Chris Makes Spicy-Sweet Sambal Pork Noodles

I don't know who is the lady

and who is the tramp in this scenario,

but we'll just, let's just both start eating.

[laughing]

We'll see what happens, okay?

[upbeat music]

We're making a Spicy-Sweet Sambal Pork Noodles.

Not that anybody asked this question,

but I feel like this dish is the answer to the question

of what would happen if Ragú alla Bolognese

got together with drunken noodles

and had a little noodle baby.

Because you get a lot of meat,

you get a lot of flavor, but you're doing it

in a very short amount of time--

[beep]

Thank you Andy, I appreciate that man, yeah.

Stick around.

So, anyway.

I just wanted to get that out of the way,

like what this is and where it came from.

And first up, I'm just gonna get some of my

aromatic veg chopped here.

Tommy insisted that I chop my own garlic.

Unclear why, but we're going to do it.

Do I have to do look and chop like Andy?

I feel like Ben's waiting for me.

[Camera Man] Oh no, you've got your own thing Chris.

What is my thing, though?

Do I have a thing?

Spoons? Spoons? [laughing]

Cool, so yeah that's a lot of garlic

but honestly this is two pounds of pork,

and garlic is awesome so it's going to be fine.

I don't peel ginger with a spoon.

I use a knife, you know, I don't know.

I feel like life is a little too short

to have to sit there, like getting in and out

of every nook and cranny most of the time.

Alright, so I'm doing some like long ginger batons,

just because I like seeing them in the final dish.

I like the kind of texture they have.

Once you have your nicely, thinly shaved slices of garlic,

ginger rather, you can go back over them

and make nice, little matchsticks here.

If you wanted to chop it, no worries.

You can totally do that.

That's nice.

Everything is going to kind of soften in the sauce.

So this is it, we're ready to go here.

So much of this is just kind of pantry staples,

a few fresh things, obviously.

Pretty minimal prep.

We're ready to take this to the stove.

I'm going to get this pot pretty hot before I begin.

Now, here's the thing:

This is a fairly big pot.

Most people at home probably

don't even have a pot this size,

or maybe they do, or maybe they use it once a year

for steaming lobsters or something, I don't know.

Browning two pounds of pork, ground meat, any type,

is going to be really hard, if not impossible,

unless you do it in batches.

What we've kind of done in this recipe,

is to take the approach of, listen, you want to get

some amazing flavor development on some of this meat,

but you don't necessarily need to brown all of it.

So I would, personally, rather brown one pound of it,

roughly speaking, like half of what

we have here, really well, than to kind of brown two

pounds of it kinda poorly.

And I want to move quickly,

so I don't really want to do two batches.

So, I'm going to show you what I mean.

Hey Amiel, how you doing bud? Hi Chris.

Good, how are you doing? Good,

we're making Sweet and Spicy Sambal Pork Noodles.

Sweet and Spicy Sambal Pork Noodles?

Sweet and Spicy Sambal, Sweet and Spicy Sambal Pork Noodles?

[Chris] Might be Spicy-Sweet Sambal Pork--

Spicy-Sweet Sambal Pork Noodles?

Yeah, exactly. The very thing.

We were kind of talking about you

a little bit, over there, like how you're

kind of looking a little bit like a character

from, I don't know, maybe Wes Anderson Film--

Okay, alright, okay. You got your

glasses rolling. Yup, you know

sometimes you need to warm things up a little bit.

I woke up late today, in a panic, and I was like,

the world is too cold.

[laughs]

Alright, so oil is rippling.

I'm getting some smoke, and by the way,

I'm using olive oil just cuz' I like using it.

I think it's got a delicious flavor.

I love it, it's all good.

You can use canola oil or vegetable oil,

if you really want to.

I'm only going to put in about half of this meat.

And, as you can see, I'm just going to leave it

sort of dotted around in there.

I'm gonna use half of it.

