CCD Singapore Noodles

Ingredients:

Vermicelli Rice Noodles (Xi Mi Fen ), 180g. Ok, so I know that buying rice noodles can get a bit confusing - there’s a mountain of different varieties and some are decidedly not suitable for frying. What you’re looking for are the sort that’re thin and round - luckily, this kind seem to be the most common kind in the West. You might see them called Mifen (Mandarin), Maifun (Cantonese), Bun Hoi (Vietnamese), or Sen Mee (Thai). When buying, try your best not to buy something that’s too tightly packed, as those sorts can shred if you’re not careful.

Curry powder (Ka Li Fen ), 1 tbsp. So right, there’s two directions you can go with this: curry powder or curry paste. If you’re like us, you might assume at first that curry paste’d be a better choice -but after testing it a number of times, we strongly felt that curry powder leads to a better texture to the noodles. Because we’re using powder though, we’re gunna add in a few extra aromatics to fry it with.

Aromatics to use with the curry powder: 2 garlic cloves, 1/2 shallot (Gan Cong ), and a bit of onion all finely minced. Apologies for the bit of onion - it really didn’t strike us to weigh it (you’re looking for roughly an equal amount of shallot and onion… let’s say and 1/8 of an onion or ~1tbsp minced?). This’s the mix of aromatics that’s used to make Hong Kong curry fish balls, which’s where we took it from.

Tumeric powder (Jiang Huang Fen ), 1/2 tsp. Optional. We added a bit of turmeric to give an extra boost to the color.

White part of the green onion (Cong ), ~6 cut into two inch sections. Ok, so these noodles have like a bunch of different ingredients tossed in. This’s the classic mix but feel free to play around with it and make it your own.

Mungbean Sprouts (Lu Dou Ya ), 80g. Veg for the stir-fry. Prep the mungbeans by snapping the head and the end off the sprout off to get silver sprouts. Some people don’t do that extra step of prep, but it greatly improves the texture of the beansprout when frying.

Quarter of an onion. Veg for the stir-fry, thinly sliced.

Jiuhuang a.k.a. Yellow Chives (Jiu Huang ), 50g. Veg for the stir-fry, middle section only cut into two inch sections.

Fresh red mild paprika chili (Hong La Jiao ) and green bell pepper (Lu Deng Long Jiao ), 50g each. Julienned.

Char Siu (Cha Shao ), 50g. Julienned.

Shrimp (Xia ), ~50g. Marinated. In the video we were using some little shrimps (it’s not shrimp season right now in the PRD and we didn’t feel like dropping the money for live ones)… feel free to use something bigger/more beautiful if you prefer.

Basic seasoning marinade: 1/4 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp white pepper powder (Bai Hu Jiao Fen ). For the shrimp.

Seasoning for the stir-fry: 1 tsp salt, 1/2 tbsp sugar, a small sprinkle of MSG (Wei Jing ) -or- 1 tsp of light soy sauce (Sheng Chou ). So right, for the video we didn’t use any soy sauce - it just had the tendency to muff up that hard-fought Singapore Fried Noodle color. Because we didn’t use soy sauce, Steph tossed in a bit of MSG to compensate for the missing umami. "But Steph," I said, "that kinda goes against the guidelines that we’ve taught people for regarding how to use MSG". Tasted good in the end, so excuse our inconsistencies. Be sure to only use the smallest sprinkle, like literally 8-10 flakes. If you don’t mind a darker color, also feel free to use soy sauce.

Process:

Big picture here - we’re gunna prep all the ingredients, cook the rice noodles, cook and cut the egg, pre-fry the onion/peppers/shrimp, toast the jiuhuang and bean sprouts, make our curry base, fry the noodles in it, and then toss everything back in.

Prep the sprouts, cut the green onion and jiuhuang, slice the onion, julienne the Char Siu and the peppers, mince up those curry aromatics, and marinate the shrimp for ~10 minutes. Think I got all of that - just remember to pick the ends off those mungbean sprouts. And again, quick reminder that we’re only using the center portion of the jiuhuang here.

Boil the rice noodles for ~90 seconds. Toss the rice noodles in a pot of boiling water and jiggle em a bit with a pair of chopsticks to break them up. These sorts of noodles cook in a flash, so don’t leave your pot - after ~90 seconds they should already be soft and transparent. Take em out, drain, but don’t rinse them - we’re gunna be using some of their residual heat to finish the job.

Either spread the rice noodles out over the counter or keep them in a strainer. Cover with a towel or some plastic wrap and let them sit and continue to cook in their steam for ~10 minutes. So the more correct way would be to lay out the noodles over some counterspace to avoid sticking. In home kitchens in China though, counter space is at a premium so Steph does it slightly differently - she’ll keep the rice noodles in a strainer (covered), and handle the stuck noodles in the next step. Either way totally works and is completely up to you.

After 10 minutes, if like us and not using the counter, gently pull apart the rice noodles. At their current stage, the rice noodles’re quite sticky and if left in the strainer’ll kinda just look like one massive clump. Gently pull apart those noodles, being careful not to break them. You don’t need to go too crazy here, we just wanna have relatively separate noodles for frying. A minute of pulling should be good enough for government work.

