Jump to content
  • Welcome to the eG Forums, a service of the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. The Society is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of the culinary arts. These advertising-free forums are provided free of charge through donations from Society members. Anyone may read the forums, but to post you must create a free account.

cold noodles with actual sesame sauce


Fat Guy

Recommended Posts

In general, the recipes I've seen for cold noodles with sesame sauce are actually recipes for cold noodles with peanut-butter sauce flavored with a little sesame oil. This is also the case with all the examples I've been served in Chinese restaurants in the US. Is there such a thing as a recipe for sesame sauce that uses no peanuts? (This is an allergy-related request; not my allergy but I'm cooking to accommodate it.)

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looking in my recipe collection seems to reveal the same thing - at least 1/4 cup of PB in the recipes. How about replacing the PB with tahini in one of those recipes?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've made it with the thick sesame paste you can find in Asian markets, but I don't see why tahini wouldn't work just as well or why peanut butter would be a necessity. Here's Bittman's version which has chicken, but that seems optional, if you don't want chicken--

http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30...-and-cucumbers/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting. Bittman seems to consider peanut butter and tahini interchangeable. I find the tastes of those two products to be quite different. I wonder if, as part of the sauce, they're more similar.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Except that peanut butter appears, from my examination of dozens of recipes, to be the standard ingredient. Tahini seems to be the adaptation. Which is odd because the dish is called "sesame noodles."

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I do sesame noodles without peanut butter (husband is allergic, and I don't like peanuts). I don't have exact measurements, but it's pretty forgiving.

I start with a base of soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, and rice vinegar (maybe 2:1:1?) with grated ginger--I usually use a microplane so it's more like ginger pulp. I think I make about a cup of dressing for a pound of noodles, and I personally like it with a lot of ginger. I also usually add a dollop of chili garlic sauce and some chopped scallions. I toss this with the hot noodles, and the flavor soaks in as the noodles cool. After they're cool, I add toasted sesame seeds. You can also finish with some extra toasted sesame oil if you want more sesame flavor.

My favorite version also includes julienned cucumber and red pepper, and shredded chicken. Cilantro optional.

I believe you can also buy sesame sauce or sesame paste at an asian grocery, but many of these contain peanut powder, so you have to read the labels (if they're not in Chinese).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I usually use peanut butter, but I also have a jar of Queen's brand sesame sauce, which claims to contain only white sesame and sesame oil (Blooming Import Inc, NYC).

When I first bought it, I made a batch of sesame noodles using it instead of peanut butter (along with soy sauce, red vinegar, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, a bit of sugar and chili garlic sauce), garnished with cukes and sometimes furikake. The sesame taste was pretty intense and not what I was used/addicted to. Now I sometimes use a couple of tsp. along with the peanut butter to deepen the flavor.

But it's been awhile and this makes me want to try another batch without the pb. I'm thinking that diluting the sauce with a bit of noodle-cooking water might mellow that SESAME taste.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

They are. The paste I have is brown and tastes like it may be made from toasted seeds. That said, I suspect that all of the above could make a nice cold noodle dish with Asian flavors, if one isn't too concerned about authenticity, though I'm not sure what counts as authentic here, since peanut butter could be a Chinese-American adaptation.

Here's a recipe from a Chinese source (though I'm not entirely sure it's more Chinese than, say, Ollie's Noodle Shop on the Upper West Side, since the publisher--Wei Chuan--is an American manufacturer of Chinese food products) that uses only Chinese sesame paste--

http://www.americastestkitchen.com/ibb/pos...ter1-p=1#278895

Edited by David A. Goldfarb (log)
Link to comment
Share on other sites

China is the world's largest peanut producer, for what it's worth.

As I understand it, the difference between Middle Eastern-style and Asian-style sesame pastes is that the the Asian-style ones are made from unhulled seeds. Tahini, however, is not a monolithic product. I see it made from raw seeds and from roasted seeds, in a variety of darknesses and thicknesses. Package ingredient listings don't seem to specify hulled or unhulled, and I'm not sure what affect that has on flavor.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In one of my many Chinese cookbooks, Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook, there are a couple of recipes for dishes with sesame sauce, none of which contain peanut butter.

