Pork hock udon

I love noodle soups. I don't know why I'm writing this now because I'm craving noodle soup something rotten, but have no suitable ingredients in the house and no intention of leaving it to get some. I'm sort of torturing myself with temptation.

Anyhow I love noodle soups because they are the comfort food of the gods, because they are infinitely variable, and because they can be utterly, utterly delicious. There's rarely an occasion when a great big bowl of steaming goodness won't hit the spot. From the simple, almost ascetic pleasure of a clear broth spiked with nothing but a scattering of herbs and a few shards of ginger, to the dense, rich pungence of a good laksa.

I make noodle soups all the time, rarely bothering with a recipe and mixing and matching ingredients from across East and South-East Asia as the fancy takes me. They're always satisfying, and sometimes memorably delicious too.

This was a particularly good effort, so I thought I'd put it on the blog. The flavours are quite clear and bright, with added richness from the fatty pork and crackling. I'm sure it's not in the least bit authentic, but if it's close to the cuisine of any country I'd guess it's Japanese with a bit of Vietnam thrown in.

it's a leftovers recipe really, so you need to have the pork prepared in advance. I had it left over from a different meal. If you do it from scratch a whole hock should do about 3 people.

What you'll need per person:

handful shredded pork meat

about 1 pint pork stock

shards of crunchy crackling

fish sauce

sriracha chilli sauce

2 spring onions

1 hot chilli

1 clove garlic

small lump ginger

mint

coriander

lime/lemon

1 sheet udon noodles

some greens or other veg (I used runner beans)

To make the pork, stock and crackling

1. Simmer the hock with onion, celery and peppercorns for a couple of hours, skimming off any scum from the surface. 

2. After a couple of hours remove the pork and veg from the stock. Chuck away the veg. 

3. Pull the skin/fat off the hock, then pull off the meat and shred it. 

4. Put the remaining bones back in the stock and simmer for another hour. 

5. Dry the fat, salt it and roast in a hot oven 'til you get crackling.

To make the noodle dish

1. Finely slice the spring onions and chilli.

2. Shred or grate the ginger and garlic.

3. Chop some mint and/or coriander leaves.

4. Heat the stock in a large pan or wok.

5. Add the noodles, greens/veg and pork and heat until the noodles are just done.

6. Squirt in some fish sauce and sriracha to taste.

7. Garnish with the garlic/ginger, the spring onions/chilli, the mint/coriander, the crackling and a wedge of lemon/lime.

8. Serve immediately, stirring in all of the garnishes with your chopsticks.

For blogs providing more expert coverage of all things noodles I can wholeheartedly recommend Eat Noodles Love Noodles and Hollow Legs.

Fuji Hiro, Leeds

Normal service is resumed. After all the gadding about in Croatia, London and Kent over the last week or so I've finally made it home, and on Friday night I finally made it to Fuji Hiro. I don't know how long Fuji Hiro has been around for, but it's a long time. I must have been planning to go for at least seven years, attracted by its solid reputation for good quality, fairly priced Japanese noodle dishes. I'm pleased to report it lived up to expectations.

The menu is concise. There is a page of side dishes (mostly gyoza and yakitori in various guises), a page of ramen (soup noodle dishes), a page of stir-fried noodle dishes and a page of something and rice dishes (katsu curry and the like). There is also a meal deal available at all times, that will get you any side dish, any main dish and a bottle of beer for £15. Taking up the meal deal offer I opted for ebi gyoza (prawn dumplings) and chilli beef ramen.

The gyoza were very good if a bit greasy, they were lightly fried to give one edge a nice crust and the prawn filling was sweet and fresh.

The ramen had a deeply savoury chicken stock base, and the beef was a sliced sirloin steak just dropped into the broth to allow it to poach a little and stay rare inside. Lovely. There were also quite a few different vegetables in the mix, including leeks which added a nice touch of sweetness. The noodles themselves were fine, though I'm a novice when it comes to Japanese food so I'm not really sure what texture they should have. As ever with soup noodle dishes the serving was huge.

Overall a very good meal with friendly service. Independent places like Fuji Hiro really are an asset to Leeds, especially at a time when every new opening seems to be another chain. The food here is made with a level of care and attention that you just won't get at a chain restaurant, and is consequently miles better than what you'd get at Wagamama or Tampopo. It's better value too, exactly the same meal (even the same brand of beer) will set you back £21.20 at Wagamama. Go, and don't let the rather down at heel decor (they really should spruce the place up a bit) and out of the way location put you off.

8/10

Fuji Hiro
45 Wade Lane
Leeds
LS2 8NJ

Tampopo, The Trafford Centre

I needed to buy some stuff, so after working late last night I headed for the Trafford Centre. Regular readers (by regular readers I mean people who mistakenly click on the Twitter links and end up here again) may recall that I don't much like the Trafford Centre, but on a Tuesday evening it's a far more amenable prospect than on a Saturday afternoon. I bought the stuff I needed and on account of having no food in the house, decided to stop for a bite to eat.

I've been to Tampopo before on a couple of occasions, and have generally left satisfied so I thought I'd give it another try. It's a canteen sort of place with bench seating very much in the Wagamama sort of style, and covers similar ground with the food as well. The menu is fairly extensive, but sticks quite sensibly to dishes from South-East and East Asia which at least have common themes, rather than randomly selecting dishes from all corners of the globe like another local chain whose name I won't mention. I ordered the Laksa with a portion of Goi Cuon on the side.

