POV Peanut and Chicken Noodle Salad

hey Vern it's Kenji again I'm gonna make some lunch so I just finished making this chicken stock which is actually well it's going on the stove but I have some chicken I took the the chicken tenders and some chicken thigh out of there which I'm gonna now make into the chicken for this chicken peanut noodle dish that I'm making so a couple slices of ginger I got here's a little bit of leek you don't really need to do this I'm just going to throw them in there though and then the broth is actually coming sorry the water is coming to a boil right now you can put the chicken in while it's still cold so I got a chicken thigh and just a couple of those chicken tenders in there oh this pan is cool by the way I don't even remember where I got it it's a prototype somebody sent me wants but it's got this aluminum this sort of ridged aluminum plate on the bottom I don't if you can see that and what that does is it actually increases the surface area on the bottom of the pan aluminum is a very good conductor by the way it increases the surface area in the bottom of the pan so that it actually extracts more it's able to get more heat from the burner and less heat goes off into the air so it very efficiently boils things I don't know why this thing hasn't come to market yet somebody somebody demoed it for me once a long time ago all right so what else is going in there we'll do some oh sorry so this dish when I was a student in the summers we used to have I used to work in a biology lab in Cambridge and by the biology lab was a bunch of food trucks and there's one called gooseberries which was a Chinese food truck and most of the food is not very good but my lunch probably three days a week was there sesame or peanut noodle salad which is cold noodles in a peanut sauce with chicken and scallions and cilantro and cucumbers so this is sort of my homage to that I'm cutting the scallion in half and then I'm very very thinly slicing it at a sharp sharp bias like this you see you don't really have to do with that thinner sharp it doesn't really matter cut them cut them into whatever size pieces you want if you have a sharp knife and you have the skills or the patience to do it that way you can do it Oh some people have asked me about the claw grip you know the hole holding your knife like this and keep you perpendicular so I do that sometimes depending on what I'm cutting like I'm cutting a bunch of like so I'll do that for this for example for this cilantro I'll pick it up like this keep my two thumb tucked back there and my knife right against my knuckles and then I kind of go like that and that's sort of the classic claw grip sometimes people have seen me doing it as sort of a half claws which is which is uh no on the scallion I guess I do this sort of classic claw grip to also so like that when I do this cucumber I'll show you what my sort of half claw grip is um I think some people pointed me towards a video adam ragout see I think that's how you say his name I don't know but I haven't watched much of his stuff but I've seen a couple of them tend to like him he had a video about whether you should use the claw grip or not which I'll link to somewhere let's say here I'll link to it and his argument is that you don't really need to use the claw if your goal is not to be a professional chef and I actually kind of agree with that it's like if you do if you've never used the claw and you're used to just kind of you know holding your food like this and being very slow and deliberate about your cuts there's no reason to switch over to the claw unless you really have a desire to get faster and faster and faster so you know you are gonna reach an upper limit of how fast you can safely cut when your thumb is sticking out like that and you're holding your food like this and the the whole point of the claw oh you see how fast I came to boil I'm gonna bring it down to a little simmer the whole point of the clog herb is that it lets you cut really fast you know like very very very fast like that without any danger of cutting your fingertips off because everything's kind of tucked behind so your knuckle it right your knife kind of rides on your knuckle like that can you see that yeah that's right hope you see it so you're gonna kind of rides on your knuckles like that so no real danger of cutting yourself if you do that but you know if you if you hold it like this if you hold your food like that you can cut off your thumb tip or your fingertips but the thing is you know if your goal is not to cut really fast then then who really cares right so I agree with him on that I'm gonna just kind of fillet this little jalapeno nub that I had you can use Serrano or no chili at all but here you know see so you take out the seeds in the core and then you end up with this and put a little julienne I'll show you a little trick with these scallions now I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab a little Bowl this spoon is here because my drawer hinges are broken by the way I think I've mentioned that before get some ice some water hmm and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put those scallions into this ice water I'll throw the peppers in there too just with all of it to zero and it bunched up together right now I'm going to put those scallions into this ice water and what that does is it'll cause some of the cells in there to