I'm here with Chef Eric, Taiwanese chef authority, general person to hang out with when the night goes on.

We're here at Nirumen Jitang, famous, proper Taiwanese beef noodle soup place.

Beef noodle soup is the dish in Taiwan, and in my opinion, it's even better late night.

These guys are busy all night, and I heard chef is putting on a new batch of soup.

So we're going to go check it out.

Hello, hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

You're still working this late?

No, no, no, I'm just as busy as I am.

Yeah, I'm telling you, I really, really, really like your place.

I come here every day.

I come at least three times a week when I come to Taiwan.

Thank you, thank you.

First thing that chef is doing is prepping the base liquid of his broth.

That liquid is chicken, beef bone, and a little bit of offal, which is not, as I understand it, extremely traditional.

But it's all going to impart flavor in a clean, sweet way.

The goal here is sweetness and sort of delicacy, balanced with a thickened texture that comes from the emulsified fat with water.

Just to immerse all of the daipan and the carrots in the bottom.

That was step one.

Step two, he's going to activate his aromatics.

Chef is going to start off by melting a little bit of beef tallow, and he's going to bring that up to temperature to extract as much flavor as he can.

Ginger goes in first, just because it's a little bit wet, it's going to take a little bit more time to extract its flavor.

You can honestly smell how aromatic it is in this kitchen before any of this beef has been involved.

It smells so good.

It really smells good.

Yeah, this is the happiest time of the day for me.

I think it's when you're eating.

No, no, no.

It's the happiest time of the day when it smells the best.

It smells so good.

The best beef in Taipei.

Yeah, yeah.

Really.

Wait, so talk to me.

This is the most traditional cut for beef, right?

Yes, so actually in Taiwan, the beef shank is one of the most prized cuts.

Beef shank is very large.

This is the very inner part of the beef shank muscle.

Taiwanese people love it because it has the most sort of even distribution of fat, collagen, tendon, and meat.

So as you can see, the intermuscular tendon on this cut is what makes this beef shank so valuable, especially in Taiwanese cuisine, and any cuisine that utilizes a lot of braising technique for beef dishes.

It's actually something too many people throw away.

Yeah, it's something people don't think about.

And in one cut, you get three textures.

You're meaty, fatty, and bouncy from tendon, right?

So this is beef cheek, right?

This, to me, is what makes New Roman Tea Town really unique.

Beef cheeks, notoriously difficult to cook.

French people cook it for hours and hours in beef bourguignon.

Do you usually get this?

No, dude, I barely see this in Taiwan, ever.

I've never really seen beef cheeks in Taiwan growing up.

I tried looking at beef cheeks and can't find them.

And finally?

Finally, the riblets.

Basically, the fattier part of the short rib.

Everybody loves a good short rib.

That just bursts umami from beef.

You'll see one thick layer of fat, a layer of membrane, and a little bit of tendon.

It's too chewy for most classic Western preparations.

A very, very underrated part of the cow that's used in a lot of Asian cooking.

And, oh, I'll, before we continue, check out the scallions.

Scallions are about to go into the fat as well.

From a scientific perspective, there are flavors that can be extracted by different solvents.

One is water, another is oil.

And in something like beef noodle soup, it's important to have both.

When you're drinking this soup, that oil is going to be the top layer of that soup.

And because it's going to be hot, those aromatic compounds are going to slowly rise from the top of the soup, go into your nose.

That thin layer of oil is the first interaction, the first culinary flavor experience of the entire thing.

That's why it's so important to take care and every single thing is as flavorful as possible from step number one.

Are we frying the onions now?

Yes, we are.

Onion time.

So the onions cook down for about an hour until they're nice and caramelized.

And this step is essential to creating a broth that has varied levels of sweetness and not just sweetness from sugar.

It's been about an hour or so and it really resembles the more conventional caramelized onions.

You cannot cheat.

It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes slow heat.

Chef is going to be sauteing his seasonings in the same exact wok.

We're just gonna add a little bit more fat, but we want to keep all of that onion flavor.

This mixture of fermented bean paste, Chef uses three different types of bean paste.

The Sichuan-style fermented baba bean paste, called pi xian dou ban.

The more traditional Taiwanese-style fermented soy bean paste, called gang san la dou ban.

And the third, tian jiu liang dou hu ru, is a sweet rice wine, hu ru, which is a fermented soy bean.

Chef, you're a Hakka.

Yeah, yeah, my mom's a Hakka.

So Chef's mom is Hakka and that is his ode to his mother.

As you can see, it has the byproduct of making rice wine as well as the soy beans themselves and the pressed ground soy bean.

Oh, wow.

It has that nice kick of sweetness in the back while being very, very savory of crunch.

It's super, super funky as well.

There's so much sugar inside the bean paste, if Chef is not constantly agitating it in the wok, it's going to stick to the bottom and burn immediately.

So this step is gonna be 10 minutes and after, we're gonna be adding in the soy sauce and then cooking the soy sauce down with the bean paste.

Chef is going to be adding these two sugars.

This is rock sugar, which is a much milder sweetness and this is called tai tang er sha and it has a much more malty and molassy flavor.

I think Chef's philosophy is to season things with the same ingredient, but different flavor profiles, right?

So two types of sugar, three types of dou ban.

