you're a lapdog to your conscience instead of your better judgement just to show that you're more afraid of being called racist than "not infected" At a time where the chinese government vehemently tries to deny everything and the probability for a deadly disease to go fully pandemic is higher than ever, it is absolutely not good to show me a video of wuhan's delicacies. I don't care how great your noodles are - this is tasteless (no the pun was not in tended) China will do everything in its power to pay off foreign press and orgs like WHO to safe its face internationally.
Yes i agree! It is our proud tradition, and our identity! Those people dont understand our ways and cultures! They think they know the best about my culture! There is nothing wrong to eat bats, and it is very delicate cuisine! We have to be proud of our culture! #yellowlivesmatter
EDIT: So this video's gotten a number of new views, and with it... comments. While you can read all my thoughts in the community tab here (ua-cam.com/channels/54SLBnD5k5U3Q6N__UjbAw.htmlcommunity ) I want to emphasize in this post too that Wuhan isn't some backwater town, one of the world's great food cities. Cracking jokes is a pretty normal and healthy way to deal with tragedy - the Chinese internet is awash with memes too - so even if I personally don't like some of the humor that's in this comment section, eh... whatever. We all got a different sense of humor. That said, there's a subset of these jokes that are either (1) in *very* poor taste or (2) super low effort. So while I usually am pretty anti-policing the comment section, there's just so much that kinda pisses me off here that I'm gunna go on a bit of a deleting spree.
Note that thoughtful, in depth comments are never deleted, even if I disagree strongly with them.
Hey guys, a few notes:
1. I screwed up and realized I forgot the dark vinegar in the narration. We added a half teaspoon per bowl.
2. Chili oil quantity is ultimately up to you. Again, homemade would be best, you're looking for something roughly between 'mild' and 'medium'. Some people eat it sans chili even, totally personal preference. I'd aim for anywhere between 1 tsp to 2 tbsp depending on what you like. We went with the lower end there primarily because the chili sauce we used there - Xianglajiang - is spicy as all hell.
3. Apparently after researching stuff for the written recipe, the proper term for "辣萝卜干" in English is 'spicy preserved radish' not 'spicy pickled radish'. Couldn't find it available on Amazon unfortunately. Again, Zha Cai would be a brilliant sub.
4. PLEASE taste your noodles as they're boiling and don't rely on our estimate of 'six minutes'. These were quite thick. If you're using Japanese ramen noodles (again, would totally be fine here), those're a little bit thinner so the time-to-al-dente would likely be a bit less.
5. As I've slept on it, I think I'm actually going to emphasize the importance of that lushui braising liquid. It's really a constant in all the good noodle shops I've been to in Wuhan and the fact that many vendors don't bother with it outside of Wuhan might be a small reason why this dish has a mediocre reputation among some.
6. As for the beef quantity in there, I'm guilty of basically eye-balling it all throughout testing. Basically, I've mostly used whatever's been cheap at the market. Having one bone with a good bit of marrow cracked open in it's quite nice and wholly recommended. Besides that, I used 100-200g of beef in each pot... some fat to the piece's ideal if you can swing it. I usually tossed a chunk of brisket in, and just ate it on the side because why not.
6. If you're a vegetarian, obviously feel free to skip the beef in the lushui.
EDIT: This video's garnered a bit of attention, and there's many people that are complaining about how they'd never be able to buy the ingredients. I totally get it, sourcing's a variable. First off, if you're based in the West, check to see if you've got a Chinese supermarket in your area! You might be surprised - at least in the USA, Chinese supermarkets aren't just around the big cities on the coast, you can find some smaller grocers basically... anywhere.
For all of our videos, we assume (1) a viewer that's not in China/Asia but (2) has access to a Chinese supermarket. Just the way we balance authenticity with... actually being able to cook the dish. There's a very specific Chinese supermarket in Philadelphia's Chinatown that we use as a basis - it's not the most stocked Chinese grocer (folks that have a Ranch 99, enjoy!), but is better than some of the general pan-Asian supermarkets you might see.
But regardless, I get it. You might be asking if you could make this dish with stuff solely from a Western supermarket. The short answer's no (all of the dishes where that's true we put in our 'Western supermarket club' playlist), but that doesn't mean you can't make a tasty Reganmian-inspired noodle dish. Here's some potential alterations/subs...
_______________________________________________
Make a lushui sub by combining water, soy sauce (Kikkoman is ok), and dark brown sugar. Add what spices you can find - I think most folks should be able to find whole cloves, bay, and cinnamon stick. If it's at all possible to find star anise and fennel seed... you'd honestly be good to go re the lushui. If you can't find all or some of those, add in a bit of powdered Chinese five spice (let's say... 1/2 tsp for each of those that you can't find). Use a bit of beef broth/beef bouillon/better than bouillon to swap for the 'extra beef' in there. Swap the wine for sake (preferably), or white wine/sherry if you've got it on hand.
Alternatively, if you wanted something quick and easy, you could probably just totally swap the lushui for a mix of water/soy sauce/a touch of sake or wine/a touch of beef bouillon/dark brown sugar/five spice powder... nuke it in a bowl for a few minutes until the sugar dissolves in. Again, you'd sort of be on your own re ratios but that'll get you something passable.
For the sesame paste, use tahini. I'm in the camp (though there's some that disagree) that Chinese sesame paste = tahini. If tahini's hard to source, a natural peanut butter would also be fine.
Use normal soy sauce (e.g. Kikkoman) in place of dark soy sauce.
