-Chow mein's a story
about mistranslation. It's a mistranslation
between Chinese and English, Cantonese and English,
it's a mistranslation of what stir-fry means,
of what noodle means. But that's not
a bad thing at all. ♪♪ -My name is Lucas Sin. I am the chef of
Nice Day Chinese and Junzi Kitchen in New York. And we're going to talk about
chow mein today. Chow means stir-fry,
mein means noodle. By the time
chow mein made it over here to the US from China, people would know that this dish
was stir-fried noodles. However, in between
the misunderstanding of the Chinese language and the proliferation of Chinese
food all throughout America, chow mein became all sorts
of really wonderful and delicious
and different things. We're going to make a proper
Hong Kong-style chow mein, chow mein as I grew up with it,
as in chow mein. I'm going to blanch these
noodles, and as we're blanching, let's talk a little bit about
how chow mein got so crazy. Historians say Chinese people
came to the US probably roughly in the 1850s,
and in the 1850s, they came over primarily
to work on the railroads. The story goes that
Chinese-American food probably came about because when
the male laborers came over, they were bad at cooking, and they brought with them
little more than a semblance of what
the recipes are supposed to be. They ended up using whatever
ingredients were lying around, and they made Chinese food
for themselves as a sense of comfort. And, therefore --
and this is what people say -- therefore, that's why
Chinese food is bad. Because people who didn't know
how to cook made it. That is only a very
slim part of the story. A huge part of the story is a story of Chinese-American
entrepreneurship and Chinese-American inventions,
including this chow mein. There are a couple
of key moments when Chinese food really,
really blossoms. The first is the 1920s, probably what we would call
the chop suey era. Imagine being
in the United States, never eaten Chinese food before, and taste soy sauce
for the first time. You've been eating grits
and gruel and all these regular things,
and suddenly you have soy sauce. The amount of umami in soy sauce
would have blown your socks off. Suddenly,
Americans become obsessed not only with this
soy sauce flavor profile, but also with
the water thickening and the cornstarch
thickening process of making thick sauces
that coat vegetables with a type of savory sauce. So, suddenly, this Cantonese
technique of using cornstarch to thicken your sauces becomes popular all over
the United States. The 1920s is also
an interesting time because you have these chop
suey houses that start popping up
all over the United States, especially in places like
San Francisco and New York, where people of color and women,
like marginalized communities, were allowed to eat at Chinese
restaurants late night when they weren't allowed to eat or weren't supposed to eat
anywhere else. You have a huge amount of
jazz songs about chop suey and paintings
about chop suey by Hopper. It's really a part of
the moment. It's bohemian and it's cool. Chinese restaurants were
some of the first restaurants to serve beer during the Prohibition
by calling it "cold tea." You could ask for cold tea
in San Francisco, and they would give you beer
in a teapot. It's about Chinese
entrepreneurship, right? It's about people just coming up
with these crazy ideas. They're willing to bend the food and bend the culture
for what their clients needed, and they would serve anybody
that would pay them. The chow mein we're making today
is a pan-fried chow mein, Hong Kong style, crispy on two sides
with a little bit of a velveted, thickened white sauce
over the top that becomes, eventually, what people here in the US call
lobster sauce. Really interesting. The main ingredients today
are two types of chives, green and yellow,
different types of flavors. A little bit
of pork shoulder that is cut into strips. Bean sprouts
and shiitake mushrooms. Really nice
and clean and simple, just like most of
Cantonese cooking. The first people to really make
chow mein the thing all over the US
was an Italian company. Make sense.
They're probably making pasta. They're making these noodles. These noodles are deep fried,
dehydrated, packed into bags. And then, suddenly,
chow mein is everywhere, in grocery stores and wholesale
and restaurants, as this hard,
short, chunked-up noodle. That's the first understanding, but also one of
an industrial scale. So, that type of chow mein sometimes covered
in the Northeast, in places like Rhode Island
or Massachusetts, in a brown sauce instead
of a white lobster sauce, is what many people think of
as chow mein up there. That crispy noodle
that was once hard and crispy, covered in gravy so it gets softer by the minute,
is exactly the northeastern-style
chow mein. Back to the West Coast,
chow mein over there would be
what we call lo mein today, which is thick, soft egg
noodles, boiled noodles, sometimes steamed, tossed in
a little bit of a brown gravy with chicken and celery and all these other
types of things. Throughout the history
of the United States, you have people referring
to not only chow mein, but the western-style chow mein
versus eastern-style chow mein. Generally speaking, no matter
what region in the United States you're in,
you can see a divergence of the crispy hard noodle
over brown sauce and then this sort of
like pan-fried noodle with -- with --
with white sauce. The ingredients
we're using today are pretty traditional
in Hong Kong. They're a little bit cleaner,
little bit more delicate. There's no soy sauce.
