Slow Cooker Beef Stew Noodle Soup (Niu Rou Mian) 牛肉麵

I bought a Morphy Richards slow cooker off Amazon.de this past March, and it’s kind of just been sitting in the corner of the kitchen, gathering dust…  so yesterday I decided to make my version of Beef Stew Noodle Soup (Niu Rou Mian) 牛肉麵 in the slow cooker.  I didn’t really have a recipe on hand, so I just made it up as I went along, and I think the finished product came out okay.  Phew.  Haha…

Ok, so here it is, folks!  I’m going to try my best to write what I did, but I didn’t measure anything, so it’s all kind of estimated.  The meat turned out a bit tougher than I would have liked–so not as soft as butter–but it still had a nice texture, and the veggies were still al dente, so you can follow what I did, or adjust as you like.  😉

Slow Cooker Beef Stew Noodle Soup (Niu Rou Mian) 牛肉麵

Ingredients:

• 600 g Siedfleisch (beef for stew, with a high percentage of connective tissue, fat, and tendons)
• 1 medium carrot
• 1 medium onion
• 1 braised seasoning pouch that my mother brought me from Taiwan
• 1 head of garlic
• 1 medium tomato
• 9 hard-boiled eggs
  

  raw ingredients before cooking

• ginger
• dehydrated Shiitake mushrooms (soak in warm water for a couple of hours first)
• rice wine
• soy sauce
• chili powder
• noodles
• water
• pinch of salt to cook the noodles
• fresh spinach leaves
  

  after about 5 hours of cooking

Directions:

1. Roughly chop up all the veggies and dump into the slow cooker.
2. Drain the Shiitake mushrooms and put into the slow cooker.
3. Scrape the ginger, slice up, and put into the slow cooker.
4. Put the braised seasoning pouch into the slow cooker.
5. Peel and put all the hard-boiled eggs in the slow cooker.
6. Cut up the meat into chunks and dump into the slow cooker.  It was a bit tough for me to cut through all the tendons with my dull knife, so maybe you’d want to try precut chunks of meat or another kind of stew meat. 
7. Sprinkle chili powder over everything.  I didn’t put that much, so I couldn’t taste any heat in the final dish.  You can put more if you like, or add fresh chilies, but please remember that the heat will intensify as you cook, so be careful how much you add.
8. Pour in about half a cup of rice wine.
9. Pour in about half a cup to a cup of soy sauce.  I think I may have ended up adding about a cup of soy sauce for color, but the final dish still wasn’t very salty.
10. Add water to cover and give it a good stir.
11. Put the lid on and cook on high for about two hours.  Then reduce the heat to medium for about 3 hours.
12. Boil the noodles with a pinch of salt.
13. Put the noodles into a large bowl, top with spinach leaves, and ladle the stew over it.

Wah-la! Done and ready to eat. 🙂