Throughout China – and really Asia at large – you can find Zha Jiang Mian (炸酱面). Literally ‘deep fried sauce’ noodles, these are a category of sauces made by (1) rendering out the lard from some fatty pork, followed by (2) frying some sort of sauce in said lard. 

Sometimes referred to a ‘Za Jiang’, the most famous version is the Beijing style… which employs a fermented sauce called ganhuangjiang (干黄酱). But you can also find it in Guangdong (Minsi paste), Yunnan (laojiang), Sichuan (combination of chili bean paste and tianmianjiang), among many, many more places. In a country with such radically different cuisines from end to end, it’s odd to find such consistent throughline. I mean, you can even find it in Japan and – especially - Korea, where the dish employs their locally fermented Chunjang.

So in about a week, we’ll be tossing out a massive post covering as many of these as we can. But on the video side of things, we figured we’d do a little ‘miniseries’, releasing three videos with three versions in succession. I know some of y’all primarily follow us here, and I didn’t want to keep you out of the loop (especially for our paid subscribers – didn’t want to bug you guys with an email though).

The Cantonese version is out now – we were aiming for the ‘Capital Spicy’ Zaa Zoeng that our local wonton shop in Shunde would carry (picture 1).