It's a deep, dark brown sauce. But that's just how I grew up
with chow mein. And this was my favorite dish
to eat on Sunday afternoons, really. The fluff of the noodle
is super important. If you don't have the fluff,
you don't have the textural contrast --
that's the whole thing. If you overcook your noodles
in the first step, you just get a flat,
boring cake. We're gonna wait for
the pan to get hot, and then we're going to give it
a really generous amount of oil on the bottom, almost like
a shallow fry, but not quite. And we're going to fry
our noodles into a nice round shape,
crispy on both sides. And then this chop suey-style,
"chop suey-style" gravy, is going to go
over the top. We are going to fry this chow
mein, as in chow this chow mein. We're gonna stir-fry,
these noodles. Ironically, we are not chowing
our chow mein. We are pan-frying our
chow mein. Bouncy egg noodles. We're going to gently
lay them down. Normally, this is done
in a wok that is nonstick, but let's be confident
in our abilities, shall we? The outside is
going to be crispy, the inside is going to be soft, which is kind of the best
of both worlds, is both the hard, crispy
American part of the chow mein and the soft stir-fried version
that we see on the East Coast. Most Chinese people who came
to the United States that set the foundation
for the type of Chinese food that was all over the US are from
similar regions in the south. In these regions like Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Fujian have a similar
preference for textures and sauces
and culinary techniques. That's not to say
that all the Chinese people who are in the US now
are from those regions. Chinese people
from different regions, like the different regions
in the United States, they start cooking food that
is of their own preference, and they start adapting
to regional preferences of non-Chinese
people in those areas. Once they've done it
for a while, those preferences, those ideas become a tradition. Once you have tradition,
you have regional foodways. And that's a whole
lot of hullabaloo about regional
American variations of this Chinese dish,
but that's not to mention the global variations
on chow mein, as well. Anywhere where you might find
a certified noodle, whether it be Brazil or Portugal
or anywhere, you would probably find
a regional version of chow mein. [ Sizzling ] See what I'm talking about? Golden brown, nice and easy. You see this crispy part?
That's good texture. But, inside, you still
have a soft. That textural paradox is,
as Faraday says, a textural triumph. This sauce that we're making is
called a heen, and a heen is a cornstarch
thickened sauce, a little bit like a gravy. So a little bit of oil. And we're going to start by stir-frying a little
bit of pork. The bean sprouts, you want it to hit
this side of the pan and not the middle of the pan because you want
some of that grassy, raw mung beans flavor
in this case to cook off before it gets incorporated
into everything else. This technique is
the predecessor for chop suey. So you have a bunch
of flavorful liquid, in this case, animal stock and a little bit of abalone
sauce, salt and sugar. And we're going to bind it
all together with the fun that's at the bottom
of the pan, as well as
all the flavors and the water that's been leaking out of all
the ingredients before this. The American fascination
of chop suey is rooted in no small part in the sort of thickened sauce,
as well this idea that everything in
the dish can be cooked together like a stir-fry, bound together
by this one flavorful sauce. So we want to build that sauce
as we're cooking this dish. Putting it together, Chow mein in the bottom. Crispy and soft noodles and a chop suey-style
velveted sauce. Want to put all of that liquid
on there, all of that stir-fry, everything in this stir-fry
is cut into strips. So it all cooks together. And that's what
I'm talking about. Look at this, dude. Come on. No garnish necessary. Beautiful.
What the heck? Crispy, right?
Soft in the middle. You see, this pulling
noodle action. You can get both
at the same time. That's what I'm talking about. Good stuff. ♪♪ Chow means stir-fried,
mein means noodles. But just because chow mein isn't
a stir-fried noodle any longer doesn't mean
that it's any worse. Just means that it's interesting to figure out
where it came from. I've done this enough times
that I've seen through the Munchies team bullshit. Every time they make me
eat on camera, they never tell him to stop because they think they're going
to get a new moment in there. Every time, all the videos. ♪♪ Thanks for coming.
