I've been making sesame noodles for about as long as anything else I cook, and it's also probably the dish I make that has changed the most. I cringe to think of earlly efforts involving regular spaghetti, and a regrettable receipt with OJ in the dressing. On the other hand, a slightly more sophisticated mid 90s version was the one thing my antepenultimate girlfriend said she would miss about me, in a Dear Cod letter, even though peanut butter and pasta was the go to choice primariliy when there was too much month at the end of the money.
The biggest change came when I stopped thinking of the dish as akin to a cold casserole, and started thinking of it as a salad with a heavy starch component. The big change here is a move to dressing individual servings, rather than mixing up the whole thing ahead of time. What makes this possible is using the kind of Asian noodles that are flexible before you cook them sold either fresh or in the bag. (Where it is available, I am partial to the Twin Marquis brand, mainly because I spent the summer of 1990 living across the street from the Twin Marquis HQ (the unfabulous end of Ludlow) and was relieved to learn that the gentlemen in the suits with the Gekko-era cellphones actually must have been in the noodle business.
These noodles are slippery enough that you can hold them, undressed, without them fusing -- the unfortunate part is that I no longer bother with this receipt if they are unavailable. The dressing, is of course, the other key. Here the shift is to end, rather than start, with peanut butter. Add some soy sauce, rice vinegar, dark sesame oil,* and some Huy Fong to a bowl, mix it up, and add natural peanut butter until you have a consistency that seems right.
The noodles fare better if you give them a quick dunk in boiling water, but this is not mandatory. Even though I believe this is considered bad luck, you may want to quarter the noodles in the bowl so you do not have long strands of noodle potentially whipping sauce onto your Lacoste shirt. Noodles in bowl, garnish with scallions, cubed cukes, and sesame seeds. As the clip below attests, Ollie, Junior VP of Rose's Lime Enterprises, seems to enjoy the result:
*Dark sesame oil tastes like Hitler's ass when it gets rancid, so buy small bottles.
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