Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup (台灣牛肉麵)

Another beautiful Sunday here in Salt Lake. Awesome! Just baked a batch of french macaroons. Looks like successful this time with the right color and bottom. Just need to taste it tomorrow to see if it is still hollow in the center. Won't be able to get the right texture (not hollow inside) without over baking it. Hopefully this is the magical batch and be able to talk about my macaroon story here soon.

While waiting the lemon curd to cool (gonna use to fill my beautiful macaroons) and cheering for the Mavs, I am going to talk about the Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup. Such a simple and yummy dish to make and you can find all the ingredients in U.S. Although I always say "the best way to make a perfect dish is to have a real one before you cook"; however, this is the dish I haven't had a "real" one yet. Maybe I should say, I haven't had the restaurant version but I did have the homemade version several times. Gotta get a authentic one next time when I got a chance to visit Taiwan. So, I made this noodle soup according to my memory from my dearest friends' homemade version and some internet research.

Overall, the Taiwanese version of beef noodles involves carrots, onions, star anise or mixed Chinese spice bag (鹵包), tomato, hot bean sauce (辣豆瓣), etc. These ingredients are very different from the Cantonese beef noodles, which is one of my favorite, especially the dried version without the soup (腩撈). Still won't be able to find a recipe for the Cantonese version as nobody make it at home. But according to my Taiwanese friends, they do make beef noodles at home and they all claim their mother makes the best beef noodles. Sounds so much like the Italian claiming their mother make the best tomato meat sauce. So, here is my version, might not be authentic enough but still pretty good. Enjoy~~

Ingredients:

• 1 lb of beef, cut into big chunks
• 3 medium carrot, cut into big chunks
• 1 medium onion, cut into halves or quarters
• 1 cup beef broth
• 3 to 5 cloves garlic, peel but no need to chop or dice
• 1 table spoon hot bean sauce
• 1 tea spoon five spice powder (五香粉), didn't have the spice bag at home and use this as substitute 
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1 table spoon sesame oil
• green onion and cilantro for garnish
• some Chinese noodles prefer the white noodle but not the rice noodles
• (optional) some yellow cane sugar to taste. I would skip the sugar next time as I feel it was a bit too sweet. Maybe the onions and carrots were very sweet already.

Cooking Directions:

1. Brown the beef chunks in a medium pot . These would help the juice stay inside the meat. Take out and side aside. 
2. Brown the carrots, onions and garlic in the pot with the sesame oil. Add the hot bean sauce and five spice powder. Stir fried until you can smell the spice.
3. Add the browned beef chunks back to the pot. Add the beef broth and soy sauce. Add water until it cover all the meat and ingredient.
4. Turn the heat to high until boil. Turn down the heat to low. Cover and simmer for 1 hour. 
5. When the beef stew soup is done, cook the noodles as direction.
6. In a bowl, add the cooked noodles, couple pieces of the beef stew, some carrots. Cover everything with the broth and garnish with green onion and cilantro. Yummy noodles are ready. Should be enough for about 4 bowl of noodles soup. 

Happy blogging - Vee