Garlic Noodles | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji and we're going to make some garlic noodles so these are a classic san francisco treat um not the san francisco treat which is rice-a-roni but a san francisco treat which i didn't really know was a thing until i moved to the bay area um i live you know like 20 miles south of san francisco i didn't know this was a thing until i moved to the berry i'd never heard of them before but it was created by vietnamese american immigrants at a restaurant called ten long which is in the outer sun set up in san francisco uh where i've been to um typically served with roast crab roast dungeness crab so dungeness crab is another san francisco street which is not the san francisco treat which is rice-a-roni but it is another san francisco treat um that said um as my neighbor and colleague and someone who i consider a dear friend even though i've never met him and don't you know we've barely interacted but he feels like a friend because he makes everyone feel like a friend in his videos uh chef john of food wishes um has said on his video for the same dish this dish goes with pretty much anything um and you can eat it on its own which is what i'm doing um my recipe is a little bit different from his but they're all basically the same sort of process you start with noodles um you can use chinese hand pulled noodles or fresh egg noodles um i'm just using spaghetti this is a this is some good old rayo's spaghetti and then i'm going to take some garlic and let's see i need a little mortar and pestle where'd my mortar and pestle go i moved everything around where did it go well i'll use my i'll use my multi-head for now this will work fine all right so i got about a dozen cloves of garlic so i'm gonna be making enough for two to three people so half a pound of spaghetti that's about you know 230 grams ish 220 grams i think if you're if you're using real units um this is just the pre-peeled garlic that i get from the uh you know you can get by the supermarket pre-peeled it's not the best if i if i really cared about perfect garlic flavor right now i would be uh peeling fresh cloves off of a head of garlic the reason is because when when you buy peel pre-peeled garlic to peel them the garlic gets blanched briefly first and that kind of deactivates some of the um the flavor in there some of the allicin forming compounds um and uh it was my buddy brad leone my new internet buddy brad leone knows alison [Music] alice's and allison is important for garlic flavor that said you know this stuff is all right what i would avoid using is pre-minced garlic because that stuff has very little actual garlic flavor left in it brad and i brad leone and i are now working on a project together we're making um a salt box a salt cellar people ask me about this one all the time which i got uh from an ex-girlfriend who bought it in in the uk um and people ask me where i got it and where they can find a similar one to it because it's so nice for salt it's one finger operation the hinge is working on this one but the ones that brad and i are building will not be broken um it's nice and wide so you can pick up salt easily anyhow so we're building um something similar to these out of reclaimed uh walnut you can go check my social the social section of my um of my account and you'll find uh you'll find some news about that project it's coming it's coming um so add a little bit of salt to your garlic when you smash it with a mortar and pencil because it helps as far as abrasiveness goes oh i know my other internet buddy um adam ragusia i know in one of his videos he's speculated that salt actually aids more in the pounding of garlic through osmosis rather than um uh abrasiveness um he's wrong about that and i know because i've done tests on this so if it was just osmosis you would expect that um the more finely ground the salt is so if you use like powdered salt it would work much better than coarse ground salt because it would dissolve faster and osmosis would take place faster but it doesn't um coarse salt actually works faster and better for breaking down garlic or whatever it is you're going to be pounding in here now maybe at the end like once it starts to turn to pace like this um osmosis comes into effect uh but at this stage no matter what salt you use is going to all have dissolved anyway so anyhow yeah you add it in there for the abrasiveness you can also just hand chop that garlic if you feel all right so for each quarter pound of pasta we're going to do about one and a half tablespoons of butter this is a super fusiony dish by the way you'll see and i'm gonna get that going in this uh walk i got here this walk is um a model i'm testing that my my friends at i got a lot of internet buddies my internet buddies at uh food 52 um they they make the cutting board that has the little cell phone holder in it that i sometimes use in my kitchen that you have probably seen if you watch this channel but they're coming out with this new carbon steel walk intended for western ranges so i've been uh testing it for them a little bit so that i can give them some feedback so far it's pretty nice you know it has a much wider flat bottom than most flat bottom woks do and i'm not positive how i feel about that yet it definitely makes it more difficult for me to stir-fry but on the other hand it makes it more versatile for other things um i don't know how i feel about that yet well i i need to put a little bit more thought into it all right so moderate heat um this is about medium low right now and i'm just going to let that butter mostly melt and then i'm going to come back in with my garlic [Music] [Applause] throw up in there i first had this dish actually at 10 long and the outer sunset when i when i first moved to san francisco and some friends of mine here wanted to show me some real a real san francisco treat um not rice-a-roni which is the real san francisco treat but a san francisco treat um and i foolishly um i borrowed my friends i didn't have a car at the time so i borrowed my friend's moped vespa um and wrote it from um the uh the mission where i was living at the time wrote it from the mission to the outer sunset um through the hills uh at night and i very foolishly assumed