Recipe: Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

This hearty, spicy soup is great for both hot summer days or cold winter nights.

Unlike the previous recipes, this one contains ingredients hard to find in a standard American grocery shop. But nowadays, you can order everything online so you can have it hand-delivered to your doorsteps!

Ingredients

Clockwise from top: bay leaves, star anise, Chinese cinnamon, red & green Sichuan peppercorns, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, cumin seeds, and dried chilies

• 1.5 lb of beef shank
• 1 lb of beef bones
• 1 onion
• 1 tomato
• Bundle of scallions
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 2 slices of ginger
• 2 tbsp of broad bean chili sauce (Doubanjiang)
• Spices
  • 2 tbsp Sichuan peppercorns
  • 1 tbsp coriander seeds
  • 1 tbsp fennel seeds
  • 1 tbsp cumin seeds
  • 4 star anise
  • 3 bay leaves
  • 1 Chinese cinnamon stick
  • Dried chilies
• Rock sugar
• 1/2 cup of dark soy sauce
• 1/2 cup of light soy sauce
• 1/2 cup of Chinese cooking wine (Shaoxing wine)

Instructions

Part 1: Purify Beef

1. Boil the beef in water for about 5 minutes
2. Drain the water and rinse off beef (see Note 1)

Part 2: Toast Spices

1. Place all dry spices into pan (see Note 2 for spice level)
2. Turn stove heat to Low
3. Stir spices until lightly smoking and fragrant
4. Remove spices
5. Add the bean chili sauce and heat until slightly darkened
6. Remove sauce

Part 3: Building the Broth

1. In the large soup pot, add some oil and turn stove heat to High
2. Return the beef to the pot to sear the meat and the bones
   • Turn the pieces every few minutes sear all sides
3. After finished searing, turn the heat to Medium
4. Add the chopped garlic, ginger, and onion
5. Continue stirring until garlic and onion gets soft
6. Add the cooking wine to deglaze the pot and burn off alcohol
7. Add the dark soy, light soy, rock sugar, scallions, and tomatoes
8. Add the toasted spices
   • Optional: Place spices inside cheesecloth prior to adding them
9. Fill with water to cover all ingredients
10. Bring liquid to simmer and cover
11. Turn stove heat to Low and let stew for ~3 hours

Part 4: Final Assembly

1. Cook dried noodles in boiling water per packaging suggestion
2. Add sliced bok choy into boiling water
   • Allow about 3 minutes left to cook
3. Strain noodles and bok choy
4. Serve noodles and bok choy into bowl
5. Add pieces of beef into bowl
6. Add the beef broth over the noodles
   • Use a strainer to filter out the spices

Story

During my first visit in China, I tried many soup noodles. My absolute favorite was a bowl of spicy beef noodles (costing $1). This was in Sichuan, where everything is floating in chili oil. While I enjoyed the numbing spice, the broth there was too oily to drink like a soup.

Upon returning to the US, I was craving the beef noodle soup again. I found out that the dish was brought over by Sichuan veterans to Taiwanese villages around the 1970s. The Taiwanese variant uses less chili oil and more soy sauce. Beef noodle soup had since become an iconic dish in Taiwanese cuisine.

Notes

1. Boiling the beef and dumping out the water at first seems like a waste, but it is standard practice for Asian bone broths. The idea is to cleanse the bones of excess blood and other impurities (the white foam). If this isn’t done, then the broth will become more cloudy and have floating bits of protein.
2. All of the spiciness comes from the chili bean paste and the Sichuan peppercorns, so adjust these proportions for the desired spice level. The chili bean paste is very salty, so more salt needs to be added if using less.
   • The rest the spices (coriander, fennel, cinnamon, etc.) are aromatics with mild flavor. I tried tasting them all raw to understand what value they add to the dish. Indian restaurants usually have a bowl of sugar-coated fennel or coriander seeds (mukhwas) by the door to serve as a mouth freshener and digestive aid, or even just as a snack. This is certainly not the case the Sichuan peppercorns.

Credit to these resources for their beef noodle recipes:

1. The Woks of Life
2. Tasty