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1
Place the pork mince in a dry wok over high heat. Stir-fry without added fat, breaking the meat apart continuously, until all moisture has cooked off and the mince is crumbled, dry, and beginning to crisp at the edges. Remove from the heat. The pork is ready when it looks sandy and slightly crunchy — not grey and steamed.
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2
Stir the ya cai through the hot pork in the wok. The preserved vegetable will pick up residual heat and its savoury fragrance will sharpen. Set the mixture aside. The combined smell should be salty, slightly fermented, and toasty.
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3
Into each serving bowl, measure the sauce in this order: 1 tsp sesame paste, 1 tbsp soy sauce, 0.5 tsp Chinkiang vinegar, 1 tbsp chili oil with sediment, 0.5 tsp Sichuan peppercorn oil. Do not stir. The sauce sits concentrated at the bottom of the bowl and will be mixed at the table. This is the step on which the dish lives or dies: too much liquid at any element and the result is soup, not dan dan mian.
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4
Cook the noodles in a large pot of boiling unsalted water until just tender with no raw flour taste. Drain well and shake off excess water — standing moisture will dilute the concentrated sauce.
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5
Lay 80–100 g of drained noodles over the sauce in each bowl. Spoon a portion of the sui zhu rou and ya cai mixture on top. The bowl should appear almost dry — less than two ladles of total sauce is visible beneath the noodles.
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6
Serve immediately. At the table, mix vigorously from the bottom of the bowl until every strand is coated in the dark, nutty, numbing sauce and the pork and ya cai are evenly distributed. Taste: the noodles should be simultaneously nutty, fiery, sour, and numbing — no single note dominant.