Cantonese Chow Mein, Supreme Soy Sauce Fried Noodles 豉油皇炒面
Ingredients
- Cantonese Egg Noodles, 100g (蛋面).
- Jiucai, “Chinese Chives”, 50g (韭菜).
- Bean Sprouts, 70g (芽菜).
- Half of a Shallot (干葱).
- Quarter of a White Onion (洋葱). Sliced.
- Boiling Water, 5 TBSP. (from noodles)
- Sugar, 1 TBSP. Take your sugar and dissolve it into the reserved hot boiling water.
- Dark Soy Sauce, 1 TBSP (老抽).
- Light Soy Sauce, 2 tsp (生抽).
- Sesame Oil, 1 tsp (香油). Toasted of course.
- Thick Soy Sauce, ½ TBSP (酱油膏).
- Fish Sauce, ½ tsp (鱼露).
Process
- Prep your veggies. Cut the jiucai (“Chinese Chives”) into sections, dice your shallot, slice the onion, and (if doing so) prepare your silver sprouts.
- Cook the noodles. Before you toss your noodles in, take 5 TBSP boiling water for the sauce in step #4. Now, for fresh noodles like the ones in the video, we’re cooking them for exactly one minute in boiling water – move them around with chopsticks or tongs to make sure they don’t clump together.
- Rinse, drain, and cover your noodles.
- Prepare your sauce. Whisk in the sugar into those 5 TBSP of boiling water that you reserved. Then add in the rest of the ingredients for the sauce and give it a mix.
- Sweat the jiucai and the bean sprouts. What we’re doing is lightly ‘toasting’ these ingredients over medium heat with zero oil.
- Oil your wok using the longyau technique. The longyau technique is this: get your wok nice and hot over a high flame, pour some oil and swirl it around to coat the wok and get a nice non-stick surface, and then pour out any excess oil. The amount of oil that we drain will be different for each ingredient. We’re not going to drain any oil before frying the shallots, drain basically all the oil except for that coating when we fry the onions, and drain most of the oil – keeping about ½ TBSP in the pot – when frying the noodles.
- Fry your shallots. Oil the wok using the longyau technique without draining out any oil, then add in your shallots. Fry for a couple minutes over medium heat, and take them out once they’re nice and brown. Drain the oil into a bowl and reserve for step #9.
- Fry your onions. Oil the wok using the longyau technique and drain out all the oil except what’s lining the pan. Fry for a couple minutes over medium heat, then take them out.
- Fry your noodles. Oil the pan using the longyau technique and drain out most of the oil, but keeping about a ½ TBSP in. Use the drained shallot oil here as it’ll lend a real nice flavor. Fry the noodles for about 30 seconds on medium or even medium low heat (if on a Chinese range), then add your onions back in. Give them quick stir together.
- Add your sauce and reduce it in the noodles. Move your noodles around to absorb some of the sauce as it reduces. After a minute or so, add back in the remainder of the ingredients – the jiucai, the beansprouts, and the shallots. Stir these around for a few minutes as the sauce reduces. Once you have no real visible liquid pool remaining at the bottom of the pot, it’s done and ready to eat.