Cantonese Soy Sauce Chow Mein (Easy Pan-Fried Noodles) | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's Kenji we're gonna make some Cantonese style Supreme soy sauce noodles chow mein a very very simple dish I am sort of loosely following the recipe for my book although as usual I'm going to make some little modifications here and there um so I got noodles I'm gonna blanch these in boiling water these are Hong Kong they're called Hong Kong pan-fried noodles you might see them sold as chow mein they're a thin egg noodle and they come in various forms they can come completely raw they can come pre-cooked or they can come like this which I think these ones I think have been blanched once and then dried actually no these look completely raw also either way what you should do is follow the back of the package instructions on how to prepare them these ones call for boiling them for just a couple minutes to loosen them up so that's what I'm going to do okay I just want to loosen them up make sure they're sort of cooked through you know you can also steam these you know put them in a put them in a steamer or in a you know bamboo steamer or a metal steamer and put them over a tray sorry over a wok full of boiling water some people say steaming improves the texture of the dish it makes the noodles a little bit firmer and less waterlogged I find that sometimes when you steam noodles in order to pan fry them they come out a little bit too sort of raw tasting so I actually prefer to boil them like this although we're sort of just at a warm water temperature here right now as long as the noodles kind of cooked through and heat up we're fine okay in the meantime I'm gonna get my other ingredients ready so these are Chinese chives um you don't have to use Chinese chives you can use all scallions but I I have these in the fridge I'm using them so I'm just going to cut them into about two inch lengths okay it's gonna all go into here terrible cut that just at the right time all right let's taste one see if these are ready or not those are good all right so now I'm just gonna fish them out put them right back onto this tray and then we're going to let them kind of air dry because they're hot and steamy they will actually dry pretty nicely on their own because they cool okay all right put those aside there we'll go in a dump this oh I got my other scallions in here all right I'm just gonna rinse out the wok and then get it ready to Stir Fry turns right back over the Heat uh meanwhile I'm gonna clean a couple scallions usually scallions only need a rinse sometimes if the outer layers start to dry off or turn mushy or yellow or anything and you can give them a little rub underwater and I like to just peel off this outermost layer you I don't know why it's called Supreme in fact I probably knew at some point why it's called Supreme soy sauce noodles and in fact maybe even in my book I explain why it's called Supreme soy sauce noodles but off the top of my head I cannot remember but um it's essentially you know the noodles are basically just flavored with light soy sauce and dark soy sauce uh some onions and other sort of you know very very light amounts of aromatics but uh mainly just soy sauce is the flavor so we saw some onions all right so I got my scallions for the scallions I'm gonna trim off the ends and I'll put the uh I'm gonna cut the whites into also two inch segments and then those I'm going to split in half lengthwise okay you don't have to split them in half lengthwise um but I do find that they sort of separate and cook up more nicely and also particularly when you're eating them um they kind of pick up they get tangled into the noodles a little bit better when they're kind of split like that all right so the whites will put into the same Bowl as the Chinese chives and then the greens we're going to add at the very end so we'll keep those kind of separate in a separate little bowl with the mung bean sprouts you can if you want these are bean sprouts if you want you can pick off these little sprouted tips makes them look a little bit neater but I usually don't really bother all right last uh onion ingredient is an onion just a regular yellow onion I'm using about I don't know a third of it about this much of the onion you can do more or less depending on how much you like onion all right so at this stage our Wok is nice and hot and what I'm going to do is par fry oh sorry so I actually have the scallion uh scallion oil scallion lard I made if you look at my scallion oil noodle recipe video either in my book or the video on YouTube You'll see how I made this stuff I just use large instead of oil when I made it this time but I'm going to use this as my cooking fat because it has a lot of nice scallion flavor in it something all right very hot going right in with the uh onions and scallions [Music] we're looking to just slightly Char these let's give them a little bit of a sort of smoky flavor in there but we still want it to be sort of nice and bright and crunchy a little bit of salt that's about it Cloud's done next we're going to pan fry our noodles [Music] oops sorry come on sorry about that oh you cannot have the onion all right so this one I'm going to reduce my heat down a little bit medium okay and for this I'll just use my regular oil because I don't want to use up all of my scallion oil all right so the noodles can go in there sort of like a cake and of course if you don't have a wok you can do this um in a frying pan either a carbon steel pan or even a non-stick will work for this you won't get the sort of smoky wakay flavor out of using a um a non-stick skillet but this is definitely something you can do and get sort of delicious results it's different results delicious results using um even without a walk all right so we want to make sure it's uh not sticky which it shouldn't if you're probably preheated we're just going to let that kind of fry a little bit on the first side okay meanwhile I'm gonna mix up my sauce so for my sauce I'm doing some oops light soy sauce I can get this open all right so we're going with about a tablespoon of light soy sauce a couple teaspoons of dark soy sauce and if you don't have this you can just use about five teaspoons of shoyu which is Japanese you know light Japanese dark soy sauce and then I'm gonna do some white pepper you can use pre-ground or fresh ground doesn't matter pepper by the way is exactly the same as black pepper it's just had the outer husk of the berry removed it's the same plant although white pepper is also often fermented and uh about a teaspoon maybe half a teaspoon of sugar let's check in our noodles we want these to be kind of crispy on the bottom pretty good and I'm gonna do a flip if you want you can you know you can flip this out onto like a you can slide this out into a wooden uh thing or flip it out into a onto a plate and then slide it back in um or you can let's see if this works ready one two three let me do it like that a little bit more oil so that second side gets crispy too the idea here is that we want to get a little bit of color and a little bit of sort of crunch on those noodles so that when we then go and stir fry it that texture is Gonna Come Through okay uh oh and some shaoxing wine which I don't have here let me go pull it out not everybody uses shushing wine some people um leave out the shushing wine some people will add a um where's my wine some people will add um oyster sauce oyster sauce is really good in this too okay another teaspoon of shushing wine and about a teaspoon of sesame oil you want to just stir this until that sugar is mainly dissolved good all right let me get a plate to serve this in because it goes fast once it's done foreign take the noodles out for now and now we're going to begin our stir fry so high heat again I'll go back with that uh scallion oil here it's kind of fat scallion lard have all my ingredients ready to go foreign [Music] now I'm gonna just dump my bean sprouts in here [Applause] dump my noodles on top put my other allium's in and it's gonna start tossing I'm using my Chopsticks to kind of break up the noodles a little bit so okay and we're gonna just clear off the side of the wok and then we'll pour this sauce in all around that sort of buried side and the idea is that you want to really sort of sear the soy sauce so that's going to give it more of that walking flavor you can smell it immediately the soy sauce gets a kind of dip around the smell to it when it's seared versus when it's raw or versus when you've kind of poured over the noodles and it's kind of slowly heats up when you pour it directly on that hot metal and it sizzles as soon as it hits a kind of super Heats and you get some kind of you get some sort of mayard reaction type Browning flavors going on we're just going to mix this together until the noodles look relatively homogeneous a little taste very good foreign foreign simple and delicious um recipe you know there's I'll link below to uh some recipes for this if you want one that's free online hmm though it might be a little bit different from what I just showed you the process for these I'm usually pretty similar um if you want my specific recipe here's uh it's in my book but you don't need to you can just follow along it's simple enough right all right um would you like a little treat uh you may notice Shabu is not here she uh she passed away recently but we still got home alone with us here you go Bud so anyhow guys gals non-binary Pals uh be nice to each other be nice to your furry or slimy or scaly or uh segmented friends and uh I will see you next time bye foreign

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 471,309

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Id: RQfuzVNsLCI

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022