This past week I made the Shanghai-Style Sesame Noodles (Ma Jiang Miàn) recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. At first glance, it looks a lot like the Dan Dan Noodles, but with less toppings and more sesame paste.

The sauce is made of sesame paste, peanut butter, sugar, soy sauce, and rice vinegar. That gets mixed together into a stiff paste. After the noodles cook, cooking water is added to the sauce to loosen it up.

To serve, some chile oil and soy sauce are mixed into each serving bowl. The noodles are added on top, and then the sesame sauce on top of that. It gets garnished with scallions.

I had high hopes for this one, I certainly enjoyed the ease of preparation, but it was quite spicy. I was surprised by the heat because it has the same amount of chile oil, but a greater volume of sesame paste as the Dan Dan Noodles. Perhaps the other Dan Dan Noodle toppings helped temper the heat in that dish?

Sure enough, when I calculated the percent of the non-noodle part of the dish, chile oil comes out to about 22% for the Dan Dan Noodles and about 35% for the Shanghai-Style Sesame Noodles.

As written, I don’t believe I’ll make this dish again, but I could be tempted to try again with less (or milder) chile oil.

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