absorb extra moisture and when that happens it's sort of like a bi-metal strip on a on a thermostat where one side expands faster than the other so what happens is that one side of one part of the scallion absorbs more water than the other part and it ends up curling so it turns the scallions into these nice pretty curls that look great as a garnish so if you've ever wondered how they do that do that at restaurants that's that's how they do it ice water and then here's the cucumber so the cucumber first I'm going to cut off one side like this to make a nice flat surface then I'm going to cut it into thin planks and so okay so here you can see I'm not really doing the clogger but kinda my thumbs out here but still I have one finger with the knuckle leading and that's where the that's where the knife is kind of stopped up again so there's no real risk that I'm going to cut my finger tips off doing this I'm so we've made our little planks now we can stack them up don't have to be perfect but you want to aligned like that and then and again I'm doing this kind of half claw grip then you cut it into julienne and the quick and dirty Julia and if I was found to be a little bit neater and fancier I would seed the cucumbers I would probably do the initial cuts on a mandolin so that they're all perfectly the right thickness you know and then I would very very carefully stack them and slice them but you know again I never do that kind of stuff when I'm cooking for myself at home and frankly like I've you know long gone are the days where I used to practice my knife skills for eight hours a day and so my knife skills are probably I'm sure there are many of you out there who are like oh my god Kandi's got terrible knife skills and if you feel that way I don't care leave it in the comments if you want I don't really care because I'm not out to impress anyone except ISTEP myself I guess maybe my family a little bit all right so we got our cucumbers we got our scallions we got some cilantro here that's what's gonna be the base for our noodle dish great big bowl to toss it in all that in here and then I'm gonna get a smaller bowl to make the sauce so the sauce soaps get a fork so you can use you know so this is sort of loosely based on a Shanghai style sesame noodle so with sesame noodles you would take a roasted sesame paste and you take a fresh chili oil and that's sort of the basis of your sauce weight and you've garnished with scallions maybe cucumber I'm just using peanut butter extra chunky a little knob of it here on a few tablespoons and we're gonna get some hot water actually you know what I use is a he's some of this some of the water from here the chicken is not cooked all the way through but the water is certainly hot enough that it's not of them it's safe to use in your sauce there's nothing living in that water right now so a couple tablespoons of that water too [Music] and what kind of dilute our peanut butter so if you do have if you don't wanna do peanut butter if you want this to be a lightly more traditional thing you can use roasted sesame paste Chinese roasted sesame paste or you can even use tahini and that tastes perfectly fine so I've got our peanuts in here I'm gonna grab some chili oil this is homemade chili oil you can use store-bought chili oil if you want very easy to make sure you like the simplest kind all you take is some dried chilies toast them chop them or you can get them already pre chopped you know like a chili powder heat up some oil on the stove and pour it over the chilies and let it infuse and then if you want you know beyond that there's all different kinds of styles of chili oil you can make again I'll cook two I'll link to them Chinese cooking demystified which has some chili oil recipes this one I believe has some garlic and ginger sesame star anis what else is in here very little salt and sugar maybe a little stitch from peppercorn I can't remember the smell oh yeah for sure there's some peppercorn in there alright we set into here I'll do a video and chili oil at some point and then I'm gonna I'm gonna do a little vinegar black vinegar not Worcestershire sauce black vinegar and soy sauce light soy sauce I'm using right here you can use dark you can you show you whatever you want you can use no soy sauce black vinegar so you can use black vinegar you can use chinking vinegar if you don't have those the closest Western thing in the Western supermarket probably be balsamic vinegar but you know you can also use any kind of vinegar you want red wine apple cider it doesn't really matter as long as it's got that acidity it's going to taste good all right so that's our sauce right there could use a little more heat actually I'm gonna I'm gonna get a quick little splash of some ball all right so now I think our chicken is probably cooked through give you a little clear skin so in this one you do want to skim off the this gum skim off the scum because we're going to be cooking our noodles directly in this water let me see how's it how's that chicken doing ah over my tongs are how can we grab something another fork I'm just gonna rip it open to see how it's doing is looking done all right you just want to be barely cooked through you know up to like 155 degrees or so is fine under 55 if you want to go higher that's fine take that out let's get our get all this stuff out okay I'm gonna top it up with a little bit more hot water now I'm