Balsamic vinegar isn't a universal sub for Chinese vinegar, but could be used here. In an ideal world I'd play around with a mix of balsamic vinegar/cider vinegar/water to sub the vinegar (ratio 2:2:1?), but for the touch we're using here, straight balsamic would be fine.
There is no sub for the chili oil - you can make your own with spicy chili flakes (you could make your own with blitzed cayenne or arbols if need be) and peanut oil. Alternatively, you can use some of the ever popular Laoganma chili crisps in oil - it's getting pretty popular in the USA now, and you can also buy online. You'll end up using the condiment I promise, it's much beloved for a reason: jet.com/product/LGM-Hot-Sauce-In-Jar-Spicy-74-Oz/0cbe90f572114e98a7f8bd6c1646f61d
If using Laoganma, no need to add MSG, the product already contains it.
For the preserved vegetable, there's not really anything that the West has on offer that could sub. Just skip it, though if you happen to have access to some Korean Kkakdugi (crunchy radish kimchi), dice it and toss it in. Otherwise, yeah nothing you can do... just skip.
For the noodles... fresh Japanese ramen noodles would be ideal, but you could also play around with the whole dried-spaghetti-cooking-in-baking-soda-water trick.
I think with all those alterations it wouldn't exactly be Wuhan Hot Dry Noodles, but it'd be a very similar taste and at the very least a solid bowl of noodles :)
At this point, you should just remake the video lmao
Don’t know if there’s an easier way to find out, but do you have a playlist/list of recipes that are the simplest or fastest to make? Or like a range from most complicated to least?
The Wuhan Hot dry noodle use the sesame paste mixed with sesame oil instead of water.
I don't think you've figured out yet that even your screw-ups are amazingly delicious.
With you all the way here, except on Tahini. I have both in the kitchen year after year: Tahini is raw, Chinese sesame paste is from roasted sesame seeds, and tastes like the sesame oil you cook with. Tahini doesn't! I have often thought you could fry some tahini a little bit, but never got around to it. People often use Tahini to thicken stuff, it can take up a lot of liquid. I have seen recipes that use Peanut Butter as a substitute or addition to the more expensive and rare sesame paste. I would eat these noodles cheerfully in any variation that has been mentioned here, and also in improvised bachelor versions I've made myself out of noodles plus everything in the kitchen, basically.
For everybody, who feels a little overwhelmed with this dish, given that it is actually a quick breakfast (in the street shops it doesn't takes a minute to assemble all the prepared stuff), some things can be simplified here to make it "quicker":
1) obviously, if you have good stock, that will serve for plenty of dishes. Freeze some of it in ice cube moulds, you won't need more than one or two for each dish - alternative: stock powder.
2) Use dried garlic, for optimal efficacy from a grinder.
3) I know for some this might be food heresy, but you can skip the whole noodle-drying step! Just cook them through in one go, dry well and add the sesame oil later. There's only a marginal difference in texture and taste imho, and I think apart from that the pre-cooking and drying is mostly a thing that makes it easier for the hawkers to process customers and prepare your bowl more quickly.
I used to study in Wuhan and really got to love this kind of snack, I had it for breakfast virtually every single day, and explored the different ways and styles throughout the city (I found that especially the stock differs from shop to shop - my favourite one used a strong beef stock similar to the one in this video, but chicken or vegetable stock works just as well). I still make these regularly at home, and often use the shortcuts above. Enjoy
Basically, this guy, compared to other cooking shows, is showing how to make everything 'extremely properly' - on a "gourmet" level. Every country's dishes are that complicated if you want to do them extremely well. People just skip steps that are not necessary.
For example, making carrot soup - an european dish. You're *supposed* to first cook the ingredients without stock for 5-10 mins, but you can just leave that step out and cook everything in the broth. Minor taste difference.
@Jason Lee i spent a few months in Wuhan and also had this dish all the time for breakfast. very little spice to it most of the time. Especially compared to the other dishes you get used to eating in that region
@Jason Lee This dish is never meant to be necessarily spicy, all ingredients besides sesame paste and noodles are optional.
@Jason Lee honestly just depends if you're accustomed to it, sichuan people would have no issue
@Jason Lee Many cultures include spice in foods for multiple reasons, I often eat a mango with raw Thai chilis for breakfast in the morning, its light and the pepper helps boost metabolism and causes you to sweat, I find its a great way to jump start my day.
Wuhan: Coronavirus outbreak
UA-cam algorithms: How about Wuhan hot dry noodles
I mean they taste good so why not?
Hot to go with your fever, dry to go with that matching cough.
@@MajorIronwood lol
Why not? aWESOME food
@@MajorIronwood 😂😂😂
I was in Wuhan from 12/26/2019 thru September, all through the quarantine lockdown. I live in Wuhan, Wuchang District most of the year. I tried every noodle shop in my area. This is the best recipe I’ve found, by far. Be careful to not overdue the Luchuan; it will make it Hot Wet Noodles instead of Hot and Dry. The proportions are critical. Also, a good chili oil to finish it, not store bought. Make your own chili oil.
So I made these noodles using this exact recipe for the first time in February 2020. I really loved the dish and so did my husband and friend at the time. However, having never been to China and having very limited access to good, authentic, non-cantonese Chinese restaurants where I live, I was left having no idea how good what I made was. Well fastforward to tonight, a new friend of mine that's actually from Wuhan took me to a small 'mom and pop' place where it's their specialty and I am delighted to report to you guys that your re gan mian recipe is SPOT ON. I would even dare say that the dish your recipe allowed me to make was ever so slightly more flavorful than the one from the restaurant. Anyways, kudos for your work! I love you so much guys.
