I’m a huge FoodNetwork junkie and I make no bones about it. It’s my background noise most nights, my culinary educator and the source of inspiration for many of my own recipes. (Kind of like this one!) So when Gordon Ramsay came up with his Gordon’s Ultimate Cookery show and promised to teach you how to cook without any of the hard graft (I love that line J) I was glued.
I have to confess something – I couldn’t stand Gordon Ramsay until this
show. He struck me as a big, bullying prick. I get he was supposed to be mean,
it made for good TV, but as someone who has struggled with low self-esteem for most
of her life, watching this man - who was supposed to be a role model - scream
derogatory insults at people who were trying their hardest just struck a
negative chord with me. His new Ultimate shows have shown him as a real person,
at home in his own kitchen, with family and friends without any of the ‘reality tv’ feel and I
thought _finally_ here’s the real guy, the one I actually like. And then he
turned out to have such a similar culinary taste to mine I went ‘wow, how did I
not know this?
This recipe is the perfect example of that – I ADORE Asian cuisine –
any Asian cuisine. This particular one is a Chinese street food that is not
only spicy and delicious but actually so much more healthy than North American
street food. I _want_ this in Toronto. Seriously! Give me a Dandan truck and I’ll
be a happy girl. I sat glued to the episode that this was from and had to try
it right away. And of course trying it meant I had to play, experiment and
adapt to my own tastes. This is what I’ve come up with.
There are asterisks in this recipe – the cooking notes are at the
bottom of the recipe J
I’ve also included a link to Gordon’s recipe at the bottom.
Ingredients
- 1lb ground pork (or other ground meat *)
- 1 thumb-sized piece of ginger root, peeled and minced
- 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 carrot, ribboned
- 3 tbsp Chinese cooking wine
- 2 tbsp low sodium soy sauce, or tamari if you’re gluten free
- 2 tbsp sesame oil
- 2 tbsp Sichuan peppercorns **
- 3-4 thai bird chilis (adjust to your heat level)
- 2 tbsp sambal olek
- Rice vinegar, to taste
- Cooking spray with a few drops of sesame oil for frypan
- Chinese duck egg noodles or rice noodles if you’re going gluten free
To garnish
before serving:
- Fresh coriander (cilantro) chopped
- 3-scallions, thin sliced on diagonal
- 1tbsp toasted sesame seeds
- Fresh limes cut into wedges
Directions
- Put your ground meat into a bowl and add the cooking wine, soy sauce/tamari and sesame oil. Stir lightly to coat and set aside to marinate for at least 10 minutes or in fridge to marinate for a few hours.
- Take meat out of fridge before you start preparing the other ingredients to come up to room temp.
- Prepare the garlic and ginger. Peel you carrot and use the peeler to shave off long ribbons of carrot, give it a rough chop to make bite sized.
- Saute in fry pan with cooking spray and sesame oil for 1 minute. Add in thai bird chilis and cook for another 30 seconds.***
- Add in marinated meat and brown.
- Add your Sichuan peppercorns, carrot ribbons and sambal olek, and a few splashes of rice wine vinegar; cook for a few more minutes.
- Taste and add more soy/tamari and rice wine vinegar if needed.
- Prepare your egg noodles/rice vermicelli according to their directions.
- Top noodles with some of the meat mixture and garnish with some fresh chopped coriander, scallions, and sesame seeds and squirt the lime wedge on top.
- Eat!
- Enjoy!!
Cooking Notes
*I’ve tried this recipe with ground chicken
too. Personally I don’t think chicken holds up under the intense flavours of
this dish but if you aren’t a pork person you might try ground turkey instead –
it’s a much heartier and robust meat to chicken.
** If you’re
like me, you habitually forget to put Sichuan peppercorns on your shopping list
so here’s an easy cheat. Crush your regular black peppercorns with a mortar and
pestle, grate in the zest of one lemon, mix together and you have faux Sichuan peppercorns!
***The
chilis give off very pungent fumes as the oil releases that can cause much
choking and coughing – I speak from experience on this! So make sure your
kitchen is well ventilated and don’t cook longer than 30 seconds to a minute
just to get the oils flowing before adding in your ground meat.
Sichuan Pork Noodles a la Gordon Ramsay
