This spicy peanut butter noodles recipe makes a quick and easy bowl of noodles that are perfect for a fast lunch or mid-week dinner. If you’re in the mood for satay but don’t have time to pound pastes and grind peanuts, this spicy peanut butter sauce should satisfy your cravings. It’s also versatile – use whatever noodles and toppings you have at hand.
If you’re a lover of noodle dishes – and dry noodles doused in sauces, in contrast to wet noodles, which are essentially noodle soups and curried noodles – then you should enjoy tucking into a bowl of these spicy peanut butter noodles, garnished with crunchy pan-roasted peanuts, crispy fried garlic, sliced red chillies, and fragrant coriander or cilantro.
We used to make the ‘Queen of Asian Cooking in Australia’ Sri Lankan-born Charmain Solomon’s peanut butter sauce recipe for saus kacang, from her The Complete Asian Cookbook back in the mid-late 1980s, when we first began cooking Asian cuisines.
Terence and I used to take turns cooking in the tiny kitchen of the terrace house basement of the first home we rented together and we each developed our own satay-ish peanut butter sauce recipes. We’d typically make it with chicken, which we’d eat with rice, and sometimes I’d use it to make an Indonesian gado gado vegetable salad.
After we discovered David Thompson’s Thai Food cookbook and Terence began pounding spice pastes, sauces and relishes from scratch, the days of peanut butter sauce were over. Once upon a time I would have been too embarrassed to share this spicy peanut butter noodles recipe and my recipe for peanut butter sauce.
But I’ve been noticing recipes for peanut butter noodles and peanut butter sauce popping up everywhere in recent years, and they’re quite different to mine, so I thought it was about time I shared my spicy peanut butter noodles recipe, which is essentially a peanut butter sauce with noodles of your choice, sprinkled with garnishes to add texture, heat and fragrance.
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Spicy Peanut Butter Noodles Recipe for a Quick, Easy and Tasty Bowl of Noodles
The food blogging world is a strange place sometimes – or space, food blogging space, as it’s called these days – and this spicy peanut butter noodles recipe and the peanut butter sauce that makes it, is a case in point. Well, not my peanut noodles recipe in particular, but spicy peanut noodles recipes more generally.
Firstly, they’re often called ‘spicy Thai peanut noodles’ and they’re nearly all made with peanut butter. Yet there’s no such Thai dish (not to our knowledge, anyway, but please correct me if I’m wrong), especially one sprinkled with sesame seeds, which in Thai cooking, like Cambodian cooking, are mostly used in sweets and desserts.
Of course, there is a Thai peanut satay sauce recipe which hails from Southern Thailand and makes a peanut-based sauce that’s typically made with roasted peanuts, a Thai red curry paste, coconut milk, palm sugar, and tamarind sauce.
But it’s generally used as a dipping sauce for vegetables or for sate gai or satay chicken skewers (in the Muslim south), as well as sate moo or satay pork skewers in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand (although more often than not the skewers are served with a vinegar-based sauce made with red chillies, shallots, salt and sugar), not doused over noodles.
In Thai Food, David Thompson’s recipe for a ‘relish of peanuts’ or nahm prik tua pat calls for palm sugar, tamarind water (extracted from ripe tamarind) and fish sauce, to be combined with a paste pounded in a mortar and pestle from dried long red chillies, chopped garlic, ground dried shrimp or ground dried fish, Thai shrimp paste, and peanuts, which is then fried in oil or rendered pork fat.
The chef recommends serving the peanut relish with raw, grilled, deep-fried, or pickled vegetables, vegetables simmered in coconut milk, steamed fish or prawns, crispy fish cakes, or sweet pork. No noodles on Thompson’s list.
While most Thai peanut satay sauce recipes call for the peanuts to be ground in a mortar and pestle, I’m sure there must be some home cooks who take short cuts and use peanut butter. Thailand’s Tong Garden, makers of Tong Garden salted peanuts, the crunchiest peanuts in the world (seriously, try them), make a delicious peanut butter.
So where did all these spicy Thai peanut butter noodle recipes that every food blogger is publishing originate from if not Thailand?
The cuisines of Malaysia and Indonesia also feature peanut satay sauces, and I think the peanut sauce for my spicy peanut butter noodles recipe must have been influenced by the Indonesia peanut sauces or peanut sambals. We were eating all kinds of Southeast Asian cuisines in the mid-late 1980s when we used to frequently meet my uncles for cheap and cheerful dinners in inner-city Sydney of Vietnamese, Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian.
In The Food of Indonesia: Delicious Recipes from Bali, Java and the Spice Islands written by two Bali-based chefs, a peanut sambal recipe calls for shallots and garlic to be fried, before adding long red chillies, roasted peanuts coarsely grounded in a mortar and pestle, dried shrimp paste, tamarind juice, and sweet Indonesian soy sauce, kecap manis. The chefs recommend using it as a condiment for grilled fish and meats, with tomato and cucumber on the side.
Pearly Kee of Penang, in her Nyonya Pantry cookbook has three peanut satay sauce recipes, although one is made with groundnuts. Kee’s classic satay sauce recipe calls for coconut cream, water, chilli powder, fish sauce, rock sugar, and coarsely ground peanuts, which she boils in a pan, then simmers, and tops with peanuts and… sesame seeds.
Like many Asian cuisines, Penang’s nyonya cuisine is a fusion cuisine, incorporating culinary influences from Malaysia, Thailand, India, and Southern China. The food of Fujian province on China’s southeast coast shares a lot of similarities, ingredients and influences with Southeast Asian cuisines due to a long, shared history of trade and migration.
You’ll find products in Fujian that you traditionally wouldn’t have found in other parts of China, such as fish sauce and shrimp paste. Peanuts and sesame seeds are used in a lot of Fujian dishes, especially as a garnish. There’s even a famous Fujian peanut soup, which is best sampled in Xiamen.