I'm just gonna throw that in there,

kind of redistribute oil and let that ride

while I wash my hands and stuff.

We're going to look for some pretty

amazing color to happen on there.

And like I said, on the backend,

we're going to get all the benefit

of having the flavor development

from all those Maillard reactions

that are going to be taking place in there,

without even having to brown

this remaining bit of meat.

Cool, so we're just about ready to start

these kinda nuggets here.

That's the kind of browning that we're looking for here,

like really deep, golden.

You don't have to go crazy, but I just want to get

some really nice color and some depth into the sauce,

and that's going to be perfect.

I'm gonna start moving these around.

And then again, I'm just going to leave them alone

for another couple minutes.

Make sure the heat's up, especially once you start

moving them around and whatnot,

you're going to start getting all the liquid

that's coming out of the meat, all the water,

holding back some of the browning

that's going to wanna happen.

That initial sear, that initial

browning period is so critical.

What happens after that, like you're usually

always trying to play catch up to some degree,

even when you haven't over crowded the pan,

even when you done a lot of the right things.

After I turned it that initial time, it took a sec

to kind of get back to browning.

Just to kind of burn off some of that

excess water that was coming off of the meat.

We are back now. Color is deepening.

I think we're just about good to go here.

I'm not going to do anything more at this point

to try and get more color on this meat.

I think there's ton happening in there,

so I'm going to throw the aromatics in,

along with the sugar, and then the rest of the meat.

So I have ginger, garlic, and sugar.

It's one of those things, like the sugar,

is it going to wanna go dark, of course.

But if it caramelizes a little bit, that's not a bad thing.

You kind of want a little bit of that sweetness

and a little bit of that cooked, kind of caramel-y sugar,

kind of vibe going on in there.

And getting that one or two second head start,

before I put the rest of the meat in.

Don't get me wrong, this meat is going to get cooked.

It's going to go in there and cook just fine.

I'm just not going to try and brown it

the way I did with that initial addition of meat.

So I'm going to do a little work to

try and break this up, as that second addition of

meat gets integrated into the rest of it.

Alright, so as you can see,

everything is, just frankly, just about cooked

in that short amount of time.

I've done a little bit of work

to break up that pork.

So at this point, I am now going to add

tomato paste and basil.

There's a certain thing that happens

when you add basil to hot oil,

you kind of get a really nice extraction

of that slightly bitter, peppery pungent oil.

It sets the color, so it kind of stays green.

It doesn't turn into that kind of cut grass

kind of thing that basil can get,

or frankly, any herb.

So I like wilting it right into that hot fat.

Also going to use tomato paste here.

The one trick with it is that you have to cook it out.

Even though it's concentrated tomato,

it's still kind of effectively raw.

Like the way it tastes is a kind of

raw, tinny canned tomato product.

So it's essential to get past this point,

where it's like this bright, kind of deep brick red.

And while you're seeing that visual change happen,

that's when the flavor development happening too.

Color deepened, we're ready for our liquid stuff here.

We got unsweetened rice vinegar.

I've got regular soy sauce.

And then I got the good amount here of sambal oelek.

I'm going to add water.

You can just add like the soy, the vinegar,

and the sambal and kind of be good to go,

but I just wanna cook out that meat,

just a little bit more and kind of

bring all these flavors together.

Even though the meat is technically cooked at this point,

I want that water to get in there

because I want it to come together as a sauce.

And like I was saying, I don't want this to be a sauce

you have to spend hours to make,

but I do want there to be a little bit

additional softening of the meat.

Put this to simmering.

I'm going to walk away for maybe half an hour,

let those flavors melt, let some of that water cook out,

come together as a sauce.

And then we'll taste it and see what's what.

Okay, so I'd spend almost 45 minutes here.

Sauce is looking really good.

So a lot of that water kinda cooked out,

but it still has a sauciness to it.

I'm going to be adding some of the

cooking liquid for the noodles anyway.

It's fucking good.

That's really good.

