Fried Flat Noodles – Char Kway Teow

So far I’ve only posted recipes that involve very few ingredients.  (I know, I know, I only have three posts…)  This is partially because I am not working right now (so you’d think I’d have more posts…) and I’m trying to be careful with my money, and also, it’s nice to be able to whip up an easy meal because you just want to eat!

However, there is much to be said about the methodical preparation of ingredients for a dish.  I love the fine detail and work you put into something while the entire time being able to envision the end product.  For me there is a certain calmness and meditativeness about being in the kitchen, when it’s just you, your cutting board and your knife.  I think, perhaps, it’s probably the equivalent to how runners feel when they describe a great run and how running gives them time to think and how they feel so reinvigorated at the end.  I’m sure there are a lot of you who have no idea what I mean and a lot of you who are thinking, “I get that.”

Today I am giving you a recipe with a lot of ingredients.  Char kway teow, or fried flat noodles.  You can actually choose what you want to go into the dish and totally make it your own.  Now, I’m trying to recreate this dish based almost entirely on taste memory.  Everyone has taste memory – a dish that you’ve had in the past and loved so much that you’re constantly on the look out for it and then when you find it, it inevitably is never as good as the taste memory. Why is that?

So, I’m basing this recipe on my taste memory of my mother’s dish.  The most memorable ingredients of this dish for me are the cockles and the bean sprouts.  The cockles give it a unique taste and the bean sprouts a little crunch.  Because I am trying to reconstruct my mother’s char kway teow, I have a number of ingredients in my recipe below – my mother is no slacker for getting all the perfect ingredients for each dish.  So, finally, you are getting a recipe with more than five ingredients!  You don’t have to have everything in your dish and the ones you can play around with, I’ve listed as optional and you can always substitute any of the items, except for the noodles, of course.

Fried Flat Noodles – Char Kway Teow

Char Kway Teow

3 tablespoons oil

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 red chili sliced

1 chicken thigh cut into thin bite-sized strips

2 Chinese cured sausage links (lap cheong) (optional, but not really – who would leave out the lap cheong?)

1/2 pound of large shrimp, shelled and deveined

1/2 cup chopped cabbage (optional)

1/2 cup chopped baby bok choy (optional)

1 pound of fresh flat rice noodles

1/2 cup cut Chinese garlic chives or green scallions, green parts only

1/2 cup fresh cockles, steamed and shelled (optional, but I think this makes the dish)

1 cup of bean sprouts, roots discarded

3 tablespoons of black/dark soy sauce

1 tablespoon of light soy sauce

1 tablespoon of hoisin sauce

1 tablespoon chili paste

2 tablespoons of chicken stock or water

2 eggs beaten

When I was young, helping my mother in the kitchen was based on a pass/fail system.  She’d start you off with something small and then work you up to other tasks, but only if you sufficiently completed the previous task.  I generally passed, but not without scrutiny.  However, the lessons I learned in the kitchen from my mother are lessons I’ve never forgotten.  One of the first things I helped my mother with was snapping the roots off the bean sprouts.  I’m not kidding.  My mother would give me a huge pile of bean sprouts and I would sit there and snap the roots off one by one.  It wasn’t until I got older and started eating at restaurants that I noticed others would just leave the roots on.  To this day, whenever I make something with bean sprouts I get torn between honoring what my mother taught me and just being lazy and tossing them in.

After having snapped off the roots of about a million bean sprouts, I wanted to do more.  I wanted a knife!  So, I was given the task of deveining shrimp.  There must have been tasks between bean sprouts and deveining shrimp since it’s such a huge jump, but I can’t remember.  Shelling and deveining shrimp is easy.  The way you think you should shell shrimp is likely the correct way.  There really isn’t that many ways to do it, and the shells always come off pretty easily.  And, once you’ve deveined three shrimp, you automatically become a pro.  Just take a small paring knife and cut along the outer curve of the shrimp.  You should see a black vein, although not all shrimp have this.  If you don’t see a black vein, leave as is.  If you do see it, pull it out…and then you’ve deveined the shrimp.  Done.  I once asked my mom what the black stuff was and she said “poop.”  I guess this is sort of true, since it’s actually the digestive track of the shrimp.  It won’t kill you to eat it, but you might get some gritty bits, because you know, it’s poop.

Break apart the fresh rice noodles.  If they’re not breaking apart easily, place them in some warm water for just a few minutes, just to help separate them.  Don’t soak them for too long, you don’t want them too soft.  If you’re usig warm water to break them apart, make sure you thoroughly drain them before frying.  Heat a large fry pan or wok and add the oil, garlic, chili, chicken and Chinese sausage.  Fry until the chicken is cooked.  Add the shrimp, cabbage and bok choy.  Fry until the shrimp starts to turn pink.  Add the noodles and green onions.  Fry for a minute or so and then add the cockles, bean sprouts, soy sauces, hoisin sauce, chili paste and chicken stock.  Fry until the noodles soften up.  Once they’re soft, move the noodles to make a well in the middle of the pan.  Add the egg and fry until the egg is cooked.

Char kway teow noodles, which my family just called fried noodles, is a popular street vendor/hawker food in Malaysia and Singapore.  It was originally made with pork fat and pork croutons (doesn’t that sound good?), and was a sustenance meal for laborers.  Nowadays, I think most people just use cooking oil…too bad…

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