Spicy Noodles in Mashed Potato Sauce

A new - and very 2023 - Chinese street food to hit the scene.

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This video is about a dish that’s pretty new on the scene. It’s basically a Sichuan-style cold noodle at first blush, complete with many of the predictable fixings – chili oil, garlic water, fish wort, crushed peanuts, etc etc. But then to that mix it adds in two… slightly less predictable components as well:

• Western-style mashed potatoes (like, KFC-style mashed potatoes)

• A thick, gravy like soup called a geng (possibly inspired by KFC gravy?)

Here’s a glimpse of how its served. Fun, right?

If we had to guess, the predecessor here was likely a snack from Chongqing called Yangyu Liangmian (洋芋凉面), or “Potato Cold Noodles”. In that dish, potatoes are fried in oil, then chopped up and served with what’re basically the same fixings – albeit sans the thick soup. If you’re curious, you can check out a vendor whipping some up here.

But besides just the style of ‘noodle with potato’ that’s on offer, there is, I think something else kind of notable about these two vendors – their age difference.

Of course, “young person whips up something fun and new, old person whips up something classic and delicious” is a phenomenon as old as time, but there’s more going on here than that. At it’s core, this dish is a very 2023 phenomenon.

A Very General Introduction to the Street Food Scene in China

Ever since I first moved to China back in 2008, street food has often been something with a bit of a… murky legality to it – informal economic activity, if you will. The dude selling lamb kebabs on the corner didn’t have a business license, probably didn’t pay taxes, definitely wasn’t ServSafe^TM certified, and may or may not have even had permission (from… someone…) to even be there.

A Northeastern chef downstairs from our old apartment in Shenzhen used to like to wax poetic about those old days – apparently, he got his start cooking professionally by grilling up some kebabs on the street after work. Him and his friend were working in an office downtown, and to make a bit of extra cash they’d hit up the Futian wholesale market in the morning and just keep stuff in the company fridge. Then, right about when people would get off work, they’d set the grill up right outside of their office building in order to hit that evening rush.

Now, if you come from a western country, I think that whole story might be a little difficult to wrap your head around. There’s a sort of radical freedom there that’s almost unfathomable – where’s the business plan, the investors, the health inspectors, the Tax Identification Number? No jumping through any hoops. No begging some rich dude for investment capital. Just… go on the street and give something a whirl. If you succeed, hey, maybe save up for a physical location. And if you fail, who cares?

Of course, how you view all that probably depends a quite bit on the ol’ y-value of your political compass score. And there’s definitely tradeoffs here, no doubt. But still, it’s a little hard to describe the sheer dynamism this can impart on the food scene without resorting to market-fundamentalist clichés. Old dishes are played with, new dishes are made – like, perhaps a surprising number of what you might think of as ‘classic’ Chinese dishes (e.g. Suancaiyu, Laziji) were – at least in their modern form – born out of the fluidity of the 80s and 90s.

It was a fantastic time for the development of Chinese cuisines.

It was also not meant to last.

Enter the Chengguan

I want to… try to be fair here. Imagine an office building downtown in the city or town where you live. Imagine if some dude randomly popped up a charcoal grill right outside and started selling lamb kebabs for a buck a pop. Just how many minutes would it take before people called the cops and shut the guy down?

In the town where I’m from in Pennsylvania, I’d be shocked if he lasted ten minutes. In America at least, we simply don’t accept this sort of thing on our streets – the only informal economic activity we barely tolerate is begging.

It wasn’t only street food, of course. The early 90s was a time of rapid urbanization in China and there was an increasing number of conflicts between people and interests regarding land use and public space. And so, in 1997, the city of Beijing responded by founding the first Chengguan (“city management”) department in order to manage those conflicts. In 2002, Guangdong and Chongqing would then take this model and crystallize it into its modern form – that is, fashioning it into a sort of parapolice force tasked with enforcing various freshly-minted urban laws and regulations. If you can understand Mandarin Chinese, I’d heavily recommend this lecture by Jiang Anli which takes a look at the history of the department with a much cooler head than I’m personally able to.