Got this vid in my recommendation and just by reading the title I was like: Oh god no, I already know how the comment section's gonna be
peepocozy
Almost cried with this one. 热干面 was one of my biggest highlights of my years I used to stay in Wuhan. Definitely making it tonight since I can't find this dish in Guangxi. Thank you.
Are you alive?
@@doctorpanigrahi9975 I'm grateful to be. How is the fight wherever you are?
@@shimeih2287 . I'm from India. In my state Odisha the outbreak is quite under control. I want the government to extend the lockdown. It's hurting the economy at $8 billion per day.
I think this Indian guy is jealous of Wuhan for no cases for 3months already when india is a shithole
Oh UA-cam's algorithms, please never change.
Oh they won't brother
I hope they never recommended me this poison that they try to pass as food
@@mrfoodskater It's actually pretty tasty. Don't let some bad things that came out of Wuhan discourage you from trying good food.
Jackson Walter no thanks I’d rather not eat poison 💀💀💀
Jackson Walter nothing to do with wuhan everything to do with how they cook food
Mate, thanks so much for taking the time to capture this in such detail. I’m in the crowd of people who got addicted to reganmian for breakfast while living in Wuhan and haven’t been able to find since, anywhere in the world - and I’ve kept an eye out in the rest of China, and Chinatowns in many cities & countries in the west! While it might be a fun weekend lunch to prepare everything “properly”, I reckon I can make most of the sauce with tahini & soys & pre-bought Chinese beef stock cubes in advance and have half a chance of actually making this for breakfast (boil the noodles, toss with sauce & add-ons). The only thing I’ll miss is grabbing a bowl of it in 2 minutes flat for ~50 cents equivalent on the walk to work 😭 All your substitutes and instructions are greatly appreciated, you’ve put so much more effort into this video post-posting, it’s awesome.
Cheers, yeah that's the thing with these sorts of street food classics. Do we (1) stay true to the original taste or (2) suggest shortcuts in order to stay true to the essence of the dish - i.e. something that shouldn't take an afternoon to prepare? We figure it's probably best for us to go with the former (because I mean shit... most recipes do that latter, and that's being charitable), but yeah it's obviously something that you've want to prep the components in advance if you want it for breakfast :)
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Makes total sense - I really like your "fundamentals" approach, as once you have experience cooking you start to know what subs you can make & what shortcuts you can take. I popped down to the market and found some Malaysian black sesame spread (something like shopee.com.my/Lohas-Organic-Black-Sesame-Spread%E6%9C%89%E6%9C%BA%E9%BB%91%E8%8A%9D%E9%BA%BB%E9%9D%A2%E5%8C%85%E9%85%B1-(270gm)-i.52694458.933260848) so I'll give it a go with that. Thanks again!
This is so authentic. FYI. Some people like to add pickled green beans as well. Thank you for showing my hometown dish to the world. For those who think it's too much of work, the easiest way might be just buying a flight ticket. Cuz even for me, this is too much of work...
Cheers yeah I really like those in it too, but we wanted to keep things possible-to-source and didn't wanna tell people to go pickle their own :)
There's a lot of shortcuts you could take here - e.g. bottled lushui, using roasted peanuts - but we like to try to teach things straight up and leave the shortcuts to the cook. We feel there's so much hogwash that goes around the Anglosphere that it's helpful to provide a basis for people to work off of!
Lol. Absolutely! There was no doubt you did an amazing job presenting every step and almost made all the ingredients from the scratch. You guys must have done a good amount of research. Keep up the good work!
I actually use it when I just want a quick meal. I just mix all the ingredients in a bowl and then cook noodles and add them directly to the bowl. The only time consuming part is the lushui, but I make a big batch of broth and then freeze it in ice cube trays to use whenever I need a little.
I don't think anyone is taking a flight .. to Wuhan .. or anywhere else .. for a long time! :(
@@discoguru8363 I'm from the future and now Wuhan is safer than the entire US (from COVID-19, of course)
I make this all the time now… hot dry noodle are a staple for me. The concept of a hot rather than cold noodle with a dry sauce is game changing. I make them in all different flavors with whatever I have around. This kind of obsessive attention to detail with all the context has helped me really understand dishes from the other side of the world without having visited myself, and it has impacted my cooking a lot.
This Wuhan noodle is to die for.
@Skywalker Animations yes funny
@Skywalker Animations yes funny
@Skywalker Animations yes funny
@Skywalker Animations yes funny
Let’s hope that the Chinese will rise up and oust the Communist Party.
I've had hot dry noodles in Wuhan several times and it's my favorite breakfast in China. The taste is so amazing to me. I wish I could eat it everyday. Thanks for showing how much effort goes into making this simple looking dish.
Wow, this brings back memories. It's been almost 2 decades since I last had this stuff. In the Wuhan of my childhood, there were hundreds of ma-and-pa eateries all over the place serving variants of this simple dish. If my late grandpa was to be believed, the history of Re Gan Mian would date back to the early 1920s when Wuhan was a bustling trading port on the Yangtze river. The army of longshoremen whose job it was to carry huge bags of cargo along precarious makeshift walkways all needed a cheap yet filling, high-calorie food to get them through half a day of hard labor. Re Gan Mian, an accidental invention of an anonymous food vendor experimenting ways to make use of his leftover noodles, turned out to be perfectly suited for their needs. Before long, this working man's breakfast caught on and became one of the signature dishes of the city.