But it’s the capital of the province, Fuzhou, which is said to be the home of a dish of hand-cut boiled bǎn miàn noodles with peanut sauce. A flat, wide noodle, sometimes made with egg, it resembles a wide fettuccini. In Malaysia, they noodles are called pan mein and pan mee.
But perhaps the best-known Fujian peanut butter noodle recipe is from Shaxian, where the wide wonton noodles are boiled before being combined in a sauce made from dark soy sauce, shallot oil or sesame oil, scallions, and peanut butter. China produces an infinite array of peanut butters, many of which come with sesame seeds.
What distinguishes the Shaxian peanut butter sauce noodles recipe is that chicken bouillon is combined with some of the water in which the noodles were boiled. A small bowl of Shaxian wonton soup is typically served alongside the Shaxian peanut butter sauce noodles. If you’re heading for Fujian, look for: 沙县扁肉拌面.
The Shaxian and Fuzhou peanut butter sauce noodles are usually garnished with scallions and sesame seeds, and sometimes drizzled with chilli oil.
So why do so many food blogs call what’s obviously a Chinese peanut butter sauce noodles recipe, a spicy Thai peanut butter noodles recipe? Sure, you can probably find the dish in Thai-Chinese eateries and in homes, but call it Thai-Chinese then, not Thai. Or simply call it what it is.
Just a few quick tips to making my Southeast Asian-inspired spicy peanut butter noodles recipe, as it really is easy and comes together quickly.
Tips to Making this Spicy Peanut Butter Noodles Recipe
I only have a few quick tips to making this spicy peanut butter noodles recipe as it’s a cinch to make and takes just minutes. Two very important tips: take care not to over-cook the sauce and and don’t over-cook the noodles.
Use whatever noodles you like, fresh or dry, but you want a solid noodle or a wide noodle. Vermicelli definitely won’t work. I’ve used fresh cooked vacuum-packed udon noodles here for the fun of it. I love the chewy texture of udon, but they can very quickly over-cook, so follow the instructions on the packet and watch them closely.
The udon noodles we buy only require a minute in boiling water. Put a pot of water onto boil for your noodles while you make the sauce, so the water has boiled by the time you’ve finished the sauce.
Use a quality organic peanut butter or natural peanut butter if you can.
Make the sauce in a wok – I use a round flat bottomed wok for this dish – as you’re going to toss the noodles into the wok when they’re done. Take care not to let the shallots or garlic burn when you’re frying them. They’ll cook very quickly.
Once you’re done with the sauce, I turn off the heat, as I don’t like to over-cook the sauce, as it thickens quickly. That means I’d need to reduce it with water, and then re-adjust my seasoning, which is a nuisance.
I like to serve lightly stir-fried Asian greens, such as bok choy, on the side, but garnishes will also satisfy. I liked sliced, fresh, long red chillies or chilli flakes, pan-roasted peanuts, crispy fried shallots, fresh coriander leaves, and lime wedges for a squeeze of lime juice at the end.
To make your own pan-roasted peanuts, heat a tablespoon of neutral cooking oil in one of these adorable little non-stick single-egg pans if you have one (if you don’t, highly recommend them; they’re fantastic for frying perfect eggs), then quickly fry a handful of raw peanuts on high heat for a minute, continuously shaking the pan so they’re constantly turning. They can burn very quickly, so transfer them to a cold dish the second they’ve browned.
Do serve the noodles straight away before they get cold. A drizzle of red chilli oil is also very good. We’ve got a homemade Szechuan chilli oil recipe here. Not Southeast Asian obviously, but you could also buy a commercial Thai chilli oil, which are readily available from supermarkets with good Asian food sections.
Spicy Peanut Butter Noodles Recipe
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp neutral cooking oil
- 100 g purple shallots peeled, finely diced
- 2 cloves garlic peeled, finely chopped
- 1 knob of ginger grated
- 3 tbsp chilli oil
- 3 tbsp crunchy peanut butter
- 2 tbsp quality Thai fish sauce
- 200 g noodles your choice
- 1 red chilli deseeded and finely sliced
- 2 tbsp pan-roasted peanuts
- 2 tbsp crispy fried shallots
- 2 tbsp fresh coriander leaves
- ½ lime chopped into wedges
Optional
- 1 tsp tamarind sauce liquid from fresh tamarind pulp
- 1 bunch of Asian greens stir-fried
Instructions
- Put a pot of water on to the stove to boil for your noodles.
- In a wok over medium-high, heat the cooking oil and fry the finely diced shallots until soft and translucent for a minute or so, add the finely chopped garlic and fry for a minute until fragrant, then add the grated ginger, combine and fry for 30 seconds or so, then reduce the heat to medium.
- Add the chilli oil, the crunchy peanut butter, Thai fish sauce, and tamarind sauce if you're using it, and stir to combine well, as the peanut butter breaks down and softens and a sauce forms. Taste and adjust to your palate. Turn the heat to low or, if the sauce has thickened right up, turn the heat off completely.
- To the pot of boiling water, add the noodles and cook until al dente – better to be slightly under-done – then drain the noodles. If you want to loosen up the peanut sauce, stir through a little water, turn the heat on again to heat up the sauce, then transfer the noodles to the wok while still hot, stirring in the spicy peanut sauce, taking care not to break the noodles.
- Distribute the sauce-covered noodles to bowls and garnish as you like with sliced red chillies, pan-roasted peanuts, crispy fried shallots, and fresh coriander leaves. You could even serve some lightly stir-fried Asian greens on the side. Serve immediately before they get cold.
Nutrition
Please do let us know in the comments below if you make this spicy peanut butter noodles recipe as we’d love to know how it turns out for you.
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