Making Hand-Ripped Noodles & Pork From Xi'an Famous Foods

[calm music]

I'm Jason Wang.

I'm the CEO of Xi'an Famous Foods here in New York City.

We serve specialty Chinese food

from my hometown Xi-an, China in the Shaanxi province.

Today, I'm here in the test kitchen

showing you one of our signature dishes,

our biangbiang hand-ripped noodles

with pork zha jiang meat sauce.

The pork zha jiang sauce

is actually a sauce from Northern China,

Northern East Asia, Korea, Beijing.

There's many different areas serving this dish

along the region but it's very personal to me

because I used to eat it pretty often as a kid

and of course, our biangbiang noodles are very distinct

to our Shaanxi province region

and it's something that Xi'an Famous Foods serves

in our stores all the time.

So putting those two together,

it's gonna be a really delicious

and really significant dish for us today.

[calm music]

So here we have a bowl of the all-purpose flour.

First, we're gonna add the salt into the flour.

It just helps the texture of noodles

and also a little bit of the flavor.

We're gonna start just imitating a machine mixer

with our fingers.

Slowly add the water.

No need to rush this.

You start seeing the dough grouping together more,

it's coming off the sides of the bowl,

it's no longer just the powder.

Sometimes you just gotta kinda hold the bowl

and kinda go into it.

When you're making the dough for use in the restaurants,

you really can't do this

because as you can see, it does take some time

but with the help of machines,

mixer machines, really large ones,

it comes out actually more consistently than handmade.

The goal is to have a clean bowl with no flour

and no mass stuck on the sides, no slush, nothing like that.

The glass is pretty much free of flour now.

It doesn't need to be perfectly smooth.

You still see some crevices here and some uneven parts.

I'm gonna put it back into the bowl to rest

but I'm gonna cover it with plastic wrap

so it's not gonna dry up and get all crusty

and we're gonna let this rest for about 20 minutes

and then it'll be ready

to be cut into pieces for the noodles.

[calm music]

The dough has gone through some trials and tribulations.

It's basically kneaded, rested and kneaded two sets

and then rested for 20 times each at room temperature

and as you can see, after resting,

it is actually really smooth now.

It's bouncier.

It should still have a bit of toughness to it.

It's not supposed to be like super squishy like marshmallow.

So we're gonna cut these first.

You just want the dough to be about 100 grams each

give or take

and now what we're gonna do is just for each piece

we're just gonna roll it out

into like a flatter, rectangular shape.

So once you get these pieces,

some vegetable oil right here, we'll just rub it on on

and the only reason we do this

is just so that it retains the moisture

and the smoothness of the dough

until we're ready to use it for pulling noodles.

And for these pieces, because you've already oiled them,

you can lay them sort of on top of each other.

Just a few more pieces and we're pretty much prepped.

Let it sit for maybe half a day or so in the fridge.

It's sort of a resting process

because just now we messed with the dough a little bit

so it's tightened up a little bit.

We need a little time for it to ease off, not be so tense

and then it'll be perfect for pulling.

So we're gonna leave it a few hours at least

and then we're gonna come back to it

and we're gonna be ready to use them to make our noodles.

Before we get started on the pork zha jiang sauce,

we gotta prepare our vegetables and our aromatics

so that is ready to go.

[calm music]

So we have the pork.

Now we're going to prepare the vegetables

that we need for this dish.

Particularly for cooking the pork,

we're gonna need some scallions or green onions

and we're just gonna slice them into smaller,

about fourth of an inch pieces.

Next, we're gonna cut a small piece of ginger.

We also have some essential sauces and liquids

that we need for this dish.

Now, this is a sweet flour paste.

It's used as the main flavoring of this meat sauce.

Next ingredient is our Shaoxing cooking wine.

It doesn't need to be super accurate

because the thing about cooking wine

is it just evaporates when you're cooking.

We're just gonna mix this up into a thick sauce

and this is the last component

of the pork zha jiang meat sauce.

So here we have the green cabbage

which is cooked with the noodles in the same pot

just to give the noodle dish

a little bit of textural variation

because the noodles are chewy,

the cabbage is gonna be a little crunchy

so that adds that texture.

So we wanna cut these into inch and a half pieces.

Lastly, we have a crunchy cucumber.

Cut them into slivers.

I'm gonna set that aside.

We've mised out all of our ingredients.

Now we're ready to go to the stove.

[calm music]

All right, so we're at the stove.

We have our pan which is a decent size enough pan

in order to fit all of our ingredients as well as the meat.

Just gonna let the pan get heated a little bit

before we put the oil in.

And when we're using oil,

we're just using regular vegetable oil, canola oil,

oils of that sort.

We're going to put the pork in first

and immediately, we just wanna make sure

to break up the meat.

This part comes together pretty quickly.

It should be done at a high temperature

so you have some of the caramelization

but you don't wanna burn the meat either.

Right about there would be a good amount.

So I'm gonna turn it off.

So I'm gonna use a slotted spoon

so we're not taking too much of the juice,

too much of the oil out.