Yeah, that's basically the story we see online too. But I also see that people say a person named "蔡明纬(Cai Mingwei)" is the inventor of Reganmian, and now the Cai family owns a Reganmian chain.
I see noodle dish , I make noodle dish. I thought nothing could top the Dan Dan Noodles recipe...
I still don't know. Holy cow. I was not expecting such a flavor explosion. The lu shui does so much heavy lifting for this dish but it really is a symphony of flavor explosions. Flavor fireworks. Okay this dish is better than Dan Dan Noodles... just wow. Is it acceptable to use finely crushed garlic instead of garlic water if I want more pungent garlic flavor, or do you guys think it's critical to not overpower the other flavors?
Awesome, glad to hear it came out well! I don't think crushed garlic would be out of place or anything, feel free to play around with it :)
This comment gave me life!!
I'll attempt to make this noodle dish this weekend!!
The dish over here is very flexible when you order it. Feel free to add or remove whatever you want.
@@ruedelta Well, our mutual friend Trevor James the Food Ranger has been to places where all the condiments are just sitting out on a table and you put it yourself!
we evolved liking fermented food
I don't understand why some people are saying this is quite the effort. It honestly sounds just as labor-intensive as making pasta alla bolognese. Hell, it even takes less time (90 minutes to braise the broth vs. 3-4 hours cooking the bolognese sauce).
There's this perception that dishes with exotic/multiple ingredients are difficult and that's so weird. Look at the process. You're just cooking noodles. Putting a bunch of spices in a broth and letting it cook for an hour and a half. Then assembling everything together. Making bolognese (again) takes more skill, if we're being honest.
This is a great, simple dish that you can enjoy. Nothing difficult about it.
lol no one said that bolognese is quick....as a westerner I think we just view it as difficult because we aren't familiar with a lot of these dishes and ingredients. i mean i haven't eaten anything like this, really. and i don't live in a place with a chinese supermarket/or any other...so i can't get my hands on the items.
Yeah, it's something that we get a lot... we really take pride in showing no-holds-barred recipes *attempting* (not always succeeding, of course) to mimic best-in-class restaurants/vendors/cooks here in China, so I do kinda get it. A lot of these ain't weeknight dishes.
That said, I've thought about this quite a bit. I think there's three reasons why people have the 'this is difficult' impression:
1. *People unfamiliar with a cuisine have no cultural background to know what's easy/what's difficult.*
It's a bit more understandable complaining about intensity for a dish like this, which you can see the vendors in Wuhan whip up in front of you in like 30 seconds (though of course that's hiding all the work they did the night before). What puzzled me is why there seemed to be so many people complaining about the intensity of something like Char Siu Bao.
Like, of *course* Char Siu Bao is hard. It's fuckin Char Siu Bao. It actually bothered me for a bit - Steph worked so damn hard perfecting that recipe. And like, if you look at recipes on UA-cam for homemade sourdough bread, the comments are full of people saying stuff like "oh, so clear!" and not "too much work, I'll just buy my own, thanks".
But really... to be fair, it makes sense, doesn't it? I'm pretty unfamiliar with Turkish cuisine. You randomly pick a Turkish dish out and ask me how difficult it is to cook. I've done a lot of recipe writing at this point so I might guess better than the average bear, but I bet I'd get a lot wrong.
2. *People expect foreign cuisines to 'come to them' on 'their terms'.*
Imagine you wanted to open a NW-style Chinese restaurant in America. Roujiamo, Biang Biang noodles, lamb skewers, so on and so forth. You want to serve Dapanji - big plate chicken. It's a classic NW dish, and you want to show people how awesome it can be.
Do you serve your Dapanji properly, cleaved across the bone?
...probably not. Even long term expats in China have issues with boney poultry dishes. Hell, it even took *me* over a year to warm up to them. People've got a lot of options for food, and maybe they'd rather choose the restaurant that *won't* require them to do some work on their end to enjoy it.
The same is true of recipes. People are *way* more likely to get into someone that'll fit into their schedule on *their* terms - e.g. smashed cucumber. So that's why when you see a lot of other channels/blogs promoting Chinese food, they'll have "EASY" and "QUICK" or "SIMPLE" right there in the title.
And while sometimes I'll find myself shaking my head at some 'simple' versions of dishes that *shouldn't* be simple, they're just playing the game - working with the hand they've been dealt. *We're* the stubborn ones for swimming against that current.
3. *Unfamiliarity with ingredients and techniques.*
Suppose I told you "knead the dough for five minutes". Immediately, you get it. Even if you've never cooked before, it's part of the larger cultural consciousness what 'kneading' is.
But suppose you grabbed a tribesman from the Andaman islands and told them to 'knead'. They'd have no idea how to attack it (note: making some assumptions here). You'd have to explain the motions step-by-step and why precisely you're doing all that.
Similarly, suppose we have something like the 'rolling cut' for Chinese food. For Steph, she never had to 'learn' what a rolling cut was. You see it around you, you see your parents do it, you see it on TV. Here, I feel lead to explain what this stuff is.
This's compounded by (1) unfamiliar ingredients (which may take a second to process - 'can I find that?') and (2) the way I edit these. I aim for 4-8 minute videos with pretty quick cuts... feels about right for a UA-cam video. But while it's an *efficient* way to digest a recipe, it's not necessarily the most *approachable* (which's why the written recipes are novellas haha).
...the interesting thing, of course, is that the inverse of all of this is also true - talk to a lot of Chinese people about Western food, and a number of them will talk about how overly complicated it is. A number of years back, I made homemade tomato sauce with fresh noodles from scratch for my ex and her kid (the kid loved the Italian spaghetti you get here in China). Her nanny was scratching her head the whole time - her whole reaction was "all this work for *this*?!?".