In goes the beef tallow, scallion and spices.

We're going to be pouring this entire vat of seasoning into the broth and this becomes our base for beef noodle soup.

And now we're gonna be adding in the rice wine and the tomatoes.

The tomatoes are skinless.

They go through that painstaking process of poaching tomatoes and then peeling the skin one by one, just so there's no bitterness from the skin leaching into the broth.

I'm sitting here, not an expert, but I am excited about tasting the layers of flavor that Chef has spent so much time building up.

It needs to be beefy, salty, sweet and all of it needs to be balanced out with each other.

The general timing of all the beef is the large beef cheeks go in first for about 30 minutes and then followed by beef shanks and the smaller beef cheeks for 20 minutes and then finally the riblets go in for about 10 minutes.

That adds up to one hour, followed by another hour of resting, totaling two hours of cook time.

Also the beef needs to be braised to a point where it's tender, but it's not overly tender because you can overcook a beef shank.

You can't overcook a beef cheek.

It needs to have a structural integrity, not like a steak, but it needs to fight back a little bit in your mouth and not just completely give.

What makes food incredible is the attention to detail and I want to point out a couple of things.

All the way at the end, you have a noodle cooker.

Chef is very, very proud of that noodle cooker.

It's an expensive machine because it's a Japanese imported machine that constantly is refreshing the pasta water that that noodle is being cooked in.

If it weren't for this feature, it would pick up all of this starch from the noodles that were cooked before, meaning that the noodle gets soggier and soggier and soggier over time.

The second thing is there's a little bit of a thermometer right above one of the chefs that is keeping the soup at exactly 94 degrees.

At that temperature, with a thin sheen of oil over the top, you won't run into the issue of too much of that soup evaporating and that soup getting too salty over time.

The noodle's going to cook for about two minutes.

There are two types of noodles here.

First is a thicker noodle, pure wheat, sort of inspired by the daoxiao mian from China.

And then there's a slightly yellow, thinner noodle that has the addition of a little bit of alkaline for a little bit of bounce.

Both are legitimate choices and everybody has their own preferences.

Bright greens over the top, mostly for color.

First is the shank.

Second is the cheek.

And third, the rib.

One of each, a little bit of tendon and tripe over the top.

Almost all of the textures that a cow has to offer.

It's beautiful, it's glistening.

And over the top is the soul of the dish, really, the soup.

You see that thin sheen of oil?

That's where all of the aromatics are.

That's where all the brightness is.

Scallions over the top for herbaceousness and a touch of cilantro.

I'm getting kind of hungry.

Show me how we do this.

Let's order.

So first, grab a ticket.

We're number 220.

Okay.

And we grab a menu right here and a marker.

This entire section is the beef noodle soup section.

You get to choose the size of your bowl, the thickness of your noodle, doneness of your noodle, and richness of your broth.

Okay.

So, it's a lot.

But, let me just.

I just need the Eric Z special here.

Eric Z special, like all things Eric Z, maximum everything.

Okay.

I love New Orleans Jidam because right now it's past midnight and they're still full.

Growing up in Taipei, I've never had a place that serves beef noodle soup at this quality past midnight, period.

And as a beef noodle soup fanatic, having an establishment like this changes the game.

The whole thing with beef noodle soup is there are all these stories of Chinese pilots bringing in certain bean paste from certain places, noodles being brought in from different places, and all these things, and the not consumption of beef, and now there's a consumption of beef, and all these different stories.

The creation of the beef noodle soup itself seems to be a process of, I really don't want to use the word fusion, but the bringing together of cultures and influences.

And to continue in that tradition of not being restricted by what you're influenced by, I think chef is introducing some really interesting ingredients and techniques into his beef noodle soup.

They just called my number.

Xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie xie.

First things first, safety is our first priority.

Adhesive, disposable bibs from New Orleans Jidam.

Wait, wait, wait, first you try the broth.

If the broth is good, you're in for a treat.

Yum.

Yum.

It's actually way brighter than I expected.

Yeah.

The tomato at the end.

Has a very nice punch to it.

The tomato gives it that like acidity, it lifts the whole thing with the herbaceousness from the cilantro and the scallions.

And it's quite beefy as well, but if you want it beefier, on every table is this condiment, which is a spicy beef tallow made from the renderings of beef fat.

With chili or pi xian dou ban?

With chili and a little bit of dou ban, and often a little bit of sugar.

So the way to do it, is dab it into a spoonful of broth.

There we go.

And then you melt it right here, and then you incorporate it into the whole bowl.

Okay, this is quite spicy, right?

Or not really?

Not really that spicy, it's more beefy.

Let's pull it here.

You can almost see the texture.

Immediately you know the noodles are perfectly cooked.

Nice and springy.

So these are the thin alkaline noodles, right?

Yes.

These are the ones that you like?

Yeah.

I'm gonna go in.

Okay.

Mmm.

Best thing about eating with a buddy, you get to switch.

I kind of want, Eric was kind of right in one of the thin noodles, but here we are.

All aspects of your palate are hit.

Yes.

I'm gonna try the beef cheeks.

Whoa, it just like disappears.

It just disintegrates.

Holds up well?

Let's see.

Oh goodness. I actually think this is the best cut. Dude, did you eat my short rib?