Recipe: Umami Noodle Dressing

The last time I visited Hong Kong, my friend took me to a dai pai dong type place to eat noodle soup for lunch. For the uninitiated — a dai pai dong is a type of no frills, open–air food stall serving very cheap food, normally specialising in only one dish. It’s a quintessential Hong Kong dining experience, at least it used to be until stricter hygiene regulations came to be enforced and led to the decline of dai pai dongs. Anyway, as with many of these eateries, an assortment of unlabelled sauce bottles appeared on the table and we put them to good use. The sauce that I poured onto my lunch was so good that we ordered an extra bowl of plain noodles, just as an excuse to eat more sauce! It has forever embedded in my taste memory and here I attempt to recreate something similar.

As my readers know, I am always hungry to optimise the umami in every dish, and that is exactly what this dressing does. The sesame oil plays a crucial role, since it latches onto the other ingredients and coats the food and mouth, and its smoky, fatty quality is highly satisfying. I am sure that the unidentified sauce that I tasted in Hong Kong had something quite sugary in it, such as a syrup. Here I have tried to keep it to a minimum by choosing a dark soy with a higher sugar content, but it’s a close imitation.

While I haven’t read Samin Nosrat’s acclaimed Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, I realised that this dressing neatly ticks three of those four boxes. Why not make a big batch, keep it in a squirt bottle and drizzle it onto anything from plain rice to salads? It’s so simple and versatile, that you could also use it as a marinade or stir–fry sauce.

Let me know if you try this recipe and share your results on Instagram with #CelestialPeach.