Shanghai Noodles with Mushrooms and Cabbage
Recently my family and I had a trip to Asia. When we got back from it I wrote down all the recipes I wanted to eventually share – noodles and dumplings and soups. The other night I was reading through that list and when I got to “Shanghai Noodles with Pork, Mushrooms, and Cabbage” I had the most visceral food memory. Those noodles – fat as a pencil and utterly slurpable and chewy and coated in an addictive, salty-sweet brown sauce – were unbelievable. I struggled to recreate them at home – that sauce! Those fat noodles! – but after several rounds of trial-and-error I finally have a reasonable approximation.
The first recipe I tried wasn’t saucy enough and the second was far too salty. I ended up ditching the pork because it wasn’t adding anything, and experimenting with my own sauce. Ideally I would use thick fresh egg noodles but I couldn’t find any, so I made do with fresh udon. Now that I know how to make them, these are actually very easy. Once you have the sauce ingredients, you could whip them up on a weeknight with no problem.
- 4 TBS dark soy sauce (don’t substitute regular soy sauce!)
- 2 TBS peanut butter
- 2 TBS honey
- 1 TBS sugar
- 2 TBS rice wine vinegar
- 1 tsp hot sauce
- 2 TBS plus 2 tsp sesame oil, divided
- 1 TBS fish sauce
- 1/2 cup chicken stock
- 2 tsp cornstarch
- 1 TBS canola oil
- 2 portobello mushroom cups, cleaned and cut into 1/4 inch thick slices
- 1/2 lb shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, caps cut into thin slices
- sea salt
- 5 cups shredded napa cabbage
- 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
- 3/4 lb. thick fresh egg noodles or fresh udon noodles
- 2 fresh scallions, chopped, for garnish