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ASIAN, Recipes, TAIWANESE, VEGETARIAN

Sesame Noodles with Spinach | 菠菜麻醬麵

Name: Sesame Noodles with Spinach
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 15 min
Ingredients: 2 Bunches of Easy Homemade Noodles; 2 Bunches of Spinach (Chopped into bite size); 3 T Toasted White Sesame Paste; 3 T Soy Sauce; 2 t Vinegar; 6 T Water (from the cooking pot); 2 t Sugar; 1 Clove Garlic (Minced)

A super easy, nutritional and tasty one-bowl meal in under 15 minutes. Sesame noodles is one of our favorite, lazy dinner go-to. It’s full of flavor, packed with veg, it’s filling and doesn’t take much to make. The best part is that leaning up is easy too since all you need is one pot and two bowls(or more if you’re cooking for more people).

A tasty bowl of noodle can be super comforting. Noodles come in all shapes, forms, dressing or soup in Taiwan, it’s almost impossible to get sick of it. I was going to name a few favorites but then realized that I love them all! Someday I will cover all my favorite recipes on here. For dry noodles, the classics include sesame dressing(麻醬, ma2jiang4), “Fried Sauce”(炸醬, zha2jiang4) and stewed minced pork(肉燥, rou4zao4). Sometimes a mixture of all. Sesame noodles is the simplest of them all and easiest to recreate, they are all super delicious, but I’m just not much of a meat eater and always craving veggies.

Noodles

You can use any noodles you want, but EASY HOMEMADE NOODLES work best at soaking up all that delicious sauce. Thick or skinny noodles? You pick! Our favorite is usually skinny, for some reason, the texture works better for us with this recipe. We bought a pasta maker last summer, and it’s probably one of our most-used kitchen gadgets! It makes making noodles so much fun, less kneading and skinnier noodles!

If you’re in a rush or not feeling like making your own noodles, soba noodle is a great choice for this dish. Soba noodle is made with buckwheat, so it’s gluten-free! Rice noodles can be an option too, but I find them too slippery and doesn’t soak up as much flavor when it’s a simple mix-and-eat recipe like this one.

Sauce

TOASTED WHITE SESAME PASTE is the key ingredient in the sauce. Similar to tahini, the toasted sesame paste has a deeper, stronger and nuttier flavor. It is used in various dishes in Taiwan, often paired with lighter-tasting vegetables like cucumbers. Toasted sesame paste can be harder to find in the US, but making it is not hard at all! Much like making your own nut butter, all you need to do is toasted the white sesame seeds until golden then blend/grind it with the help of some oil to make a paste.

Other than the toasted white sesame paste, soy sauce, and vinegar are also added for balancing the flavor. The secret to the perfect sesame noodles lies in nailing the proportion of saltiness, sourness, and nuttiness.

Like it spicy? Add a few dashes of MALA HOT SAUCE to create a burning sensation.

Your Choice of Veg

I love a bowl of noodle with LOTS of veggies. There is usually more vegetables than noodles in my bowl. You can use any leafy veg you like, but there is some beautiful spinach at the Rochester Downtown Farmers Market I couldn’t resist so that’s what I’m using. Noodles with sesame dressing is usually really plain in Taiwan, with only a few leaves of veg in the bowl but you could always order a side of vegetables. But since we’re making a lazy, one bowl recipe here, just throw all that into a bowl!

I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF THIS RECIPE, RATE + COMMENT BELOW OR #CHEWEXPERIMENT ON INSTAGRAM!!!