The sauce for the classic Don Don Noodles, for instance, has garlic, ginger, scallions, chili flakes, ground Szechwan peppercorns, sesame paste, sugar and soy sauce.

About sesame paste, Mrs. Chiang (or her interpreter) has this to say:

Although it rarely appears in the dishes of American Chinese restaurants, sesame paste is one of the most important and characteristic of all Szechwanese condiments.  It has a much stronger taste and more powerful aroma than the Middle Eastern variety, and appears most frequently as the basic component of this type of highly spiced sauce.

Fuchsia Dunlop, in Land of Plenty, has a recipe for the same noodles, also containing only sesame paste.

In Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's New Cantonese Cooking, her recipe for sesame noodles contains no peanut butter, only sesame oil.

And in Irene Kuo's seminal The Key to Chinese Cooking, her recipe for sesame paste contains both sesame oil and sesame paste, but no peanut butter. In her glossary on ingredients, however, she does mention that peanut butter creamed with a little sesame oil is a good substitute for sesame paste.

I get the feeling that true sesame paste is more of a Szechwan ingredient, and Bruce Cost in his book Asian Ingredients, seems to back this up:

The paste is the base for sauces, among them a spicy Sichuan dressing for a summer noodle dish.

Mitch Weinstein aka "weinoo"

Tasty Travails - My Blog

My eGullet FoodBog - A Tale of Two Boroughs

Was it you baby...or just a Brilliant Disguise?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I had a Chinese friend who used to use tea as the diluent to loosen sesame paste and/or peanut butter for cold noodles. Just a tiny, judicious amount; you may try oolong or green tea, to see which one suits your palate. The tea adds a little depth, astringency and complexity to the richness of the cold noodles. You may cut down on the soy sauce when you do so, leaving more of the seed flavor unalloyed.

Increase the quantity of tea until it is enough to make a slurry, if you feel that is to your taste.

Try it once, and let us know how it worked out. Pickled [Chinese style] gherkins & garlic cloves, & fresh Kirby/pickling cucumbers shredded, on the side, as mentioed upthread, are excellent.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've been using the recipe for this from "The Chinese Cookbook" by Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1972), for more than 30 years. The recipe calls for Asian sesame paste, though in a pinch I've used peanut butter, which isn't quite the same but still good. The recipe calls for the sesame paste to be thinned with tea or water. By time you add the other liquid ingedients (light soy, vinegar, hot oil, peanut oil), the sauce is plenty thin. Just takes a bit of elbow grease to get the thinning process started.

I think a lot of recipes call for peanut butter because they originated before the explosion of Asian groceries beyond the bounds of traditional Chinatowns.

Bob Libkind aka "rlibkind"

Robert's Market Report

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Are peanuts not a traditional Chinese ingredient? I thought peanut oil, crushed peanuts, et al., were common in various Asian cuisines. I think peanuts have been over there for hundreds of years -- probably for as long as hot peppers.

I'm also wondering if the choice to use peanut butter over sesame is more about cost than availability. Presumably, peanut butter is cheaper than sesame paste. Or isn't it?

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Are peanuts not a traditional Chinese ingredient? I thought peanut oil, crushed peanuts, et al., were common in various Asian cuisines. I think peanuts have been over there for hundreds of years -- probably for as long as hot peppers.

I'm also wondering if the choice to use peanut butter over sesame is more about cost than availability. Presumably, peanut butter is cheaper than sesame paste. Or isn't it?

I think they're a traditional ingredient, but not necessarily as butter. Peanuts, roasted, crushed, boiled as well as peanut oil seem to show up fairly frequently.