If you already have some stock, it seems pretty straightforward, most of the ingredients are in a jar or something. I live in Central Florida (which is nowhere) and can easily buy all these ingredients in more than one place. If I couldn't, I could just go to the nearest major city (Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando) to have many choices!
@@ChineseCookingDemystified i've been looking into chinese cuisine (aswell as others) and let me tell you finding the ingredientes is the harshest part. I enjoy learning new techniques and approaching new ingredients, it's exhausting but exhilarating. However.... finding those ingredients IS PAINFULLY difficult and time-consuming, so much so it pulls me back. It's just increadible how inaccesible some of the basics are. I live in Spain so double the difficulty...last day i searched in Amazon for fermented Bean paste.... They don't deliver It to Spain!!!
It's about familiarity with the ingredients
Sad what has happened to Wuhan. Hope that the city would recover
Ghost town yet.
that city was in bad shape for a while before this. Often time when you saw pictures of how bad Chinese pollution is it came from there
*And now they've officially confirmed no new cases in the past 48 hours*
Now they are lifting the quarantine partially, as we Americans look towards a rush of cases lol
@@CaptainAlliance What! Is that the red commie Chinese info? If so, why would you believe them?
4:58 All natural purified seaweed crystal, you are killing it!😭
Lmao!
all natty brah
Are you saying that adding MSG kills the dish?
@@number1neek no, I'm sure it makes it! I'm always suspicious when I see Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese cooking that omits this! Ah, this specific bowl of noodles looks really attractive, it's nice to put everything neatly on top so you can see it, even if you will then mix it all up.
@@leonardpearlman4017 My thoughts exactly. There's a phobia of MSG because it's overused in processed food, just like salt is and it also has an E number. But MSG actually has a much lower sodium content than salt and it's minimum lethal dose is way lower than salt too. People should be more scared of salt 🤷♂️
Looks like this vid has gone viral squared.
Just like wuhan
I see what you did there you cheeky lil' tart.
Get out.
@Seán Pretty sure I got this thrown at me because I liked a comment of yours on A Different Bias and you also commented here. Hope you don't mind the freaky shit I watch clogging your recommended now.
Man these noodles aren't the only thing that are hot and dry now
a fellow traveller I see
I was so confused when I read ”13 years ago”, I had to check when this video was uploaded lmao.
From whuan
*cough*
@@pbjracing14yearsago49 13 years ago?!
Who is never going to make this? ;)
You need to make it. Just. Do. It.
Don't skip or replace anything, do it exactly like the video and you will be rewarded :>
Except for 卤水(lu-shui), all the other sauces or ingredients can be found easily in Chinese supermarket.
That depends on how good of a cook you are and how good your ingredients are. It could be the opposite as well, where the finished product could be so good that it felt like you're cheating.
There is a lot of areas that give room for failure with a complex dish. If you do everything well, you'll go to food heaven.
I'm going to my local Chinese store right now to buy whu shang du and bing bang shon while reading the labels in Chinese. My other favorite local stores are from South Sudan, North Korea and Iceland. I live in the middle of nowhere, but these shops are all over the place.
@@squirrelknight9768 Its not a vegetarian dish if one of the sauce is made with meat.
I'm definitely gonna make this when I study in the UK.
It's the icon of my city and I'm not ready to lose it yet. Thanks for the video. I really appreciate it.
I'd go to Wuhan for the proper experience, but for now it'd be a much safer bet to just make this at home.
When the epidemic is over, welcome to wuhan, I can be a tour guide
I'd go just for the food.
3 months later, Wuhan is safer than the rest of the world
cant have the full experience if you dont eat the raw bat soup breh
Months later, Wuhan was hit by a boomerang.
Having spent my foreign semester in Wuhan, I thought re gan mian was a national dish, cool to see it's Wuhan specific!
Crazy that this costs only 4-12 yuan, depending on toppings
Oh dear, that is so cheap. I need to go travel to China when this whole quarantine thing is over...
Its a breakfast dish from my hometown. Its the best noodles of entire world. Forget spaghetti, rigattoni or any kind of other asia style fried noodles. Nothing to compare with this one. Simply the best! Re Gan Mian, i love you more than myself haha
看到武汉人也是不容易，个板马
I've been living in Wuhan and never seen they actually put peanuts there. The missing common ingredient is dou jiao, and they usually put MORE sesame sauce than that, trust me it's wayyy more tasty
Your Chinese pronouciation is superb. Applause from a Wuhanese.
Timmy Zhou you English is great bro 💯
Tell your fellow citizens to stop eating at wet markets
@@JTCFC1 Don't believe the bullshit media says about wet markets.
Vontez get the fuck out ya goddamn oily hair no good hand sanitizer drinker.
Arw you alive yet
Fabulous! I followed your suggestion and I was able to show to my family how amazing Wuhan HDN is. I've been to Wuhan a couple of times and this noodle experience was out of this world!
Damn, now I have to buy a fan. I will call it the breakfast fan.
Man i love chinese culture, i feel like its catching on a global scale.
China sure doesn't, beyond the money it makes. Their cultural revolution really fucked things up.
@@jackhazardous4008 r/wooooooosh
@@abra2133 Who let you out of your cave redditor
@@jackhazardous4008 r/whoooooooooosh
🤣🤣🤣
*Everyone searching for Coronavirus*
UA-cam: "Yall want some wuhan noodles?"