The fat's basically done a lot of its job

in cooking the meat at this point

so we don't need too much of it.

We're starting with a clean pan

so we're gonna wait for the oil to heat up again

before we put in the aromatics.

So the oil is hot at this point.

Gonna put in the ginger.

Stir around a little bit.

We'll put in the scallions.

Really just sweat it a little bit,

get the flavor out, try not to burn it.

The scallions should turn greener and a little bit wilted

but not brown or black or burnt.

Same with the ginger.

I'm going to add my pork back in.

Make sure you stir around so no meat is stuck on the sides.

The meat's already cooked

so you don't need to cook it too long.

It's really just about meshing the ingredients

and now we're going to take the reserved sauce

which is the cooking wine

and the sweet flour paste or sweet soybean paste

and we're gonna add it in.

So see how it's a really thick consistency

and that's really again adding to the body of the sauce.

It's actually becoming more of a sauce

rather than a stir fry.

And we're gonna turn the fire to medium

so it doesn't burn the sauce.

So there's a lot of sugar in the sauce

and it's already very thick

so we really don't want to reduce it too quickly

or burn the sugar

but we do want the flavor to get deeper into the meat.

And we're gonna add a little bit of more sweetness to it

with a little bit of just white sugar.

The sweetness helps balance out the saltiness of the sauce.

All right, so the sauce is done.

I'm gonna just let it sit

with the fire off just a little bit

while I go over and make the hand-ripped noodles.

[calm music]

For these dough pieces,

it takes two to make one of our regular sized servings.

So I'm gonna take two pieces here

and I'm gonna make sure to cover the rest

so they don't get dry and crackly.

Roll the pieces out so they're a little bit more even.

Not roll it super thin but just kinda spread it out

into a little bit bigger of a rectangle

and then you're just gonna take the roller

and you're going to make an indentation across the long way

or the horizontal way of each piece.

The purpose of that is to guide the shape of the noodles

so that when you're pulling it,

it'll keep along that line instead of going kinda off

and then you'll have thick ends and things like that.

To do the next step, you gotta pick up the pieces

but when you pick it up, be careful not to pinch too hard

but also don't let go.

Be careful not to linger too long holding the pieces

otherwise these things will make the ends very thick,

you'll risk breaking off where you're holding them.

So that's just a tip from me.

I'm gonna pick the first piece up.

I'm gonna hold it kinda like a book.

First, stretch it apart just passed your shoulder

and then you're gonna start swinging up and down,

slap it on the counter

while you're pulling it ever so slightly more apart.

So that's what I mean by kinda linger.

As I'm talking, I linger a little too much and it'll break

but it's okay, if it breaks,

pick up the end and then keep going.

That's the sound that you hear, the biang biang biang sound.

That's why we call this biangbiang noodles.

So once you get to a certain length, four feet at least,

we're going to take the middle

where the slight indentation is, gonna rip it apart.

You don't have to rip it all the way through

but just making sure that you rip enough

that the ends are sorta even,

the lines are sorta even in terms of thickness.

So you're really doing a lot in your wrist.

Not so much like this.

Just use the swing of the dough

to pull it further and further apart.

All right, so again,

I'm just gonna take the middle, split it.

So now the noodles are ready.

I'm gonna go over and drop it into the pot.

[calm music]

And we're just gonna drop it

right into the hot boiling water.

Right after we drop the noodles in,

we should add in the cut cabbage.

So just a handful, as much as you prefer.

So it's been about three minutes.

I'm gonna take the noodles and the cabbage out

with a spider net.

So noodles are done.

It's time to assemble the dish.

We got some ingredients here.

First of course we have our meat sauce,

the most important, the one that we just cooked,

pork zha jiang sauce

and then we're gonna put in some sliced scallions as well,

the noodle sauce

which is primarily soy sauce and black vinegar

and then our chili crisps.

I like spicy so I added a lot of chili oil.

Everything is in there.

I'm going to just use tongs to mix it up

and you really should do this quickly after cooking noodles

because the noodles are very fickle.

They really should be enjoyed right away.

So I add a little bit more of the pork

and a little bit of the cucumber for garnish.

This is pork zha jiang biangbiang hand-ripped noodles.

Oh my gosh, you know I like it spicy

so the spice is definitely there

but the pork, the sweetness of it, the meat sauce,

it's a gentle sweetness

that works really well with the spice

so it's very well rounded.

It's not a dish where it's just all about heat.

It's why this dish

is actually kind of a sleeper hit on our menu.

Our noodles being very wide and chewy,

it actually carries the sauce very well

and it's kinda like an envelope.

It catches all the pieces of meat.

The heat is not overwhelming

because the sweetness of the sauce rounds it out

and it's just very approachable,

very familiar tasting in a way at least for me

because of that sweetness.

That's my dish,

pork zha jiang biangbiang hand-ripped noodles.

The process is very simple.

So I really hope you get to enjoy some noodles at home.

Remember the best way is to enjoy it fresh from the pot

and don't let it sit too long and have fun with it.