Chinese Beef Noodle Soup (adventure!)

While searching for something else last fall, I ran into a video of Chinese noodles being made.  I had never seen anything like that before and was intrigued.  Then I ran into this video that is sort of a tutorial.  Moments later I emailed Cache and asked him if he wanted to try them with me over Christmas break.  And moments later I heard back from him: of course he did!  He loves culinary adventures as much as me!  All we needed was a few recipes.

When it came time to make this, we could not find the video above to know how to make the soup base.  So we used this one as a base instead.  (Tom says they are both authentic, the one we used is from northern China with a lot of spice and the other is a typical southern fare.)

I found a noodle recipe with grams as the measuring standard, so thankfully Mathematician Cache was able to translate that into something usable for us.  The noodles were quite tricky and we were terribly unsuccessful at getting them pulled and stretched.  We don't know whether it was our dough or our lack of experience or both.  But we have ideas for improvement for next time.  We did however, roll them out thin and sliced them.  It is a wonderful alternative if we can't ever figure out the pulling and stretching bit.  The recipe we used was so small that at last minute I sent Tom to buy some packaged fresh Chinese noodles.  While okay in a pinch, they were not nearly as good as our homemade.  So we'll definitely be trying our hand at them again soon.  (Chinese New Year is just around the corner and Cache took ingredients to make it at BYU.)

Everyone in the family LOVED this soup.  We can only improve on it!

Here is our working recipe:

Noodles:  (I will triple this for my family.)
1 1/4 cup cake flour
3 TBSP all purpose flour
1/2 cup warm water
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 TBSP oil

We put this in the bread machine then let it sit most of the day to break down the gluten.  It was such a sticky dough that we had to add a lot of flour to even be able to work with it.


Next time I am going to try stirring this mixture together by hand and then using my bread machine to knead it as I slowly add more cake flour as needed until it is a good working consistency.  After that cycle is finished I will see how stretchy it is.  If it needs more kneading, I will use my bread machine again on the knead cycle.  If this doesn't work, I can always roll them out and cut long and thin!

Soup:
Cut tenderloin steak into bite-sized pieces, removing all fat.  Cook in cold water and cook slowly until cooked through.  Drain and rinse well.

In soup pan, saute in 1-2 TBSP hot oil
4 cloves garlic, smashed
1 TBSP sliced ginger

Cook until fragrant.  Add 6 dried chili pepper (with tops broken off).  Add:

Cooked beef
1 1/2 TBSP chili paste
scant 1/3 cup soy sauce
1 cup beef broth
5 cups water
1 tsp. sugar

Simmer for 1 hour.  Ladle over a bowl of noodles.

We all wanted a few vegetables in it.  Next time, I'll add some carrots, broccoli, and green onions near the end of the cooking time.

This soup had a lot of heat!  But we all loved it.  We just added a little extra water to the girls' bowls.  Can't wait to try it again!