In practice, one of the primary responsibilities the Chengguan were often tasked with was the clearing out of street vendors. As a force, they quickly became a bit infamous in China – confiscating carts and cooking equipment was a common occurrence, and at times disputes turned violent. Not-too-uncommon cry to hear when perusing a night market was the alarming call of “城管来了!” (“Here comes the Chengguan!”) – followed by everyone quickly clamoring to pack up their carts and run away before the Chengguan could nab them. As someone that loves street food, it’s a little difficult for me to express how I feel about this, so perhaps I can hand it over to the Wuhan-based punk rock band SMZB:

Over the years, the Chengguan would (obviously) win these battles – The State always wins. While in my old home of Shenzhen there was still a touch of street food here or there in the outskirts of the cities, the vendors that remained weren’t necessarily the best cooks… but rather often the ‘most talented at evading the Chengguan’. Similarly, by the early 2010s, much of the country’s previously-lauded street food scene had effectively become extinct in the major cities. And this would soon apply to much of the rest of the country as well.

The Civilized City

The civilized city program is a program that actually dates back to 2005. Basically, the central government goes around to individual cities and grades how ‘civilized’ the city is on a number of metrics. If they pass review, the city is granted a “National Civilized City” award (全国文明城市). Now, the path of promotion within the party tends to go from city level, to provincial level, to national level… so ambitious young officials often tend to get their start at the city level. And the word on the street was that, apparently, receiving this “National Civilized City” award was quite good for a mayor’s potential promotion prospects – especially as the Party began to de-emphasize GDP growth in the 2010s.  

Now again, I want to try to be fair here. I want you to take a look at the list of requirements to become a ‘civilized city’ – this is the Baidu Baike (you can just use Google Translate on it). I think that most people would think that these tasks are good. Like…

“build more libraries and clinics”

“make sure there’s enough buses and green space”

“more than 80% of the days of the year have an AQI under 100”

“maintain an approval rating of over 90%”

Promoting government leadership by giving them local offices and seeing if they can hit these sorts of targets surely isn’t a crazy way to run a country. When Chinese officials talk about stuff like “Whole Process Democracy”, this isn’t just bullshit – a lot of them are true believers in the system. Of course we’re ‘Democratic’, we asked everyone if they liked us and they said yes! Plus, look at all the parks we’ve built. How many parks have you built?

Unfortunately in practice, when it comes to street food… what would happen is that a civilized city bid would often wipe out the last remaining bastions. Like, Guiyang was a city that was filled to the brim with amazing street food, but then an ambitious mayor comes in, wants that award… and away it goes.

It got to the point where – so we heard – around 2020 CCTV wanted to follow in Netflix’s heels and make a documentary on street food in China, only to find out that… there wasn’t really all that much left.

Forbearance

Now, all of that said, China’s still obviously a phenomenal place to eat. You don’t need to eat on the street, after all – restaurants exist for a reason. Because, honestly, most ‘developed’ countries don’t allow that sort of radical economic freedom, either. The very best vendors would respond to clean up efforts by getting a physical location, so it was a rare sight to see something get truly lost to the Chengguan or a Civilized City bid. Sometimes vendors would even get corralled into specially designed markets ala Singapore, though the higher rents those places would demand would (in practice) morph the markets into more of a tourism sort of place.

Still, it always made me… a little sad. For me, there’s just something about an excellent night market that makes it one of the most exciting possible places to eat – maybe it’s the sort of chaotic, Dionysian energy; maybe it’s the diversity of what’s on offer, I don’t know. And then to see that same street that was once so teeming with life, and energy, and culture… all scrubbed barren? There’s just something so profoundly empty about the thing – the urban equivalent of attending a wake. But thanks for planting some trees, I guess.

And yet… first during the pandemic, followed by the poor economy in 2023, the Chengguan started doing what I previously thought was completely unthinkable.

They’ve began to… chill out?

