Sidetracked

My experience with sesame oil has mostly been as a seasoning. A few drops are enough to give a dish a hint of… nuttiness, I guess is the word. If I have to be honest, I had never really given it much thought beyond the fact that it makes everything smell better.

A few days ago, I searched for a recipe that featured Sichuan peppercorns, eventually deciding on dandan noodles. As a bonus, the dish presented the opportunity to finally open the jar of sesame paste sitting in the pantry. It had been an impulse purchase, a who-knows-this-would-come-in-handy-someday kind of decision. In fact, I found out just in time that it was not the kind of sesame paste the recipe had called for, being made from untoasted sesame, hence tahini. Googling some more, I learned that all it needed was some good old toasted sesame oil thrown into the mix (toasted sesame oil is the kind widely available here; it is amber-colored (compare to the oil in photo below)).

Then there is this, from Wikipedia: “(Sesame oil is) mixed with foods that are hot and spicy as it neutralizes the heat.” Fact? What I can tell you is the dandan noodles had a fair amount of it, and I had to use more chili oil than the recipe had called for to get it mildly hot (Sichuan peppercorns are not spicy as much as numbing). Still, it was not enough to give the noodles that distinctive orangey tint, and I had to restrain myself from adding more. Was I too rash writing off Pantai-brand chili paste? Sure it had zero heat, but I could have used the color…

What actually surprised me was that sesame paste tasted just like peanut butter. I love peanut butter, but in savory dishes, not so much — and do not mention kare-kare, because it’s shrimp paste that makes that dish so good. Turning again to Wikipedia, I learn that the use of sesame paste in dandan noodles is mostly a Taiwanese/American-Chinese thing — and that peanut butter is a common substitute. I should have guessed as much.

Could Tianjin preserved vegetable have lent another flavor dimension to the dish, perhaps acted as some sort of foil for the cloysome sesame paste? I had none, but after looking it up, decided on Napa cabbage, the closest I could get to turnip greens. The dish ended up looking like run-of-the-mill pancit Canton. That’s not necessarily a put-down. Dandan noodles started out as street food, dan dan being the pole vendors used to carry baskets of the noodles and sauce around in, one at each end.

Did I even like the dish? That would be a qualified “yes.” I won’t be making it again anytime soon, but when I eventually do, I will be more sparing with the sesame paste, less so with chili oil and chili paste. And just in case you were wondering, this post was supposed to showcase Sichuan pepper, not sesame. At any rate, I had not used enough of the stuff to cause numbness, or even something approaching a tingle or buzz. With elections mere days away, we already have a lot of those going around. Nuttiness, too.