that san francisco can't get that cold at night and so i was wearing shorts and a t-shirt um and then on my way home like late at night when it was dark at like 9 or 10 p.m and it was freezing cold out because it gets real cold in san francisco at night um all the time uh freezing cold going back uh on a vespa with shorts and a t-shirt on a san francisco night not a good idea um and yeah all right so the garlic we don't want it to burn or brown too much we just wanted to sort of gently give up its aroma to that butter um so as soon as you start seeing it turn even slightly brown like that right now it's done now i'm gonna come in here with about a couple teaspoons of that's light soy sauce there's a few big squirts of fish sauce probably a couple teaspoons of that too and then this which is oyster sauce this is a lee kum kee oyster sauce the the fancier one it's the one with the the little boy and the mother on the on the boat with the oysters as opposed to the one with like the panda on the cover um this one has more oyster in it the first ingredient this is what you want to check for when you buy oyster sauce um the first ingredient should be premium oyster extract or some something like that oyster extract all right so it's like garlic and butter and ultra umami you can sort of think of this as like you know vietnamese alio olio it says butter and garlic and then things are going to get even crazier in a second after this pasta's done let me taste how it's doing [Applause] here are you why am i having so much trouble with these today let me get my smaller sticks those sticks are those big sticks of mine are starting to warp which makes it really hard to grab with the tip [Applause] all right we are pretty much done there so we're late we're waiting for that to get just sort of barely just shy of al dente not quite not quite fully cooked a little bit chalky in the center still but mostly al dente is what we're looking for and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to dump it in here with whatever liquid happens to come with it i'm not gonna be careful about straining that liquid off by the way this pasta um i cooked in a skillet you can see that sort of concentrates the starchiness which is good for a dish like this because it makes the sauce creamy um but i did not salt that pasta water at all and the reason i don't salt the pasta water is because there's so many salty elements in this sauce the soy sauce and the fish sauce and the oyster sauce that if you salt that pasta water at all it makes the whole thing too salty so no salt in the pasta water um by the way you know soy sauce fish sauce and oyster sauce those are common ingredients you don't have to use all three of them you could use as a sub select a sub selection subset of them you could also use magi seasoning so yeast extract or worcestershire sauce is also a common ingredient in this any of those things you really just want sort of umami rich sauces and finally i'm going in here with some cheese so this is pecorino romano typically you would use parmesan in this parmesan and fish sauce right this is pecorino romano just because i like the flavor of it and i happen to have some but you can do whatever you like any kind of hard grating cheese is what you're after i'm just going to give it a hard stir you can see how nice and creamy that sauce has gotten from the reduced pasta sauce pasta water emulsifying with the butter and the other ingredients um you know what i'm going to do to finish this off i'm going to add some so this is done as is but i'm going to i got some scallions i'm going to add a thin slice scallion and uh you know i'm gonna add also i think this will be good this is um tarako which is a japanese salted um cod row that comes sort of in its egg sac and i grill it and then we eat this for crumble it over rice and eat it for breakfast um something i grew up eating and that i can find here this is definitely not a normal ingredient in um in uh garlic noodles but i think it'll be delicious um sort of similar it's sort of similar to you know it's the japanese version of italian botarga which is also salted cured i believe mullet roe maybe it's cod row and you know some kind of salt and cured tiny fish eggs that are delicious on pasta [Laughter] not being too careful about how i slice these scallions all right let's leave some off for garnish and this will go right in here and we'll just toss them and let the residual heat of that pan and pasta cook them and so if it starts to get a little bit too tight like this has just added a splash more pasta water to thin it out um and the one thing to remember with pasta is that like eggs um it's going to tighten up a little bit and get a little bit sort of drier once it's in the plate so you always want to make sure that your pasta is slightly looser than you want it in the pan than it's going to be on the plate this looks about perfect to me all right so let's just flip this out [Music] see nice and creamy that sauce has become and boy oh boy is it garlicky this would go really well obviously with um roasted crab but also you know it could go really well with sauteed shrimp grilled shrimp any kind of sort of seafood i think it goes really well with but as our friend chef john said goes well on anything so i'm gonna finish it off with some more scallions and then some of this salted cod row all right how does that look to everyone i think it looks pretty great let's go uh eat some by the window looks good smells good how's it taste tastes real good oh boy sorry guys you can't have the garlic but you know what here it's a little bit too garlicky for the dogs but they can get a little sit good girl little cheese snack all right garlic noodles a san francisco treat not the san francisco treat which is riceroni um everyone take care um stay healthy eat well um guys gals and um binary pals i will see you next time bye you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 1,024,869

Rating: 4.8736415 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: wK9OHVxB_Z8

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Funambulatory]

Wonder when it drops

[u/stupidillusion]

He said he'd have a link to the project in his socials but I've not spotted it. Anyone know the link?