Asian Beef Noodles - Mongolian Beef Noodles - Cooking with RicThis Mongolian beef noodles recipe I have decided to call more accurately Asian beef noodles, and there is a good reason. As a kid I remember my parents regularly ordering sizzling Mongolian beef at our regular Chinese restaurant, which would be thinly sliced marinated beef, served on a cast iron plate and sizzling as it was served to the table. Usually with something green in there to give it some colour.

So in one of my "I want to try that" moment I started to research the dish.  It turns out, the original recipe has almost nothing to do with Mongolia. In Mongolia beef is/was usually stewed or boiled, then served with some type of dipping sauce.

So where did what we call Mongolian beef actually originate?  Turns out it was mostly likely a Taiwanese creation, according to a couple of quick (and not so well verified) searches. Apparently kind of borrowed from a Mongolian barbeque concept, but not really, after which it became a regular inclusion on many a Chinese restaurant menu in the US, Australia, UK and who knows where else.

The one thing that always struck me, then and now, when ordering any beef dish in Chinese restaurants, let alone Mongolian beef, is how tender the meat always is. In my early cooking attempts at any type of beef stir fry, the meat would almost always turn out a little tough and chewy. Not at all tender. I would get super frustrated with the whole thing, thinking I would never get this right and pondering how the f**k do they cook it like that?  Turns out the answer is so simple it's not even funny.

Most restaurants tenderise beef for stir frying by slicing the meat very thinly across the grain and then marinating in a mixture of baking soda and water. There are other ways, but this is by far the most common and so easy. The baking soda raising the pH levels and reacts with the proteins in the meat stopping the bonding process during cooking, resulting in a very tender piece of meat.  This method can be used on most types of meat, like chicken, pork and lamb.

So here we go. I'm using a slightly modified recipe for Mongolian beef and combining it with noodles to provide a relatively easy one pan dish for dinner. You can just remove the noodles to create your own Mongolian Sizzling Beef dish to serve with rice as well.

Have a go and let me know.