The Sinosphere · Volume 27, The Iron Pot, the Frozen Pear and the Railway’s Own Sausage
Yanbian Lengmian
Yanbian
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 2 hours
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Ethnic Korean farmers developed this dish in Yanbian partly to solve the practical problem of food spoiling in summer heat, and it is now listed on Jilin province's own intangible cultural heritage register. It is a genuinely separate tradition from Manchu-heritage Dongbei food, and a genuinely separate dish from the naengmyeon this atlas's Korea volume treats in full (see AS-55, The Korean Peninsula); this chapter treats the Yanbian version as its own, real, China-side hybrid rather than either ignoring it or folding it wholesale into the Korean peninsula's own tradition.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 2 hours, most of it the broth.
Ingredients
- 1 kg beef shin or leg bone
- 400 g beef, in one piece
- 300 g buckwheat flour
- 100 g wheat flour
- 50 g potato starch
- for garnish pickled cabbage, chilli paste, cucumber, boiled egg, Asian pear, sliced thin, to garnish
- to taste soy bean paste, sugar, vinegar, to season the broth
Method
- Simmer the bone and beef together for 1 to 2 hours, skimming regularly, then strain and skim off the fat; season with soybean paste, sugar and vinegar to a clean, sharply savoury balance.
- Chill the broth thoroughly.
- Poach the beef separately until tender, then slice thinly once cool.
- Mix the buckwheat and wheat flours with the potato starch and enough boiling water to form a stiff dough, then extrude or roll and cut into noodles.
- Boil the noodles briefly, about a minute, then plunge into cold water and rub the strands gently by hand to remove surface starch, the step that gives the noodles their characteristic bite.
- Divide the noodles between bowls, top with the sliced beef, pickled cabbage, chilli paste, cucumber, boiled egg and pear, and pour the ice-cold broth around, mixing everything together before eating.
What a modern chef changes
A precision-clarified broth and a properly rested dough.
Not a numbered rung.
Method
- Cook the beef shin sous vide, 75°C for 24 hours, alongside a conventionally simmered bone stock, then combine the two for a broth that is both clean and deeply flavoured, rather than relying on a single long simmer to do both jobs at once.
- Chill the finished broth over an ice bath rather than in the fridge, for the fastest, cleanest possible drop to serving temperature.
- Rest the noodle dough, wrapped, for 30 minutes before extruding, letting the buckwheat hydrate fully, and pass it through a pasta extruder fitted with a round die if a proper Korean noodle press is not to hand, a reasonable substitution this chapter names directly rather than pretending is traditional.