I spent the afternoon in the kitchen yesterday prepping for this week’s Dan Dan Noodles dish from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. He has recipes for three of the ingredients for that dish, and since I’m cooking my way through the book, I figured I’d do these, too. The ingredients are Fried Peanuts, Homemade Sesame Paste, and Sichuan Málà (Hot and Numbing Chile Oil).

The fried peanuts are incredibly straightforward: gently fry peanuts in oil until golden brown and toasty.

Kenji has a note with these peanuts for Hot and Numbing Fried Peanuts, so I made a batch of Hot and Numbing Spice Blend to do that. It’s just some freshly fried peanuts tossed with the spice blend. I noticed this time when making the spice blend that Kenji directs at one point to add “the sesame seeds to the rest of the spice mixture,” but he does not list sesame seeds in the ingredients. I’ve added this to the errata.

The end result was good? Fine? They tasted like fried peanuts. I don’t have a craving for them, but they were an easy enough snack to make, and better than un-fried peanuts. I might make them again. They were certainly easy enough to make. The Hot and Numbing Fried Peanuts were a little more interesting.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.