酸菜炖粉条 (Braised Vermicelli with Pickled Cabbage)

I haven't been very good at keep up with the blog the last few months. I'm way behind on my recipe write-ups. It's going to take me a while to catch up, but here's what I've got for today: 酸菜炖粉条 (suāncài dùn fěntiáo), which is cabbage and vermicelli stew (or "braised vermicelli with pickled cabbage" if you're going for a more literal translation). It's a popular winter dish in northern China, often prepared with home-made pickled cabbage. My cabbage was not home-made. In fact, the whole soup base came from a kit that I found at the Asian grocery store. I'm sure it would've been even better had made it myself, but the kit was still really nice. We did it as a hotpot and tossed in various veggies and proteins to cook at the table.

Before making the soup kit, I looked around online for recipes to make the dish from scratch. And the Woks of Life came through for me with a great home-made recipe. I used their recipe to adjust how I prepared the kit a bit, including mixing up the delicious dipping sauce to serve along with it. And now I know what to do if I want to make it without the kit in the future. It's actually quite simple to put together.

The folks at the Woks of Life provide several different options for the sour cabbage component of this stew. The best option, if you can find it, is pickled nappa cabbage. If you can't find that, they recommend pickled mustard greens as the next best thing. They tend to be a bit easier to find, but their texture isn't ideal for this dish. And, as a last resort, if you can't find either of the others, you can use sauerkraut. It has a different flavour than the others, but it is sour and it's made of cabbage, so it'll do in a pinch.

We made our stew with mung bean glass noodles/vermicelli, but sweet potato glass noodles are actually recommended. Unfortunately I didn't have any of those and I did have a huge surpluss of bean noodles, so I used what I had. I really liked it with the bean noodles. Sure, they absorbed a lot of the broth and made it less soupy, but I was okay with that.

One final note: The authors of the Woks of Life blog note that this stew is almost always served with rice. I'm sure it would be tasty that way, but we chose to omit the rice and just have our brothy noodles and veggies. Follow your heart!

Cabbage and Vermicelli Stew

From The Woks of Life

Ingredients

Pork Preparation

• 1L water
• 450g pork belly or 900g meaty ribs
• 2 Tbsp. Shaoxing wine
• 4 slices fresh ginger (~2cm by 4cm)
• 2 scallions/green onions
• 1 tsp. Sichuan peppercorns¹
• 1 star anise
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Dipping Sauce

• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 Tbsp. light soy sauce
• 1/4 tsp. sugar
• chili oil, to taste (optional)

Soup

• 450g pickled cabbage
• 2 Tbsp. canola (or other neutral) oil
• 3 slices ginger (~2cm by 4cm), julienned
• 2 sallions/green onions, white parts julienned, green parts chopped
• 1 Tbsp. oyster sauce
• 1 c. chicken stock (optional)
• 90g glass noodles
• 1/4 tsp. white pepper, ground

Optional Extras

• carrot, chopped
• zucchini, chopped
• tofu puffs
• kale, chopped
• mushrooms, sliced
• rice, cooked

Directions

Pork Preparation

1. Combine water, pork, wine, ginger, scallions, Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, and salt in a pot, cover, and bring to a boil.
2. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
3. If using pork belly: Reserving the broth, remove the belly from the pot and set it aside to cool.
   If using ribs: Turn the heat off, but leave the ribs in the broth to cook some more while you prepare everything else.

Dipping Sauce

1. Combine all sauce ingredients and set aside.

Soup

1. Slice the pickled cabbage into 5 or 6mm pieces and place it in a metal bowl with fresh water.
2. Stir the cabbage around a bit, then drain it and squeeze well to remove as much residual liquid as possible. Set aside.
3. Once the pork is no longer hot, cut it into 5 or 6mm slices. Set aside.
4. In a heavy pot (something that retains heat well), heat the oil over medium heat.
5. Add the ginger, white parts of the scallions, and pickled cabbage and stir-fry for 5-7 minutes.
6. Strain the pork broth and add it to the pot.
7. Stir in the oyster sauce and chicken stock (if using).
8. Add the sliced pork and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
9. Add the glass noodles and cook according to package directions.
10. Add the white pepper and green parts of scallions.

Serving

1. This can be served as a hotpot. Make sure the broth is boiling and then toss in any veggies or proteins you'd like. Once everything is heated through/cooked to desired doneness, you can fish it out and eat it with the dipping sauce, rice, and noodles.
2. Or serve it without any extra inclusions. Make sure it's piping hot and give everyone dipping sauce for the pork and rice.

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¹ It would normally be important to make sure you picked all the seeds out of the Sichuan peppercorns and only used the husks. However, since the broth is strained before adding it to the final dish, any seeds (or husks) will get filtered out so there's no need to worry about it in this case. ^Back