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Mystery Ingredients


liuzhou

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Time to put you out of your misery and reveal all.

 

hmmm.jpg

 

This is 蕨根粉丝 (jué gēn fěn sī).

Brake Root Vermicelli  - aka Fern Root Vermicelli. Popular in Sichuan and neighbouring Shaanxi province. Usually served cold. The noodles are made from the starch extracted from the brake fern roots (the same plant that gives us fiddleheads), along with some sweet potato starch and oil.


brake noodles1.jpg
 

Here is the information printed on the back in Chinglish:

brake noodles2.jpg

 

More info and recipes:

Black Noodles

Mark Hix recipes: Our chef gets creative with pasta and spring vegetables

Slurping Shanghai I: Fern Root Noodles at Dunhuang Xiao Ting

Fern Root Vermicelli With Chicken And Dried Enoki Mushrooms

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Thanks - as unusual as interesting. Please let us know how it turns out as a final dish ...

 

As for the noodles' bracken fern origin: a rather long time ago while doing my PhD thesis in organic chemistry I developed a synthetic pathway to certain chemical structures that are very closely related to Ptaquiloside, a glycodside found in bracken fern and related plants. The major interested in those structures was that they are very reactive and react with DNA in living cells (good if you can target specific cells, bad if you alkylate just anything as the ptaquiloside does). My methodology never really produced anything workable, but I read the entire literature on bracken fern toxicology back and forth. And have not eaten it since then ... maybe your noodles might be a worthwhile (re)start.

 

Further reads: http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/ptq/ptqh.htm

Edited by Duvel (log)
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bingpiantang ?

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Fossilized dinosaur scat?

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1 hour ago, Alex said:

Fossilized dinosaur scat?

 

'I think it looks vaguely like parts of the bones I've bought for my dog, the ones in pet stores that have been coated in some mystery sauce and dried, but I wasn't going to say it until this comment. :D

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Something that makes use of 1000 year eggs?

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