Chinese cooking question--noodle dishes.

Factual Questions
1

My wife bought a wok for me as a Christmas gift, and tonight I decided to try my hand at making a chicken lo mein noodle dish tonight. It didn’t turn out too bad, but I think that I need to definitely work on my technique.

I first fried the soy-marinated chicken in a bit of peanut oil and followed up by adding the vegetables and frying them a little. I then added boiled oriental noodles which I had drained a few minutes earlier and tossed the ingredients around until blended. The end result tasted pretty good, but the noodles were sticky and kind of tough to manage in the wok.

My question is this: should I have drained the noodles just moments before adding them to the wok so as to eliminate clumping, or did I do the right thing by draining them ahead of time and adding a bit of oil to them when I replaced them in the covered pot?

Any help is apprecieted, especially any links to Chinese cooking sites that would be useful to a novice such as myself.

Fukui-san?

2

BTW: I really meant to type “appreciated” in my initial message.

Carry on…

3

I’d suggest using the pan-fry approach, you can skip boiling the noodles unless you get the completely dry, hard kind. I like to get the soft kind you buy in the freezer case. Frozen Yakisoba noodles are the easiest to work with, and fairly easy to find.
Pan fried noodles aren’t easy to cook in a wok until you get the hang of it. They are my specialty, I must’ve been fixing them for 10 years, but I do ruin a batch now and then if I’m not careful.
I suggest you pan fry the noodles separately and then put them aside on a plate, then add them back to the mixture after you cook the meat and veggies. This is alot easier, and it’s common to add, remove, and readd foods to the wok in Chinese cooking.
First, take a package of frozen yakisoba (or lo mein, or whatever) noodles, zap it in the microwave for about 30 seconds, until it just STARTS to get soft, but is not completely softened. Then get your wok set up. I use the old “Frugal Gourmet” slogan for wok cooking, “hot pan, cold oil, and the food won’t stick.” Get the pan up to heat without adding oil. Once the pan is hot, add your peanut oil, just enough to coat the sides, but not too much. If there’s a big puddle in the bottom, you’ve used too much. Immediately add the unsoftened noodles to the oil, and watch out for splatters! Once the mix starts to sizzle, add a small splash of lukewarm water (cold will kill the wok’s heat), and close the lid. The intent is to make steam, keep it frying in a mix of oil and water. Once the water starts to boil off, it will be left in just oil, and the noodles will already be softened. The noodles will begin to fry, let them cook until they get fairly well fried on that side, then scrape them up (you DID get a large bamboo or wood spatula with your wok, didn’t you? No metal tools in a wok!!) and flip the noodles. Get them good and fried, stir them up and get them fried from all sides, if they aren’t softened enough you can add a bit more water and take another pass. Don’t use too much heat or the noodles will scorch and stick. Once the noodles are browned a bit, you can remove them, put them aside on a plate, then cook your meat and veggies, then readd the noodles.
This all sounds very complex, and to some extent it is, you’re manipulating both steam from above and heat from below. But it all happens in at the same time. Don’t worry, it isn’t as complex as I make it seem, I’m just trying to overkill the instructions, so you get an idea of what is happening all at once…
Oh, BTW, you DID season your wok before you used it for the first time, didn’t you? You have to blacken the surface in order to make it nonstick. The easiest way to do this is to heat it up REALLY hot and fry table salt. Just heat it up, add a bunch of oil, then toss in a large handfull of table salt. It will smoke and burn, blackening the surface. It mostly blackens in the bottom where the heat is most intense. It is harder to blacken the sides, and you don’t really need to, they will blacken with age and use. And for GODS sake, don’t EVER scrub your wok with steel wool or anything like that. The proper tool is a bamboo whisk, but you can use a plastic scrubbee sponge, if it is not an abrasive type. You are not supposed to scrape it down to bare metal, you’ve got to preserve the blacking, and it builds up over time.

Good luck with your wok, it’s a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. Feel free to ask for more tips!

4

Oh… I forgot. Don’t wash your wok with detergent. Just clean it out with hot water and the whisk/scrubbee sponge while it is still hot. If you feel the need to sterilize it, throw it back on the burner until it’s hot again. Don’t put away your wok until you put a light coat of oil inside it.

5

Chas.E,

The wok that I have has a Silverstone non-stick surface, so I don’t think that your pan preparation tips will be very useful in this case. My care instructions said to wash the pan in dish detergent, dry it, and coat it lightly with non-salted vegetable oil. Worked like a charm–nothing stuck. Also, the spatula I use is metal coated in a plastic that is safe for non-stick cookware. Its shape fits the contours of my wok really well.

I did end up boiling dry noodles for my dish. I didn’t even think of going to the freezer section to look for noodles. You can bet I’ll do that on my next attempt.

Thanks for the cooking tips!

6

If you want a really easy way to do this or don’t have access to some of the products Chas listed (and don’t mind if it’s not really authentic), you can do what I do…use linguine. I just boil it like on the package, rinse it with water, then add it to the already cooked vegetables and meat in the wok. Then I cook it a bit more to let the marinade mix with the noodles. Tastes good and does a pretty good impression of lo mein.

7

Of course you’re right, no need to season the wok if it has a teflon surface, this only applies to bare metal woks.

8

A good post by Chas.E, but here’s a quibble:

There’s nothing wrong with metal tools in a wok, as far as I’ve ever heard. I’ve been using a big metal ladle-like thing to stir (you find these at Chinese kitchen supply shops) for years with no ill effects. The guy who taught me, a real expert in Chinese cooking, did the same thing. True, I flip most of the time instead of stirring, but when I do stir with the metal tool, nothing particularly bad happens. My wok’s surface looks fine, and never needs reseasoning.

By the way, an extra tip for cookin on the wok: You can never get enough heat. Get a backyard gas range, one that can spit out insane BTU’s. Once you get that much heat, things start getting a lot easier, and tastier. Just be careful - your wok will flare up, especially if you use marinades with alcohol. Make sure you wait until the wok starts smoking before you put in oil. Don’t wait too long, or your wok will catch on fire. If your wok can start smoking within 30 seconds, you’ve got a nice heat going. To make good chow fun, you need a lot of heat. DO this only with a carbon-steel wok, BTW.

9

FWIW, I really like this cookbook with a lot of wok cooking: “Martin Yan’s Feast: The Best of Yan Can Cook”.

10

Well avumede, I guess it depends on who taught you how to use a wok. I learned from Japanese guys, and they’d yell at you if you used anything but a wooden spatula or those long wooden cooking chopsticks. They said it damages the surface. If your wok isn’t scratched by metal tools, it’s probably because you’re careful not to scratch it.
But I will reiterate this warning, because the wok in question has a teflon coating. You’re not supposed to use metal tools with ANY teflon pan.