I mean, it’s obvious in a way. Economy is bad. You’re dealing with an unemployment problem, particularly among the youth. There’d been rumblings here or there that maybe these urban clean up efforts had gone a little too far anyway, so… why not just let people make their own jobs if they have the ability to? This was during the pandemic, but there was this fantastic moment where the head of a local Chengguan was calling a local street vendor to ask him to come back to the street:

But again, youth unemployment is quite high, so these days you’re not just seeing the remnants of that old crowd hit the streets – you’re also seeing this influx from the younger, post-90s generation. If you can’t find a job at an office or a factory, why not try your hand at making a bit of street food?

But, as we talked about a bit on our Chewy Cheesy Bacon Bread video, on a couple fronts the current urban post-90s generation is a bit different from those that came before. After all, this is a generation that grew up in a post-WTO China, with a non-negligible number that went to university abroad. So food-wise (and coffee-wise, and beer-wise) tastes are… quite a bit more internationalized. Back when I first moved to China you’d have to trek to one of only a handful of Starbucks in a city to find a morning coffee, nowadays in Guangdong it’s not uncommon to find 2-3 boutique places a stone’s throw away on a single block.

So on the street, right next to the predictable grilled skewers, in this new wave you can also see young people bringing stuff like sushi, baked goods, etc. From a culinary perspective, generally speaking it’s usually not the most interesting stuff (I mean, you surely know what sushi tastes like already), but hey, you’d probably appreciate it if you lived in the neighborhood.

But as we talked about before, the street’s pretty a dynamic place. So, I think if you look closely enough, you can – at times – faintly start to see some new ideas and dishes just beginning to sprout.

Take sushi rolls, for example. That sort of suitably-sticky Japanese rice is a bit expensive in China (and a little difficult to work with), so in pockets you can start to see people subbing it with sticky rice. Sticky rice sushi rolls certainly aren’t the same, but they’re… a pretty interesting texture, actually. Different, but not worse – and you could imagine certain fillings actually working better with it (e.g. pork floss). So if you let that function iterate a couple times, after a spell you could start seeing some pretty inspired sticky rice sushi concoctions, in my opinion.

Which brings us back to our dish today…

Mashed Potato Noodles (土豆泥凉面)

Now right, street food is often a little awkward to make at home, for many of the reasons I articulated in our last What is Cantonese Home Cooking post. Vendors will pre-prepare a number of ingredients in advance – some of them rather intense – and mix it all on the spot. For the home cook, what this often translates to is working for hours on a dish, only to scarf it down in a couple noodle-y bites.

The answer for these dishes, I think, is to batch-prep like the vendors… but to do so the way a homecook would batch-prep – i.e. leaning on the freezer.

Of course, some things in this recipe will freeze well, some would be better to keep in the fridge, and some you’ll need to whip up the day of. For the things you can keep in the fridge or freezer, we’ve based it off of eight servings; for the things that are done the day of, the recipe will be per serving.

However, street food are often snack sized, which is also the case of our portioning here. So if you’re making this as a proper meal, we’ll suggest you do a double serving for one person in order to be full. (We did a rough calculation, one serving is about 500 calories give or take. )

Hope that doesn’t get overly confusing.

Component 1: ‘Oil Noodles’ (油面)

Importance: Obviously mandatory for the dish, though you could potentially use other sorts of noodles if you really want.

How to Keep: Two options here. You can boil your noodles the day of -or- you can make a larger batch, portion into little baggies, and keep them in the fridge. Fridged oil noodles can last 3-4 days without much degradation in texture, and so can be quite handy (nuking for ~one minute at medium to re-heat). So, up to you, but we’ll assume you’ll be doing this one the day-of.

Ingredients:

• Fresh Alkaline noodles (碱面), ~60g per serving

• Oil, preferably Sichuan Caiziyou, ~1 tsp per serving

For fresh alkaline noodles, if you don’t have access to the Sichuan style, you can use the Japanese sort (i.e. fresh ramen, something like this) or you can also follow our from-scratch recipe our the Beef Noodle Soup video. You can also use dried alkaline noodles (~40g-50g per serving) in a pinch, or even just your favorite noodle.

Boil the noodles until mostly done, or about al dente. Strain, then toss on a wide plate. In front of a fan or a hand-held fan (or a magazine/newspaper), drizzle over the oil, then continuously lift and jiggle the noodles with a pair of chopsticks to separate the noodles and let the steam escape.

