Chris Makes Spicy-Sweet Sambal Pork Noodles | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

I don't know who is the lady and who is he in this scenario, but let's get started. We are making

spicy

sweet

s with

pork

noodles

. Not that anyone has asked this question, but I feel like this dish is the answer. to the question of what would happen if ragu bolognese was put together with drunken

noodles

and had a little bit of noodles in it, you know, because you get a lot of meat, you get a lot of flavor, but you do it in a very short amount of time, thanks Andy, I appreciate to that man, yeah, stay here, so anyway I just want to get that out of the way, like what this is and where it came from, and first I'm going to get some of my aromatic vegetables here.

Tommy insisted that I cut my own garlic, it's not clear why, but we're going to do it, I have to watch and chop and I feel like Ben is waiting. I don't know, you have your thing, Chris, what's mine? one thing, the spoons, the spoons are great, so yeah, it's a lot of garlic, but honestly, it's two pounds of

pork

and the garlic is amazing, so it'll be fine. I don't feel the ginger with a spoon, I just use a knife, you know? I don't know, I just feel like life is too short to have to sit there going in and out of every corner most of the time, so I'm making some like long ginger canes just because I like seeing them on the final plate it just

makes

me like the kind of texture they have once you've got them shaved clean like slices of ginger with garlic, instead you can go back over them and just make little matchsticks here if you want to cut them up, don't worry, you can. do it totally, that's nice, nothing, everything is going to smooth out like this, so this is like we're ready to go here.

A lot of it is kind of pantry staples, you know, some new stuff, obviously, like pretty minimal prep. I'm ready to take this to the stove, so I'm going to heat this pot up quite a bit before I start. Here's the thing, so this is a pretty big pot. Most people at home probably don't even have a pot this size or maybe or maybe they use it once a year to steam lobsters or something, I don't know, to brown two pounds of ground pork. You know any type is going to be really difficult, if not impossible, unless you do it in batches or unless we have What you do in this recipe is just take the approach of listening that you want to get incredible flavor development in some of this meat. , but you don't necessarily need to brown it all, so I personally prefer to brown a pound of Generally speaking, it's about half of what we have here, very well, then try to brown two pounds, but a little bad, and I want to move quickly, so I don't really want to make two batches so I'm going to Show you what I mean a meal how's it going buddy we're making

sweet

and

spicy

sambal

pork noodles sweet and spicy Sam Ball nose yeah

sambal

sweet and spicy, sweet and spicy sambal pork noodles, can be spicy, sweet sambal for sweet and spicy balls. pork noodles, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, same thing, yeah, we were like talking about you a little bit there, like you like it, you look a little bit like a character from I Don't Know. like maybe like the Wes Anderson movie or like, yeah, you know, sometimes you need to heat things up a little bit.

I woke up late today panicking and thinking the world is too cold so the oil is rippling. I'm getting something. I smoke and by the way I'm using olive oil here just because I like to use it. I think it tastes delicious. I love it, everything is fine. You can use canola oil or vegetable oil if you really want to, so I'm just going to put. on about half of this meat and as you can see, I'm going to leave it kind of dotted there. I'm going to use half of it, I'm just going to throw it in there, redistribute the oil and let it ride while I wash my hands and things like we're going to look for a pretty amazing color happening there and like I said, on the back, we're going to get all the benefits of having the flavor development of all of those our reactions that are going to take place there without even having to brown this are going to stay a little bit cold, so we're almost ready to start spinning these kind of nuggets that are like the kind of brownie that we're looking for. here. like a really deep sear, you don't have to go crazy, but I just want to give it a really nice color and some depth to the sauce and that will be perfect.

I'm going to start moving them and then again. I'm just going to leave them alone for a couple more minutes to make sure they warm up, especially once you start moving them around and stuff, you're going to start getting all the liquid coming out of this, all the water like it's holding onto some of the Browning. that's going to want to happen, just like that initial browning, that initial browning period is so critical, what happens after that, like you know you're usually always trying to catch up to some degree, even when you've got the pan cluttered, even when you know I've done a lot of the right things after turning in that initial moment, like it takes a second to brown again, like just burning off some of that excess water coming out of the meat, so we are back. now the color is deepening.

I think we're ready to start. I won't do anything else at this time to try to add more color to this meat. I think there's tons going on there, so I'm going to pull. the aromatics and along with the sugar and in the rest of me, so I have the ginger, the garlic and the sugar, you know, and it's one of those things like sugar, yes, it will want to darken, of course, but if it caramelizes a little bit, that's not bad, you know you want a little bit of that, like sweetness, and a little bit of that cooked, caramelized sugar kind of vibe that's there.