Everyone: "Um.. yeah sure"
Eh, it’s not the noodles fault!
….just don’t use the “bat meat” from there. Lol
Wow this is truly the most authentic cooking channel ever !
Thanks for another amazing recipe. Just made it this morning. Delicious!
Cheers, good to finally get a nice comment under this video :) Great noodle dish, right?
Thank you for sharing all these wonderful recipes.
I would love to see your take on Dry Beef Hor Fun (干炒牛河)!
Best regards from Holland.
It's my hometown famous breakfast !!! Everyone in Wuhan love it very much! HAHAHA........
Haha in Shenzhen there's a *ton* of people from Hubei, and when we were swinging up that way the first thing everyone says is to be sure to eat some reganmian.
Food in Wuhan's really quite awesome though... like, just in general. Everyone talks about reganmian, but I think Hubei food is super underrated as a whole - not just abroad but in China as well.
Believe me, Wuhan people have great passion in food :) reganmian is absolutely on the top of our list.
@@judithl5672 我記得武漢的熱乾麵很好吃，還有武漢人也非常友好。嗯^_^
Still alive?
judith, please leave a word, that you and your family and your dogs survived the virus?
It's awesome that you contain the recipe separately. I'm definitely going to do some of the stuff you've shown on the channel. It all looks wonderful.
I've been making sesame sauce all my life and I never knew you add the water in slowly, I just dump a whole bunch and mix xD
For sure you make the best and most authentic Hot Dry Noodles I've ever seen on UA-cam.
y'know, i kinda expected the comment section to be coronavirus jokes.... i am not disappointed.
I came straight to the comments section
Feel so lucky to be able to eat this here in italy in the traditional restaurant where i work, my boss is from the city of Hubei and this dish is a best seller!
I'm sooooo hungry. Thanks from the Netherlands
Thank you! My first year as an expat in China was in Wuhan, and reganmian from an alley shop was my breakfast almost every day. And then, after that year, I moved out of Wuhan and never found these noodles in any town in China again! I tried to re-create it, but I clearly didn't realize how many ingredients there were!
I've got that same issue. First year in China was in Wuhan and reganmian was an absolute staple, then I moved to Chongqing and I can't find it anywhere. They've got their own traditional noodle dish, xiaomian, but it's not even close to being the same. Every time I go back to visit friends in Wuhan, reganmian is practically the only thing I eat.
I love watching your videos, but I've never felt such a need to make the recipes (as most have sesame in some form and I'm allergic). This has changed that! i guess it's time to work out an alternative for sesame oil and tahini.
This video is beautiful, as usual, and brings some positivity to the type of publicity Wuhan needs right now. Thank you.
Why the heck am I watching food videos at 3 AM ... again?
I’ll probably go to China later this year. Never been to Wuhan but I’ll definitely try this when I go.
This is one of the best channels out there
"All-natural purified seaweed crystals."
Nice. :P
UA-cam and it's crazy algorithms!! That looks so tasty.. I don't think I'm ever getting hands on half the ingredients mentioned in there.. But I'm definitely giving this a try. Hope you're doing good.. Wish you the best
My girlfriend is from Wuhan and often talks about these as "breakfast noodles". I think I'll try and surprise her with this recipe.
Ah awesome, let me know how it turns out!
@@ChineseCookingDemystified he failed
Eric Barnett wish I had a reason to make this, or even an excuse will do.
@@firstnamelastname9646 Just make it because it looks good? Isn't that the best excuse? :D
When I first clicked, I thought, "Wow, this seems simple." I'm exhausted just watching the guy make it.
I get this on my campus and always wanted to know how to make it....thank you, thank you, thank you.
Tried it - bought the ingredients from the Budapest Chinese District. Turned out AMAZING! Now it's at par with the dan dan noodles to be my favorite noodle dish
I think I should go to Wuhan to get the real deal. Can't wait!
good luck bro
love the authenticity and completeness of your videos. thank you
Why is this being recommended to me. Especially with the Viral epidemic it's like UA-cam is taking the piss
Rite!!
Although i watched the whole thing, 3 ads and left this comment so the yt algorithm worked ... i guess!?
The quality of the video is exquisite. Keep them up.
Man These spices are so expensive over here! Especially if you want good quality freshly packed ware! 🇩🇪 Keep healtsy!
same 😭
The cooking tips for the noodles are excellent! Thank you for that and for the great video.
That looks really authentic. Wuhanese approved.
Hope you and everyone you know is safe and healthy :)
Omg it’s been years since I’ve had these in Wuhan and I haven’t been able to get them out of my head. So excited to make them!
I find UA-cam algorithms genuinely.... AMUSING
Me and you both man, but I hope you can make this dish... remember that there's a great city there with awesome culture.
Same
I love this channel, and this looks fantastic!
Looks delicious but I know I'm too lazy to ever cook this myself
I love the way we use the same IKEA pots (365+) and obviously chopsticks also. ;)
Thank you for this wonderful channel. It's a well of inspiration that never runs dry, especially for those of us who can only "visit" these places in their kitchens.
Haha our entire living room is like a damn Ikea catalog, only plus pots of bamboo.
And yeah, that was always something that I'd think about watching food travel shows (e.g. Bourdain) and such in uni... all of the awesome stuff they ate seemed like distant fantasies. That's why we do try to focus on replicability without sacrificing authenticity - I want people to have the same experience and love for this cuisine that I got when I first started traveling here.
I just came here for the covid jokes
Lu shui, is that like red cooking? It seems similar. I have a gallon of that broth in my freezer I break out for red cooking every couple of months. Is that the same thing or an acceptable substitute? Beyond that this seems pretty straight forward and much less complicated than people are making it out to be.