The Goi Cuon (Vietnamese summer rolls) were lovely and fresh tasting as they should be, with plenty of crunchy vegetables, but not as good as the real thing which usually have prawns or pork or both in them as well. This isn't really a criticism though, as they are advertised as a veggie version on the menu.

The condiments provided at the table are worth a quick mention at this point, as they are a good basic Asian selection; - Kikkoman soy sauce, Ketjap Manis (a sweetened, syrupy Indonesian soy sauce) and Sriracha Hot Chilli Sauce (a Thai classic). Some combination of these three will liven things up if your meal is a bit dull.

The Laksa was a decent effort. Laksa is a dish of noodles in a rich, heavily seasoned coconuty, curry broth with some sort of protein and assorted veggies. The broth was a bit underpowered, it needed a good squirt of Sriracha as it was a lot milder than the 'three chilli' warning on the menu would suggest. It was also too sweet. Having said that it also had some fine attributes. Many of the extensive range of flavours often found in food from the Malay peninsula were present including coriander, mint, lime leaves, garlic, chillies, coconut and even a hint of pungent shrimp paste. Prawns, tofu and chicken provided the protein, with cucumber, red onions and breansprouts on the veg front. All were fine except the chicken which seemed to be rather poor quality and tasteless. The whole made for pleasant if unspectacular eating.

In summary my opinion of Tampopo hasn't changed much after this visit. It's a decent option. I'd rather eat there than most of the other places in the Trafford Centre, but it's overpriced. Any small independent restaurant doing the same sort of food (I could name Vietnamese, Chinese, Malaysian and Korean places that fit the bill) would generally charge in the region of £5 - £8 for a dish like this, whereas I paid £10.75 at Tampopo. Any dish costing over a tenner at Middle Kingdom or Hunan would be served in something the size of a household bucket, and have about a kilo of meat in it. In total I paid £18.25 for the food, a lime soda (£1.90!) and service. Ok, but I wouldn't make a special trip.

6/10

The Orient,
Trafford Centre
Manchester
M17 8EH

Plus various other branches

http://www.tampopo.co.uk/

Wokon Noodle Bar, Leeds

Wokon is another expanding mini-chain offering an alternative to the usual fast food behemoths. I'd put them in a similar category to Rice and Barburrito and after my recent visits to those two were distinctly poor and average respectively I didn't have particularly high expectations for Wokon.

I was pleasantly surprised. The menu sensibly sticks to Asian food, with most of the stir-fries listed being Chinese with a couple from other countries thrown in (Thailand, Indonesia). I ordered a Nasi Goreng with prawns and pork (Indonesian style fried rice).

The portion was generous with plenty of prawns and loads of pork (those little cardboard containers look deceptively small, they really pack it in). The prawns were fresh tasting and the pork was flavoursome if a bit chewy and unnecessarily red. There were plenty of veggies in the mix and the requested spiciness was present and correct. It cost a reasonable £5.49.

I went to the branch on Briggate. There are others on New Station Street and in Headingley. Hopefully more branches to come...


7/10

Wokon Noodle Bar
156 Briggate
Leeds
LS1 6LY

http://www.wokon.co.uk/

Rice, Manchester

Rice is a Manchester based mini-chain serving a wide variety of rice and rice noodle based dishes. I thought it might be worth a try for an early dinner as I fancied something vaguely oriental.

The Piccadilly Gardens branch is canteen style; you order at one end of the counter and collect your food dished up in takeaway containers at the other. The menu is a bit of a mish-mash covering pretty much every corner of the globe (Argentina, Russia, Spain amongst others), the only apparent connection being the presence of rice (or at least rice noodles).

On ordering a pad thai I was informed that there was a special offer on today, a free starter with every main meal ordered. A bit of a marketing ploy this, as what they actually meant was that filling in a scratchcard with your e-mail address and phone number would get you a free starter. I duly obliged anyway (real e-mail address, fake telno, I can't be doing with spam texts) as I'm not one to turn down free food without good reason. I chose prawn katsu from a choice of that or spring rolls.

The prawn katsu was more akin to a couple of frozen scampi fried some hours earlier, and was served up alongside some manky looking iceberg. Yum. Oh well it was free, what did I expect.

Unfortunately the pad thai wasn't a whole lot better. First the plus points; - a good generous portion and a nice smoky flavour (wok-hei I think this is called) to the noodles suggesting it had been stir-fried properly over a high heat. That's about it unfortunately so let's move onto the minus points; - the noodles were overcooked and had gone gluey, there was a solid mass of them about the size of my fist right in the middle of the pot. The chicken was dry and tasteless. The prawns didn't taste very fresh and were chewy. There were no beansprouts in it. No garnishes were available other than soy sauce, salt and pepper meaning the whole thing was pretty bland. I ate less than half of it before giving up out of boredom.

In summary it was poor, and not cheap either (£7 for the pad thai), but perhaps I chose unwisely and some of the other dishes are better. I'll maybe give them another try in future as they certainly seem popular (not that that's always a good sign, every branch of Wagamama is always rammed full and I think it's overpriced and boring). In the same area any one of the curry cafes up the road will feed you better for less money (£4-5), as will Baekdu for about the same amount of money. If chain places are your thing I reckon Tampopo is probably a better bet, and at least they stick to Asian food and don't try and shoehorn every cuisine of the world onto the menu.


4/10

Rice Piccadilly
Piccadilly Gardens
Manchester
M1 1RG
http://www.ricebars.com/