I'm just understanding that as a 1 1 or 2 second advantage. before you put the rest of the meat in, don't get me wrong, this meat is going to cook, you know, it's going to go in there and it's going to cook right. I just won't try to gild it like I did with the initial edition. from me, so I'm going to work a little bit to break this down as that second edition of meat integrates into it, the rest is fine so you can see, frankly, everything is, you know, roughly cooked in that short period of time. time.

I just did a little work breaking up the pork, so at this point I'm now going to add tomato paste and basil. There's something that happens like when you add basil to hot oil. you get a very nice abstraction from that, like a slightly bitter and pungent spicy oil, you know it sets the color so it stays green, it doesn't just become something like cut grass, you know, something like basil. I can get or, frankly, any herb, so I like to wilt it into that hot fat. I'm also going to use tomato paste here, the only trick is that you have to cook it as if it were tomato concentrate, it's still kind of wrong since it tastes like some kind of raw, canned tomato product, so what's essential is to get past this point where it's like that big kind of deep brick red and as you see that visual change happening, that's when the flavor development is happening, the color has intensified, we're ready for our liquid, I have unseasoned rice vinegar, I have regular soy sauce and then I have a good amount here of sambal oelek.

I'm going to add water, you could just add. like soy, vinegar and sambal and it's ready, but I just want to cook that meat a little more and bring all these flavors together even though the meat is technically cooked at this point. that water goes in there because I want it to form like a sauce, you know and like I was saying, I don't want it to be a sauce that you have to spend hours to make, but I do want there to be a little bit more tenderization of the meat. which is simmering. I'm going to step away for maybe half an hour, let those flavors blend, let some of that water cook and come together like a sauce and then we'll taste it and see what's good, so it's been almost 45 minutes here, the sauce looks great, so much of the water is cooked off but it still has a spicy flavor.

I'm going to add some pasta and the cooking liquid to the noodles anyway, that's really good, there's so much ginger and garlic in there, it's very aromatic, but the pork gives you those kind of unctuous, meaty nests and the sambal honestly sambal is not my favorite product to use just because I think ultimately you know. We could, obviously, it would be nice to allow your own chiles or use fresh chiles, but the nice thing about this is that you can use a lot because it's not as spicy, so we put a third of a cup in here so you like it. a lot of chili spice and a lot of brightness, but all those flavors are like buzzing there, it's like Oh, the first time you take it, it tastes like salty meat, you know from the heat of the vinegar, it's all like it happens your taste buds tastes have nothing to just settle on, so it's amazing, so let's cook noodles.

Put a little salt here. I don't think so, there's no salt in it, so these are beautiful ramen noodles from Sun ramen. They are so stretchy and so delicious and they are going to be so fucking amazing. You can also use spaghetti which would be totally fine and we tried it that way too and it was great. The other thing, frankly, is that there's nothing wrong with like getting a packet of dry ramen noodles without using the flavor packet and just using those dry noodles as noodles and chilling, so it'll be a couple of minutes, check back, so it's been a couple of minutes here and the noodles are good honestly ramen noodles have it.

They give them so much spring that it can be difficult to judge when they are really cooked. I'm going to place them directly into our sauce. Here it's okay, if we obviously capture some of that liquid from them, that's great. I'm going to be adding a little bit of that liquid anyway, I just want to be able to control it well, so I'm going to turn up the heat a little bit here, work this in and now this is what I thought was like this. a little exaggerated no this butter you don't have to put butter on this obviously you don't have to put butter on anything but obviously it's a great idea to put butter and a lot of things from a flavor perspective, but Also, you know, butter with pasta helps It brings sauce and pasta together in a way that few other things can, but it's definitely always worth taking a good minute to put it all together because look at what that butter and just the starch from those noodles are doing. everything is covered very well there splash more water turn off the heat I think we're good here, yes, we're good to take it to the plate, and then this is where we have our fresh basil, which you wouldn't be surprised if you had it.

Great Thai basil, here we go, I haven't really had a good spacing yet, how do you try this before? So about something I didn't do and I was really mad because everyone else loved it and I was like, oh cool, well can I? I didn't wait to try it and then it was empty hmm it's so good. I wonder, look, it's very bright, it's very bright. I was worried it would be greasy, but it isn't at all. Yeah, so I'll eat this all in one go. Great, thanks anyway, noodles are so quick and easy, and you know, I think part of how you can go from totally wrong gradients to a super tasty dish like that is that we lean on our ability to use the pantry. basic foods and smart ways, so the soy sauce, the sambal oelek, you know, the rice vinegar, all of that was like helping to speed up the flavor of the ground pork and take us to that beautiful spicy place in a period really short time, so Jesse thinks I think I need to go get one of those sentiment buttons before they all disappear.

It's like if you look, everyone can't get a trophy just for showing up. You know what I mean. Sometimes things are good and sometimes I think things can be. best you know, I think so, everyone has to be honest, this is when we cut to someone sitting with a curtain in mind. I'm going, I didn't come here to make friends.