Component 2: Mashed Potatoes (土豆泥)

Importance: Mandatory for the dish

How to Keep: Can be frozen in one-portion sized baggies. When serving, can be reheated in the microwave – no need to thaw. Because it’s incorporated into a sauce, there are… less textural demands on the mash, so to speak. The Kitchn has a very complete discussion on reheating mashed potatoes.

Ingredients:

• Potato, 1 large, ~350g

• Salt, 1 tsp. For the boiling water.

• Butter, 20g.

• Milk powder, ½ tbsp. Be sure to use full fat milk powder.

• Seasoning, to taste. I added an additional ¼ tsp salt.

Nothing fancy here. Peel the potato and cut into ~2 inch chunks. Boil for 15-20 minutes until soft, and then drain.

Add the butter and milk powder. Mash, and then season to taste.

Component 3: Sichuan Chili Oil (油辣子) -or- our Lazy Altered Lao Gan Ma below

Importance: Mandatory for the dish

How to Keep: Can be kept in the fridge, 1-3 months. The upper limit really depends on your botulism paranoia level – if the level is practically zero then chili oil keeps in the fridge practically indefinitely.

So if you happen to have some Sichuan chili oil on hand, definitely use that. We have an old recipe on our channel that I’d like to re-do, so in the meantime you can check out the illustrious Wang Gang’s recipe if you’re in the market (has English CCs).

Still, sometimes I feel a little bad for doing the whole recipe-writer “recipe-inside-of-a-recipe” thing, sending you down some sort of twisted recipe rabbit hole. So while I’d definitely recommend whipping up a batch if you’re envisioning yourself making yourself a good bit of Sichuan food, you can also do this in a pinch:

Ingredients:

• Oil, preferably Sichuan Caiziyou, ½ cup

• Red fragrant chili powder, e.g. Gochugaru, Qinjiao (陕西秦椒), Kashmiri, etc; 4 tsp

• Spicy chili powder, e.g. Cayenne pepper, Heaven Facing chili powder (朝天椒辣椒面), 1 tsp

• Lao Gan Ma Chili Crisp (老干妈香辣脆油辣椒), ¼ cup

Heat the oil up until smoking (~200C), then shut off the heat. Add in the chili powders and stir well. Once no longer bubbling, add the Lao Gan Ma chili crisp and swap the flame to low. Cook for ~1-2 minutes until fragrant.

Component 4: Ground Pork

Importance: Completely optional

How to Keep: Can be frozen in one-portion size. No need to thaw, microwave to serve.

Ingredients:

• Ground pork, preferably ground shoulder/Boston Butt (猪肩肉), 250g

• Marinade for the pork:

  Salt, ¼ tsp

  Sugar, ¼ tsp

  Cornstarch (生粉), 1 tsp

  Soy sauce (生抽), 1 tsp

  Liaojiu aka Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tsp

  Dark soy sauce (老抽), ¼ tsp

  White pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ¼ tsp

• Garlic, 2 cloves. Smashed

• Ginger, ~1/2 inch. Smashed

Mix the pork with the marinade and set aside. Smash the garlic and the ginger.

In a wok, first longyau: get you wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil, here ~2 tbsp, and give it a swirl. Over a medium flame, add in the garlic and ginger and stir fry until fragrant, ~30 seconds. Then up the flame to medium-high and add in the pork. Fry the pork until cooked through and deepened in color, ~5 minutes.

Component 5: Carrot/Mushroom Soup

Importance: Mandatory for the dish, in our opinion

How to Keep: This is a starch thickened soup, so you have two options. First, if you thicken with starch like the recipe below, it’ll keep in the fridge for about three days – you can reheat either on the stovetop or in the microwave. Second, you can choose to NOT thicken the soup when making it, then freeze it in one-portion baggies/cubes, then thaw and thicken it with starch it on the stove-top.

Ingredients:

• Ginger, ~1/2 inch. Minced.

• Scallions, white part only, 2. Minced.

• Enoki mushroom (金针菇), 60g. Cut into ~1 inch sections.