If you like Chinese cooking, a braising base in your freezer for soy sauce chicken or red cooked anything only gets better with use. And simplifies a dish like this.
Sure, extremely similar. Basically, the only difference is that (1) in red-braised stuff the sauce is thickened by reduction and (2) it uses a tangse caramel. Sometimes there's a bit of a different spice mix in lushui, but we went with the simplest bog-standard one here, so not much difference there either. You could absolutely use your leftover braising liquid for this as well.
This might take me roughly a week to make but I am up for it!
Haha it's not too bad really, if you get yourself organized you can start and finish by the time the lushui's done. No one step's difficult per se, but it *is* a number of steps. Common sort of story with street snacks :)
My actual problem here is....where dafuq am I supposed to find all that stuff? ahahaha
You should be able to find all of those ingredients at a Chinese supermarket! They're all around in the USA/Western Europe.
In italy I used to have a Chinese supermarket every 30m, unfortunately now that I'm in Switzerland, there's only Thai shops : (. I'll try tho.
Man if I knew about this channel back in 2015...
Awesome content keep it going
搞出了鬼，武漢伢跟你學起做熱幹面！🤣👍
Tennis Fan 这很正常啊。我原来在学生宿舍学看Gordon Ramsay做牛排的时候，旁边一个local小哥看着UA-cam做热干面！我到现在都没尝试过😂
OMIGAWD! You have 76,000 subscribers! I'm just so proud of you both. That's wonderful. See? Being great cooks, producing superb videos and both of you being so personable is being rewarded. I could just weep with joy.
Those noodles look stunning! A perfect nighttime meal. I'm thinking I'd really love this. I adore really well made broths. I love making them with different meats or veggies. Yours is a must try~as are the dry noodles.
Again~congratulations for growing so much.
Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
Cheers, thanks Jenn! Growing bit by bit.
These noodles could obviously be eaten any time, but the most classic's in the morning. Imagine a cold winter morning with a bowl of these in front of you, with a side of ‘egg wine' soup (think egg drop soup with some rice wine, roughly as alcoholic as a beer). Nice way to warm up before you start the day :)
@@ChineseCookingDemystified
You made my mouth water, 😂!
Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
I thought this was supposed to demystify Chinese cooking!
Now you know how to make Reganmian!
Didn't it?
Is sherry an okay substitute for Shaoxing wine
? I'm sure it's not as great but I've read it's an ok substitute if you can't have or can't find shaoxing wine. I can't find it where I live and I've read sources that say it contains wheat/gluten, which I can't have. Thanks so much... excited to make this
also, could I use indian black cardamom? or is it better to skip if I don't have chinese cardamom? thanks
@@panterxbeats You can sub the wine with sherry. As for cardamom, you can just skip it~
@@thisissteph9834 thank you steph!
Just admit it. After clicking, we all came straight to the comments section.
When making the braising base, is it acceptable to add some beef bouillon (or maybe store-bought stock) to the liquid instead of cooking the bones and meat? I mean, the flavor will probably not be quite as deep, but I think it should add at least SOME "beefiness" to the liquid. I dunno...it just seems that using the bones and meat scraps is a bit too obsessive for me, especially if it's possible to replicate the result without going there.
Sure, totally. I know a lot of beef stock in the West is heavily flavored with aromatics and such though, so just make sure it's not adding too much other stuff to the mix.
The recent comments are incredibly ignorant and stupid. Local food is local food no matter what the crisis.
Looks like a lot of effort goes into making even this "street food"
Thanks for the recipe and good luck dealing with the trolls who can't deal with the fact that UA-cam recommended them a video and they watched it.
if you saw a video titled "Chernobyl Borscht" i'm sure you'd have at least one cheeky comment
@@Σατανας666 you thought it was important
@@Σατανας666 your name is the the deaner
your racist headass aint welcomed here
watching this while hungry in the middle of the night was not the play, this looks amazing
Holy crap and I thought only Indian cooking need tons of ingredients.
Those looked like biryani spices--cloves, bay leaf, cardamom, cinnamon, star anise... Yay! I can now buy these spices because of the overlapping recipe ingredients!
@@jsung352 Those combination of spices used in the video (minus the sichuan pepper) is what is referred to as garam masala! (when made into a powder)
@@roardinoson7 Thanks for the info. I freaking lo~ve Indian food and want to learn more about it!👍
@Raj Neo In England, at least, the extent of most peoples' cooking is putting something in the oven for half an hour, or browning some meat in a pan and mixing it with a premade carb and a jar of sauce etc.
@@roardinoson7 good to know, that might save a lot of time
This looks really good! If I can't make the beef soup/broth from the beginning, is it ok to use regular beef stock? I know it's not very authentic but I don't wanna waste food if I don't end up using it all (edit: I read the pinned comment and I can just make it in a smaller quantity :p should've figured that out, but I'm not the smartest lol)
I know I’m a year late -but when I make stocks (beef, chicken, seafood etc) I do larger batches and then I freeze the room temp stock in ice cube trays.
Once frozen, I will store the cubes in gallon zip bags in my freezer! After that, I can just pull out and melt down however much stock I need for a dish.👍💖
(The stock will last about 6 months in the zipbag…but I typically do a BIG BATCH of stock and will put 1/2 the frozen cubes in a “food saver” airtight bag. The stock cubes will last well over a year in one of those bags!)
"Mom! Can I have some Wuhan hot dry noodles for breakfast tomorrow?"