There is so much ginger and garlic in there,

so aromatic, but the pork gives you

that like meaty kind of unctuousness.

Sambal, honestly, sambal isn't my

favorite product to use,

because, ultimately, it would be nice to obviously

ferment your own chiles or use fresh chiles.

But man, what's great about is you can

use a lot of because it's not so hot.

We put in a third of a cup here,

so you get a lot of chile heat and a lot of brightness.

But all those flavors are kind of zinging around in there.

It's like, oh first I'm tasting salty,

meaty, bright from the vinegar, heat.

It's all just kind of happening.

You're taste buds don't have just

one thing to sort of settle in on.

So that's awesome.

We're going to get cooking noodles.

I put some salt in here.

I don't think, yeah, it's unsalted.

So these are beautiful ramen noodles from Sun Ramen.

They are so springy and so delightful,

and they're going to be freaking amazing in this.

You could also use spaghetti,

which would be totally fine,

and we tested it that way as well and it was great.

The other thing to, frankly,

is there's nothing wrong with getting a package

of dried ramen noodles, not using the flavor packet,

and just using those dried noodles

as your noodle in this, if you wanted to.

Cool, so that's going to be a couple minutes.

Maybe we'll check back.

[Camera Man] [swiping sound] Cue, cue.

[swiping sound]

Alright, so it's been a couple minutes here

and noodles are good.

Honestly, ramen noodles have so much spring to them,

like it can be tricky to judge when they're actually done.

Perfect.

So I'm just going to scoop these

directly into our sauce here.

It's fine if, obviously, we capture some of

that liquid off of them.

That's great.

I'm going to be adding some of that liquid anyway.

I just want to be able to control it well.

Alright, so we're going to fire up

the heat a little bit here, work these around.

And now, this is the thing that I thought

puts this sort of like a little bit over the top.

Not this. [laughing]

This, butter.

You don't have to put butter in this,

obviously, you don't have to put butter in anything,

but obviously it's a great idea

to put butter in lots of things.

Both from a flavor perspective, butter with pasta,

it just helps bring sauce and pasta together

in a way that few other things can.

But definitely always worth spending a good minute

just bringing everything together,

because see how that butter and the starchiness

of those noodles is making

everything coat super nicely there.

Splash more water, I'm going to turn this heat off

because I think we are good there.

Yeah, we'll get to take it the plate.

Alright, and this is where we have our fresh basil,

which no surprise there if you had Thai basil.

Great. Ooh!

It looks so good, here we go.

[Chris] I haven't really had a good taste yet.

Did you try this before when we were developing?

I didn't and I was really mad about

because everyone else loved it,

and I was like, Oh, cool. Well, um, can't wait to try it.

And then it was empty.

It's so nice and like glossy.

[Chris] It's very glossy, it's very glossy.

I was worried about it being greasy,

but it's not at all.

So, I'm going to eat all of this,

just wanted to give you a heads up.

I made this for you.

Thank you, well, wonderful.

Thank you, nice to meet you, bye.

[Chris] Oh, you're back!

I'm back, oh sorry, I wasn't sure

if I could actually keep this or not.

[Camera Man] Yeah, yeah that's--

And action.

So, anyway. So, the noodles.

So fast and so easy.

I think part of how you're able to get from

just totally raw ingredients to a finished

super flavorful dish like in well under an hour,

is we're leaning on our ability

to use pantry staples in smart ways.

The soy sauce, the sambal oeleak, all of that is

helping accelerate the flavor of the ground pork,

and get us to that beautiful, saucy place

in a really short amount of time.

Jesse believes, I believe, you'll believe,

and I need to get one of those cinnoman buns

before they all disappear.

It's like, look, everybody can't get a trophy

just for showing up.

You know what I mean?

Sometimes things are good and sometimes things

can be better,

and everybody has to keep themselves honest.

[Camera Man] This is when we cut

to someone sitting with a curtain behind

them going, I didn't come here to make friends.

[laughing]