Thenthuk (pulled noodle) soup

It may take a while to read through this recipe, but preparation and cooking take less than an hour. Measure and assemble all the ingredients in advance to make the process go smoothly. Read the Amchok family’s story here.

Traditional Tibetan thenthuk soup. Photo: Alexandra Torrealba.

12 servings

For the soup:
15 cups water
1 pound lean, boneless chuck beef
1 cup chopped red onion
3 cups spinach
1 cup of vermicelli, cooked
1 medium plum tomato, sliced
3 medium white potatoes, peeled and sliced
10 medium mushrooms, or one box
4 ounces ginger, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil (to fry garlic)
2 tablespoons salt, or to taste
1 1/2 tablespoons reduced-sodium soy sauce
1/2 tablespoon of Chinese Chinkiang vinegar

For the pull noodles:

4 cups unbleached white flour
3 cups lukewarm water
Extra water for boiling
Olive oil

To make the soup:

Place 15 cups of water in a large pot. Bring to a boil on high heat. Wash and slice the tomato and mushrooms into large pieces. Discard tomato seeds and core. Chop red onion into large slices, and then cut into quarters. Wash and slice the three potatoes. Place them in a bowl with hot water to remove starch. Set aside.

Rinse boneless chuck meat and remove excess fat. Chop into half-inch cubes. Add chopped tomato, onion and beef to boiling water. Cook on high for approximately 5-7 minutes. Add ginger, and turn down heat to low.

While the soup is cooking, make the noodles:

Put the flour in a large bowl. Add 3 cups of lukewarm water slowly, while kneading the dough simultaneously. (The water must be lukewarm; cold water will stiffen the dough too much.)

Mix the flour and water by hand, and knead as much as possible to eliminate lumps. Add more water if necessary. The dough is ready when it has reached a flexible consistency, similar to pizza dough. It must be thick enough to be able to stretch when pulled.

Knead dough and form a thick roll on a cutting board. The more you knead the dough, the better. Slice the roll into 10 wedges, approximately one inch in thickness. Using your hands, coat each wedge with olive oil. place all of them in a plastic bag, and seal tightly. If the cooking area is particularly cold (or not at room temperature), wrap the bag with a cloth. Let dough wedges sit for 15-20 minutes.

In a large pot, bring approximately 5 cups of water to a boil: The noodles cook separately from the broth to keep them from getting soggy, and to keep the broth from getting cloudy.

Add potatoes and mushrooms to the vegetable and meat broth. Stir.

After the dough has set for 15 minutes, take one wedge and roll it in your hands, stretching it into a long string. Using your thumbs, flatten out the dough so as to create a long flat string. The string should be approximately 3 to 3.5 feet long after flattening.

Using your thumb and index fingers, pinch off half-inch pieces of the flat dough and place into boiling water. This must be done quickly, especially when there is lots of dough, as some “pinch noodles” will inevitably spend more time cooking than others. Stir noodles frequently.

Once all noodles have reached a texture and consistency similar to that of cooked pasta (approximately 7 to 10 minutes,) strain them and pour them into the broth. Increase temperature of broth to high.

Add cooked vermicelli, salt, soy sauce and vinegar to the broth, taste and adjust seasoning, and turn off the heat.

Fill a steel ladle with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and carefully hold it over a burner on high heat. Add the chopped garlic to the oil and quickly stir-fry for 3 minutes.

Plunge the ladle carefully into the pot of broth. It will sizzle on contact with the soup; alternatively, you can stir-fry the garlic in a small skillet and pour it into the pot.

Add spinach and continue stirring for approximately 5 minutes.

Serve in small bowls, with hot sauce, soy sauce, pepper or extra seasoning to taste. Use chopsticks to eat the meat and vegetables, and sip the soup directly from the bowl.

Thubten’s Secret: Never add raw garlic to the soup. When the chopped garlic is fried in olive oil before incorporating it into the soup, it still gives the dish its garlicky flavor, but prevents the taste from lingering in your mouth for hours after the meal.

Nutritional information:

One serving contains 389.5 calories, 16.58 grams of protein, 9.94 grams of fat, 52.93 grams of carbs, 2.96 grams of fiber, 4.72 grams of sugar.

Cost:

The total estimated cost of the entire family meal is $19.55, excluding the cost of olive oil, salt, vinegar, and soy sauce. The estimated cost per serving is $1.63.

[These are not cookbook recipes. Some home cooks work from written recipes, but many know their favorite dishes by heart, or improvise on the spot, or define a home-cooked meal as take-out put on a plate. We offer these as a closer look at what our 12 New Yorkers had for dinner, whether it was a set of traditional recipes, or take-out, or even a sandwich consumed first thing in the morning.]

NYTable