"Sure thing, honey! We just have to wake up at 1:30 am to get it ready."
"Umm, never mind, mom, I'll just have Boo Berry cereal."
why don’t u prepared it prior?
🤣 lmao
The braiding liquid should be available because you want to cook large batches of braised meat as side dishes and snacks for months, or for a decade in my case, for over 100 years in certain restaurants’ cases
Lovely looking recipe.
Quick question, when separating and cooling the noodles, you coat it in sesame seed oil, but later on you dip it in water to re-heat the noodles. Would the noodles lose their sesame seed flavour, or is it more to help keep the noodles separated?
So while the noodles are cooling and resting, the oil gets absorbed a bit into the noodles. The final effect is subtle, so you could use peanut oil (Steph insists that if using peanut it must be heated first) if you prefer!
The oil also helps keep the noodles separate as well.
Many thanks for the informative reply!
I'm currently living in Japan and tried this at a Chinese restaurant, the owners are a Japanese/Chinese mixed family. This is one of the dishes I tried there and it was amazing! But I never knew the name because my kanji reading is terrible. Thanks for doing this one, I will definitely be trying his at home!
Hey this looks like an interesting simple dish I could make right now!
Let me grab my, uhmmm, fan?
Shit Im out of sesame oil. Damit, liu cheng (?) braising liquid. Don't have that don't know what it is.
Oh great! Theres a recipe for it.
Damit, peanut oil.......guess I'll pull out my grocery list. Ok, sesame oil, peanut oil. Got it.
Ffs, sesame paste now? Ok, sesame paste it is. Next!
Went to buy everything I needed for this, after hour I gave up and ended up eating at my local restaurant.
Make your own sesame paste from toasted sesame seeds.
Always have sesame and peanut oils on hand, loads better than that "neutral" tasteless stuff.
Liu cheng isn't really necessary, you can just use bouillon + ginger-garlic paste + grated scallion in water.
penut oil can be swapped for rice oil or any cooking oil (if used for stir frying one with a high smokepoint)
Hi, love your videos, always a trusty source for Chinese food contents online!
If I can ask something, I'm really excited about la luobo gan and Chinese preserves in general. Do you know of any books or other sources that I could use to learn how to make some from scratch and get a better understanding of Chinese pickles?
Thanks!
woah, doesn't everyone say "star a-knees"??
Aah-niss is how it's usually pronounced.
That's how you say it in Spanish (aah-nees), so you got that goin for ya
wow amazing, and so well explained, I guess that's why i am a fan and subscriber cheers
NO youtube algorithm, NO! too soon!
Wow....amazing info and recipe! 👏😳🤤
UA-cam algorithms wilding today, huh
yep, days later, still going strong.
I’m from Wuhan and I haven’t been back in over a decade. Definitely made me reminisce the taste of 热干面🤧🤧🤧.
Hi, thank you very much for your amazing videos ! I was wondering if a vegetarian version of the braised stock would exist ? cheers from France
Just swap out the beef, totally fine. Most other recipes online I've seen in Chinese don't include beef, that was just sort of our personal obsessive approach to try to mimic those noodle shops... the lushui will be real tasty sans beef too :)
One nice thing about doing this without beef is that you can much more easily scale down the lushui. It'll also only take about an hour for the spices to infuse into the broth.
Merci beaucoup !
i would use mushroom for the stock
Would you recommend a lu shui with the same recipe minus the beef for a vegetarian option?
00:29 mind blown
I know, right?
This was my favorite breakfast dish when I used to live in Wuhan !! Is just delicious
You forgot the most important ingrediant; bat.
Siyao Wu ouch.
I'm allergic to sesame... Are there any alternatives that you can suggest to use? I'm thinking peanut oil might be ok, but wondering if there are other oils that might be good to try.
Use a good natural peanut butter in place of the sesame paste :)
That's got an insane amount of ingredients. While I would never make it myself, I would def try it if I saw it. I usually walked past them as I wasn't sure what all the stuff they put in it was.
Thank you so much! This looks super yummy. I want to make this dish tomorrow in honor of Dr. Li, but of course, I'm stuck at home and can't get ingredients for braising liquid and pickled veg. Would a dash more of vinegar help sup for the veg? For the braising liquid, could a soup stock with some spices possibly work? Thanks so much! I love your channel!
Just read your expanded comment: thank you! I think you answered most of my questions :)
This is not a good time to recommend me that, youtube.
what a retarded thing to say
@@WumaoAnnihilator Go eat Bat Soup, bigot.
Prove to me you're a lapdog to your conscience instead of your better judgement just to show that you're more afraid of being called racist than "not infected"
At a time where the chinese government vehemently tries to deny everything and the probability for a deadly disease to go fully pandemic is higher than ever, it is absolutely not good to show me a video of wuhan's delicacies.
I don't care how great your noodles are - this is tasteless (no the pun was not in tended)
China will do everything in its power to pay off foreign press and orgs like WHO to safe its face internationally.
Or you could just not click on the video and spare everyone your bs, you sad sack of shit.
Oh, that sesame sauce is going in my playbook forever. Thanks, CCD!
Why are the comments so racist
Yes i agree! It is our proud tradition, and our identity! Those people dont understand our ways and cultures! They think they know the best about my culture! There is nothing wrong to eat bats, and it is very delicate cuisine! We have to be proud of our culture! #yellowlivesmatter
@@renoirsfive1051 fuck off
You guys are awesome, I've added this recipe to my repertoire! Thanks again! 👍🏽
Cheers and thx. Glad you like it~