Do a bang up job whisking the egg, thinly cook it and julienne. Ok, so the idea here is that we want nice sorts of slivers of cut egg - if for whatever reason I’m not explaining this well, feel free to check out 2:33 in the video for a visual. As always, first longyau: get your wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in your oil (here maybe… 1 tbsp?), and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Turn your heat to medium and add in your thoroughly whisked egg. Tilt the wok in a circular motion to spread it out and get the thin, even sheet of egg. After about ~45 seconds of swirling, there should be no more liquid portions of the egg remaining, so shut off the heat and cover for two minutes. After that time, carefully roll the egg up and slice it in half. Move it over to a chopping board and cut it into nice slivers. Reserve.

Same wok, fry the onions and peppers. No need to rinse this - if done correctly the egg shouldn’t leave any residue (if it did, rinse and longyau again). Toss in the onions over the same medium heat, fry for ~30 seconds, then add in the peppers and fry for another ~15 seconds. Peppers get soft real quick so a quick fry’s all you need. Out, and reserve.

Same wok, toast the jiuhuang and the beansprouts. Again, no need to rinse, we’re just looking to do some dry wok cooking to toast/sweat these ingredients and the onions/peppers shouldn’t sucked up most’ve the oil. Same medium heat, toast the jiuhuang and beansprouts for about a minute each. This’ll help give the ingredient some fragrance, but perhaps more importantly release a bit of moisture. Fried noodle dishes’re like allergic to moisture, especially if you don’t have a powerful stove. The idea’s a bit similar to sweating in Western cooking, albeit for a shorter time and without any oil. Reserve.

Same wok, add a touch of oil and fry the shrimp. We’re not being too meticulous with this fry as the shrimp’ll go back into the stir-fry later. Just add in a touch of oil, toss in the shrimp, and give it a quick fry for ~45 seconds til they’ve changed color. Out, and reserve.

Stir fry the rice noodles. As always, first longyau, then turn the heat to medium low. We’re working with a small flame at first because we’re gunna be making our curry base.

Diced onions, in. Fry for about a minute.

Minced garlic and shallot, in. Fry for another couple minutes, til those aromatics are wilted and translucent.

Green onion slices, in. Fry for ~45 seconds.

Curry powder and turmeric, in. Add a touch more oil to loosen it up.

Continue adding small amounts of oil to the curry powder/aromatics, frying for ~3 minutes until the powder’s absorbed into the oil and no longer gritty. I know this technique of adding oil bit by bit might seem sorta weird - we’re mostly doing it this way in order to get just enough oil to make a nice even base and not a drop more. Nobody wants an oily rice noodle dish, and nobody wants a gritty texture… so this was our personal way of cracking that nut.

Rice noodles, in. Up the heat to medium and fry. Kinda like fried rice, our goal here is to get rice noodles that’re loose and dry - accomplishing that’ll take a couple minutes, so just be patient with it. The motion that you wanna do is to continuously pull the noodles up with a spatula and a pair of chopsticks to loosen them up and avoid sticking - visual is at 5:12 in the video here.

Season with the salt/sugar/MSG or soy sauce. Mix that in real well, 15-30 seconds.

Add in the onion slices, the peppers, the jiuhuang, and the bean sprouts. Up the heat to medium-high. Combine using that same motion we did from frying, ~15 seconds.

Char Siu and shrimp, in. Fry for 30 seconds.

Egg, in. Super brief mix.

Heat off, rice noodles out, optionally garnish with some white toasted sesame seeds.

Note on curry powder:

Neither of us are experts on Indian cuisine, but what I do know is that the ubiquitous curry powder ain’t exactly Indian. Curry powder came into Hong Kong via the Brits, which obviously makes a great deal of sense.

For reference, the curry powder we were using in the video was a common brand in Guangdong that’s imported from Kolkata. It consists of coriander, turmeric, chili powder, fenugreek, cumin, anis, ginger, garlic, cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves. YMMV

After nailing this dish, an interesting way to get creative might be to see how more proper Indian masalas work with rice noodles. Hell, maybe dry roasting the spice mix and grinding it yourself might be cool, I dunno. If going in a radically different direction with spices you might wanna play with the other ingredients you add in, but that’d be my direction to start tinkering with.

Note on another rice noodle frying technique:

So there’s another technique for frying rice noodles that we found was a bit of a headache to work in with this particular dish, but we’d be remiss not to discuss it. For rice noodle dishes generally, a cool technique is to place the rice noodles (without any other ingredients) in a hot wok with an extremely thin shear of oil. Leave it in the wok without touching it for about a minute to let the rice noodles slightly brown. Flip, do the same with the other side, and take it out and reserve for the final stir-fry.

What does that technique impart? You might be surprised to hear wok hei. That’s right, there’s nothing mystical about wok hei and you don’t need a ridiculous 100k+ BTU burner to achieve it. What’s wok hei? Well, it’s the browning of an ingredient via the maillard reaction. It refers to a specific technique in Cantonese cooking whereby an ingredient is cooked in a small amount of oil over high heat. So while the standard English translation of wok hei is the breath of the wok, we vastly prefer to translate it as searing.