hong kong style stir fried beef noodles 港色牛肉炒麵

While shopping at the Korean supermarket I happened upon the section where they keep bean sprouts. I immediately thought of doing a dish that I haven't done for a very long time. I picked up a bag of mung bean sprouts 綠豆芽. These are made of mung beans instead of soy beans. The two are similar but soy bean sprouts has the chewy and more filling yellow heads. Depends on the dish you want to make you choose accordingly.

a bag of mung bean sprouts

I wanted to make a Hong Kong style stir fried beef noodles 港色牛肉炒麵. This is a popular dish in Hong Kong's Cantonese restaurant typically eaten for lunch. It is hard to make at home as the dish requires wok chi 鍋氣 - meaning you need to have a range with sufficient fire power, and have the skills to take advantage of it. Cooking with a lot of fire power things happen very quickly and you have to be well versed with the sequence.

Making this dish in a household kitchen tends to create a lot of oil smoke (vapour) and oil smoke is nasty indoors. Fortunately for me I can make this dish in the outdoor kitchen.

The noodles used in this dish comes in a bag typically labelled as stir fry noodles. You lightly blench the noodles and drain before frying them.

all the ingredients prepared - the noodles were lightly blenched and then drained dry which I did in the kitchen

The keys to this dish is you have to fry the noodles alone first to perfection. Done right the noodles forms a pancake like shape with a crunchy layer on the outside. The inside should be moist and hot. It takes quite a bit of oil and wok chi to achieve this. The pancake like fried noodles is laid onto the serving plate. Next is to make the stir fried beef topping.

The topping also is stir fried with sufficient wok chi 鍋氣. At the end you make a gravy like sauce and pour on top of the fried noodles in the serving plate. There should be just enough of the gravy to go with the rather dry fried noodles. The ingenuity of this dish is the mung bean sprouts. They have a lot of liquid and so balance out the dryness of the noodles. I only used as much oil as necessary to fry the noodle unlike most restaurant that tend to use too much oil, resulting in a rather greasy dish.

this is the appearance when the dish is served - you can see the crispy browned noodles on the edge

It is customary that the waiter will cut the pancake like noodle with a pair of scissors for you. The cuts are done like you would divide a small pizza into 4 equal slices.

I cut the noodles with a pair of scissors and scooted aside some toping to reveal the fried noodles

I nailed the proportions perfectly, and the dish is delicious. The amount of gravy is just right. I have more beef than what a typical restaurant would give you. All too often home cooks attempt this dish tend to pile on too many ingredients. This is a simple dish and often simplicity is good. I chose a large and flat plate to present this dish which left very little margins for error - should the sauce was too runny or too much oil from the fried noodles.

This dish is best to chased down with a couple of cups of good Oolong tea after.