using these or these Shanghai style Chinese noodles you can use any kind of noodles you want really you can use egg noodles if you want to you if you all you have access to is western pasta one nice trick to give western style pasta to a sort of alkaline noodle texture that sort of chewy bouncy texture that certain types of Chinese noodles have is to add a little bit of baking soda to the water that you're boiling them in so maybe about a quarter teaspoon or so per mmm for every two cups like I have to have teaspoon per quart of baking soda to the water and boil your pasta in it so spaghetti angel hair whatever you want and it'll get that sort of yellow color and the bouncy texture of a good Chinese alkaline noodle but I'm using these fresh noodles I'm only going to cook like half of these right now because that's all we need and that's a good risk these will stay for later all right now we're just got to wait for that water to come to a boil oh you know what else we can add in here now it is at a boil all right here we go quick get the noodles in there a little stir to make sure that they're not clumping together what I'm gonna add to my sauce is a tiny little dash of MSG maybe yeah it's like 1/4 teaspoon or so you don't have to use msg of course as I always say but in my family we don't mind it no I'm also not going to tell you that you aren't sensitive to MSG if you think you are because who am I to say what you are and are not sensitive to all right so those noodles are done now I'm gonna take a little splash of the pasta water and add it to my sauce this pasta water it actually actually you know what I'm gonna add a little bit to my chickens talk to you know it's it's got a little bit of flavor already in there from the chicken that I boiled in it plus it had some of that starchiness and that's gonna help the the noodles pick up the sauce just as you would with an Italian pasta so I'm gonna drain them sitting with some cold water to stop the cooking if I was trying to do this like a super traditional way or you know whatever some time sure someone's gonna call me out on the comments for this but if I want really wanted to do this like the ideal way I think I what I would do is I would drain them and I would lay them out on the sheet tray and let them air dry a little bit rather than shocking them like this but I really don't care this is the fast fast easy dirty way all right warm noodles into the bowl they go let's get our chicken I'm gonna have to clean that up later get our sauce in here chicken I'm gonna use couple forks to pull it apart get rid of that little access knob a fat here come with it chicken thigh shabu sit Oh almost she catches it well you've seen she catches it maybe thirty percent of the time shabu is a for those who you're asking shabu is a mutt she was a rescue street dog has had many babies in her life apparently but she was you know she we had her tested and she was like something like 25 percent rat terrier I think and then everything else is just some undecipherable mix of all different types of breeds she's a sweet dog she was not a sweet dog limit for Ascot or she was really difficult would not go near anybody except for me including my wife which was very difficult for her she was also very poorly behaved would bark at people snap at people but she now she's a now she's a big sweetheart all it takes is some love well loving loving a lot of training she also loves chasing animals once caught her with a live swallow swallowing a swallow that swallow was like halfway down her throat she brought it it brought it into the house like that wasn't too fun all right chicken is shredded into the sauce it goes and now let's look at our pretty little scallion bits so you see how nice and nice and curly they kind of become pretty great hey those can go right in there it's only the ice going in it's okay if you get a little extra water in there because those noodles are gonna as they cool that sauce kind of thickens up a little all right all right now let's just toss I'm sorry about that I think my battery GoPro ran out of batteries but I don't know how far god I hope I didn't miss too much basically just put it all together and I'm tossing it now and you see as as the sauce the sauce was pretty watery when I put it in but now you see as it cools and as it mixes with the noodles it really sticks to the surface of the noodles and it comes out just the right texture so you want the noodles to be kind of loose not clumpy and to get to that loose stage loose dry dry but loose you get there by making it too wet to begin with let me give these a taste hmmm delicious could use a little bit more salt these are you still hungry a little more salt a little more vinegar alright [Applause] overfill the bowl and let's add a final little drizzle almost like that a little drizzle of chili oil at the end there we go this I promise you well I haven't had gooseberries in years I don't know if it even still exists probably not maybe it does that whole area has changed but this I promise you is better than anything gooseberries ever served and it's so easy delicious look at this hmm I could do a lot of that alright I will see you next time

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 289,567

Rating: 4.9562349 out of 5

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Id: cf3IBpffpss

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020