Reganmian (Hot Dry Noodles with Sesame Paste)

Variations

• Instead of caidou: Hubei tops it with chopped pickled mustard stem or zhacai. Chopped pickled radish is the easiest stand-in, and either way rinse the salt out or it shifts the seasoning of the bowl.
• With tahini: Middle Eastern tahini is made from raw seed — paler, and a little bitter. To use it here, grind in 2 tablespoons of toasted sesame seeds and add half a teaspoon more sugar.
• There is no soup version: pour broth on this and it becomes a different dish. Sesame paste let down into a broth is Japanese tantanmen, and dan dan noodles separates that line out in its own Variations.
• The breakfast table: in Wuhan it comes with doupi (a glutinous rice and egg parcel), mijiu (fermented rice), and soy milk. A bowl is 4-6 yuan, and it is the centre of guozao, the local habit of eating breakfast out.
• Against dan dan noodles: two Chinese noodles dressed in the same sesame paste, sticking it to the strand in opposite ways — hot starchy noodle water there, a film of oil here. The first Tip is that story.
• Against liangpi and bibim-guksu: the other end of noodles without broth, and both are served cold. Reganmian holds the position of no broth and hot at the same time.
• Against luosifen: its pair, and the opposite position on broth. There the broth is the whole bowl — snails simmered for hours and then thrown away — and here there is none at all. Both are Chinese breakfast noodles, and both are cheap and fast.

Tips

• Oiling a noodle is forbidden here, and this dish is built on doing it. Cooking noodles tells you to keep oil out of the pot, and says why: "it floats on the surface and coats the strands as you lift them out" It gives the reason not to rinse in the same breath — "Surface starch is the glue" Reganmian breaks both. Boiled the day before and tossed in oil, it has no surface starch left and a film of oil instead. The sesame paste clings anyway, because the rule assumes a water-based sauce. Water and oil push each other away; sesame paste is not water, it is ground seed and its own oil. The film is not a barrier to it but the same phase, and it spreads more easily over an oiled strand than a bare one.
• The glue dan dan noodles uses does not exist here. That page is blunt: "Plain water will not do it — the starch is what makes the sauce cling" Reganmian has no noodle water to use. The noodles were boiled yesterday, and the ten-second dip this morning releases almost no starch. Same paste, same country, two different things making it stick. Make the two bowls side by side and you can see it.
• Eighty per cent is the point of the night before. Boiled through, they collapse in the morning's ten seconds. Cooled with a bite still in them, the starch firms as it goes cold and that firmness is what survives a night (cooking rice covers the same phenomenon on grains).
• The cooling is a cooking step, not tidying up. A fan drives the surface water off quickly and lets the oil settle into place. Covered and left to cool slowly, the steam falls back and the strands stick together damp.
• Shaking the water out is the last pressure point. Water does not merely thin sesame paste, it splits it. Shake the basket two or three times, hard, until nothing drips.
• Loosen the paste with oil, never water. Let down with water or stock it becomes a water-based sauce, the logic above collapses, and it slides straight off an oiled noodle (why sauces split).
• Alkaline noodles get closer. Hubei's are made with kansui, which is what makes them yellow and springy. Cooking noodles has a section on why the kansui is in the dough; here that springiness is also the condition for surviving a night and a reheat.
• What chow mein does in one line is this dish's whole method. Its step reads only: "Boil the noodles per the package, rinse under cold water, drain, and toss with a little oil so they don't clump" In a stir-fry the oil is a stopgap against sticking in the pan. Here it is the mechanism the sauce hangs on. Same action, entirely different purpose.
• Do not let it stand tossed. Sesame paste keeps drawing water out of the noodles. Three minutes after tossing it is stodgy, and adding water then really does split it.