Mitch Weinstein aka "weinoo"

Tasty Travails - My Blog

My eGullet FoodBog - A Tale of Two Boroughs

Was it you baby...or just a Brilliant Disguise?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sort of going off on a tangent, here, but hopefully a helpful one:

While peanuts are used extensively in Vietnaese cuisine, there also seems to be some question as to the authenticity of peanut butter in such dishes as the peanut dipping sauce nuoc leo. See, for instance, the preface to this recipe:

... It seems that you can have the authentic one only in Vietnam or at home. Most of the time in Vietnamese restaurants, peanut butter is mixed with hoisin sauce and some ground peanuts are tossed in. The result is very pasty and not very refined. This peanut sauce is true to the original in Vietnam, being fluid and light.

... and this notation in the list of ingredients:

3 ounces unsalted roasted peanuts, 1 tablespoon chopped, the rest finely ground (but not butter)

At the same time, my web searches for nuoc leo recipes have turned up plenty of posts on food-geek boards saying things along the line of "hey, my family is Vietnamese and we always used peanut butter at home to whip up this sauce." Which comments led me to think of all the handy "this is far from haute, but boy is it guilty pleasure comfort food" shortcuts lots of American home cooks make in American recipes. :biggrin:

So--extrapolating to the peanut butter vs. sesame paste question with these noodles: hey, it sounds like the peanut butter may not have been the original tradition, but y'know, things happen, people and products emigrate around the globe, it's illuminating to know the history and to try the variants, but there's no harm in liking the modern adaptations.

P.S. re the nuoc leo -- the first time I made it, I hand-ground the peanuts. Every time since, I've substituted a good-quality all-natural (i.e. nothing but peanuts) chunky peanut butter. Works for me. :cool:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you toast the sesame seeds and make a sauce out of it, the sauce will have an incredible roasted nut flavor. Or so I discovered when I tried a recipe for baba ganouj from Peter Reinhart's Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Cafe (an early cookbook from PR's restaurant days in Sonoma).

To make roasted tahini: Toast 1/4 cup white sesame seeds in a dry pan, moving the seeds around constantly, until they begin to brown. Combine with 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil in a food processor or blender. Taste and decide if you want to add any of the following: 8-10 cloves of roasted garlic, 1/3 cup fresh lemon juice, 1 tsp salt, chopped parsley for garnish. Add this sauce to roasted eggplant and you have baba ganouj. I really liked the sauce but I thought it overwhelmed the eggplant. For plain ol' noodles, it might be just the thing.

Funny, I've never liked the taste of peanut butter in Asian sesame noodles. But I do like fried or roasted peanuts in other Chinese dishes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think that as Ellen says above, the quality of the peanut butter used is of prime importance, if you're using peanut butter as a sub for sesame paste. Freshly roasted peanuts freshly ground should give the best results.

Mitch Weinstein aka "weinoo"

Tasty Travails - My Blog

My eGullet FoodBog - A Tale of Two Boroughs

Was it you baby...or just a Brilliant Disguise?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now I pulled my copy of Barbara Tropp's Modern Art of Chinese Cooking off the shelf, and I found two recipes for sesame sauce made only with sesame, no peanut butter. Why didn't I look in this book first? Dunno. When I think of Asian sesame sauce, I think of peanut butter. Which tells you how entrenched peanut butter is in that sauce.

One of the recipes was printed in the NY Times ages ago. The recipe starts in the middle of the page here:

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/02/garden/c...l?&pagewanted=3

The Chinese sesame paste in the recipe sounds like tahini made from roasted sesame seeds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are many variationx of tahina and Chinese sesame paste. Graded from very light to very dark. I prefer the toasted unhulled versions of both. I have used dark and light tahina in Chinese dressings/sauces with good results but the moment I use a Korean dark sesame paste. I have not come across peanut butter as an ingrediant in any of my chinese cookbooks, but peanut butter is cheaper/ more widely available in the west so I'm guessing its used as an aproximation. But is it works and it tastes good, its all liberty hall ;)

Edited by Mr Wozencroft (log)
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...