dan zai mien - Tainan shoulder stick soup noodles

In every trip one of my unwritten goal is to bring back a culinary inspiration. Often in the form of a dish or food preparation techniques. The dan zai mien - translated to "shoulder stick soup noodles".
 These are a few photos of the restaurant I ate this humble dish at in Tainan. Being such simple dish I easily reverse engineered it by taste and observation of how they prepared (more like assembled and presented) it.

Here are the photos of my re-creation and re-interpretation of dan zai mien.

this is a upscale version of my recreation - with dungeness crab meat!

While this dish's origin was a humble street food during the tough seasons for the Tainan fisherman, I reinterpreted and expanded it to make it into a variations of one bowl meal or snack, with the ingredients I have on hand. I keep the unique tastes and characters of this dish, which is a good broth, a sensible serving of noodle, a minced pork with fermented soy paste reduction, cilantro, and a topping of a shellfish.

I only use crab meat I harvest from live crabs rather than buying off the shelf crab meat

more upscale broth - made with sea scallop and shavings of jamon

the minced meat paste will darken as you simmer to reduce it

I often use a bit os sake for a good seafood based broth

this deluxe bowl is topped with gulf shrimp, sea scallop, and crab meat