• Carrot, 60g. Julienned, then cut into ~1 inch sections.

• Liaojiu aka Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tbsp

• Soy sauce (生抽), ½ tbsp

• Stock, 1.5 cups

• Seasoning:

  Dark soy sauce (老抽), ¼ tsp

  Salt, ¼ tsp

  Sugar, ¼ tsp

  MSG (味精), 1/8 tsp

  Chicken bouillon powder (鸡精), 1/8 tsp

  White pepper powder (白胡椒粉)

• Slurry of 1 tbsp starch, preferably potato starch (土豆淀粉) mixed with 2 tbsp water. See note below if you’re opting to freeze the soup.

Mince the ginger and the scallion whites. Julienne the carrot. Cut both the julienned carrot and enoki mushroom into ~1 inch sections.

In a hot wok, swirl in ~1 tbsp of oil and fry the ginger and scallion over a medium flame until fragrant, ~30 seconds. Add in the mushroom and carrot. Stir fry until the mushroom and carrot are beginning to shrink and dry a bit, ~3 minutes, then swirl in the wine. Quick fry, then swirl in the soy sauce and mix. Add in the stock and bring to a boil.

Boil for ~2 minutes, then lower the flame to medium-low. Drizzle in the slurry to thicken.

Note: If you’re choosing to not thicken the whole batch but rather do it on a portion-by-portion basis, use 1/2 tsp starch mixed with 1 tsp water per serving.

Component 6: Roughly Pounded Roasted Peanuts

Importance: Optional

How to Keep: Pounded roasted peanuts keep roughly forever in the fridge.

• Peanuts -or- roasted peanuts, ½ cup

If you like, you can use roasted peanuts from the store (preferably unsalted) and lightly crush them in a mortar.

Alternatively, toast the peanuts for ~5 minutes over a medium flame until fragrant and the skins are good and blistered. Remove the peels, then lightly crush in a mortar.

Component 7: Pickled vegetables, Zhacai (榨菜) and Pickled Daikon (酸萝卜)

Importance: Both are optional, but I personally quite like the pickled Daikon.

How to Keep: Zhacai will keep roughly forever in the fridge, and pickled daikon will keep for about one week after opening. You could chop up eight servings worth or just chop it up on the day-of, up to you. We’ll do this per-serving though.

• Zhacai (榨菜), ~5 grams per serving

• Pickled Daikon (酸萝卜), ~10 grams per serving. The Japanese style is quite similar if you don’t have access to the Sichuan sort.

Slice both into ~1/2 cm pieces.

Component 8: Herbs, Scallion and Cilantro

Importance: Both are optional at their core, but I would include at least one (cilantro is higher priority for me, personally).

How to Keep: Don’t keep this. Slice these the day of.              

We’re aiming for roughly ~1 tbsp each of scallion and cilantro. This will be roughly 1-2 green leaves from one scallion (you can use the green parts that we didn’t use in the soup) and about 1/3 of a sprig of cilantro.

Component 9: Garlic Water

Importance: Suggested bordering on mandatory.

How to Keep: Don’t keep this. Make your garlic water the day of.

Ingredients:

• Garlic, ½ large or 1 small clove

• Water, 1 tbsp

Pound the garlic into a paste and then mix with the water.

Assembly

Ok, so putting it all together:

• Cooked Youmian Noodles, 100g

• Mashed potato, 40g

• Carrot/Mushroom Soup, 40g

• Cooked Minced Pork, 30g

• Chili oil, 1.5 tbsp

• Crushed Roasted Peanuts, 1 tbsp

• Zhacai, ½ tbsp

• Pickled Daikon, ½ tbsp

• Chopped Scallion, 1 tbsp

• Chopped Cilantro, 1 tbsp

• Garlic Water, 1 tbsp

• Soy sauce (生抽), 1 tsp

• Dark Chinese vinegar (陈醋/香醋), 1 tsp

• Sichuan peppercorn powder, ¼ tsp

• MSG, 1/8 tsp

Mix well in a large mixing bowl. Transfer to a small serving bowl. Optionally top with more pork, chili oil, and scallion/cilantro.