Hand-cut Noodles & Chilli Padi

Yesterday, I ordered a plate of hand-cut noodles fried with pepper beef at a Chinese restaurant. When the plate of noodles arrive, I recognise it instantly as a dish we used to eat when we were children--remember DaoMaQie (literally means Cut-with- Knife, in Hakka). The closest equivalent of this dish is perhaps the Shanxi DaoXiaoMian.

I think I have not been fair to Ah Po as I've not said much about some of the things she did well. While Ah Po did not really have much culinary skills to boast of, she did make good DaoMaQie.

Ah Po used flour, water, salt and egg perhaps to make a sizable chunk of well-kneaded dough. She then rolled the dough into a flat rectangular shape with a bottle (no rolling pins those days); then cut ot into strips of noodles. Isn't that how pasta is made as well?

To cook the noodles, Ah Po threw them into a vat of boiling water and quickly take them out to cool. The result is chewy, chunky pieces of noodles. Our home version of DaoMaQie is eaten with a soup made out of fried enchovies (ikan bilis)and a kind of basil-like leaves (don't remember the name of this vegetable, but we used to grow them in our garden. The leaves are plucked from their thorny stems to be eaten). While we don't eat DaoMaQie much, it was like a treat for us when Ah Po made them each time.

I remember my first introduction to chilli padi. Chilli Padi is a small and very hot chilli, probably of the species called african birdseye or African devil. The hotness is about 100,000 - 200,000 Scoville heat units. The ordinary Jalapeño chilli that we used for everyday cooking is 2,500 - 8,000 on the scoville scale. So chilli padi is about 50 times hotter!

We were eating DaoMaQie in Ah Po's vegetable farm house in the village. Ah Po brought out a bottle of pickled chillis.

"It's very hot! Be careful," she cautioned.

I took one look at the bottle and muttered to myself, " How can it be so hot? It's so tiny!".

The next moment, I took a whole chilli and put it in my mouth, defying Ah po's well-intentioned advice.

I felt fire in my mouth; my eyes smart and tears started to roll down involuntarily. I thought smoke came out of my ears as well. Ah Po and aunt Yoke Foong laughed out loud.

I spat the chilli padi out and quickly washed my mouth with gulps of cold water. Then I continued to eat DaoMaQie quietly. It was delicious as always!