Delicious Times

Lo Mein

Chinese Serves 6–8 as a side

Appeared at: Dumpling Night

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The safety net for Dumpling Night. Mise en place matters here — once the wok is hot, things move fast.

Ingredients

  • 2 boxes Trader Joe's Thai wheat noodles, or 1 box bucatini
  • 1/4 green cabbage, peeled apart and cut into 1-inch squares
  • 2 cartons shiitake mushrooms, sliced into thin strips
  • 3 heads broccoli, broken up into bite-size pieces
  • 1–2 lb shaved steak, or any steak cut into thin 1–2 inch pieces
  • chives, chopped in half
  • 8 cloves garlic
  • 1 large thumb ginger

Marinade

  • 1/3 cup soy sauce
  • 1/3 cup Shaoxing wine
  • 1 tbsp sesame oil

Sauce

  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 3 tbsp sesame oil
  • 2 cups Shaoxing wine
  • Lao Gan Ma spicy chili crisp, to taste for spiciness, around 4 large spoonfuls
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp white or black pepper

Make it

Prep (do in advance)

4–8 hours before cooking, put the steak into a bowl with 1 tsp of baking soda and 2 cups of water for each pound of meat. Vigorously mix it together. Put it in the fridge.

About an hour before cooking, take the steak out of the fridge and squeeze dry in a fine-mesh strainer. Mix the marinade ingredients together and roughly massage it into the meat in a new bowl. Put it aside or into the fridge depending on how long before you cook.

Blanch the broccoli in salted boiling water for about a minute, until vibrant green. Pull the broccoli out and cook the noodles in the water, about 2 min short of what the box says.

Set the broccoli out on a pan and pat dry with a paper towel, then leave to finish drying.

Toss the noodles with some oil to prevent sticking, then leave them to dry as well.

Chop the green cabbage, mushrooms, chives, garlic, and ginger, and put them in bowls.

Mix together the sauce ingredients.

Cook

  1. Heat up your wok.

  2. Stir-fry the cabbage in a bit of oil, going for a nice wok hei light char on it (~1–2 min).

  3. Repeat with the broccoli (~1–2 min), chives (~20s), and mushrooms (2–3 min).

  4. Add a bit more oil than usual and toss in the garlic/ginger. Fry those for about 20s before adding the meat. Cook the meat for about 30s and then add about a third of the sauce. Cook the meat the rest of the way through (2–4 min).

  5. Add everything back into the wok (all the veg, noodles, and then the rest of the sauce), and mix thoroughly.

  6. Taste, add sauce or Lao Gan Ma to taste.

  7. Serve it up.