Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup
With the weather warming up and snowboarding adventures winding down, Sunday night dinners are back! Well, occasionally, that is. With the mixed group of people that we often have over for these dinners, we decided to throw the theme of “The Motherland” out there, so that our guests could all get to know each other better and share their family’s secret recipes. Although, the theme does pose some difficulties with regards to beer pairings because of the multi-ethnic potpourri of dishes, so I decided to invite the attendees of the dinner to post their recipes and write about their dishes so that we can discuss the beer pairing with each dish individually. But then (lightbulb), I realized that our Sunday night dinners would be much better documented if this became a regular routine…. so here it goes.
One of my favorite dishes that my mom makes is her Taiwanese beef noodle soup. I’ve had this countless times, but had never tried to make it myself, so I figured why not experiment on dinner guests? This dish is a savory soup with beef short ribs and large chunks of carrots, that are cooked down until they melt in your mouth. Mmmmmm…. deeeee-ricious! Then the soup is served over fresh noodles and garnished with cilantro, scallions, and pickled mustard greens. It’s my ideal comfort food and is so satisfying after a long week.
Ingredients:
- 5-6 lbs of beef short ribs
- 5 very large carrots (the giant type that you get at Asian grocery stores), cut into large 2″ chunks
- 3 large tomatoes, quartered
- 2-3 small green hot peppers, halved
- About 10 star anise (whole)
- 3 cloves of garlic (peeled)
- 3/4 cup of soy sauce
- fresh noodles, approximately the size of fettucini (typically found in refrigerated section of Asian grocery stores)
- cilantro, course chop of mostly the leaves
- scallions, sliced
- pickled mustard greens, finely diced (found in vacuum sealed packets in refrigerated section of Asian grocery stores)
I boiled the beef ribs for about 5 minutes to remove any of the funk that typically floats to the top of a pot of boiling meat. Then I poured off the dirty water and rinsed away any excess funkiness so that it wouldn’t cloud my broth. I returned the meat into a large stock pot, added the soy sauce, garlic, star anise, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, and enough water to cover. Then I just brought it to a boil, and reduced the heat to a simmer. Let simmer for about 2 hours. During the last 30 minutes I boiled and rinsed the noodles and put them in large soup bowls, with the garnish or cilantro, scallions and mustard greens. When the soup was done, it’s just ladled over the noodles and served.
This soup, if paired with beer, is typically paired with a light lager that is most commonplace in Asian countries. The night that we had this dinner we had Jer’s black mild on tap, so we had that. The roastiness of the beer goes holds up well to the rich savory flavors of the soup, and the beer helps to cool down a little of the burn from the peppers. Ahhh, another successful Sunday night dinner where experimenting on my dinner guests ended with some happy beer bellies!
