How to Make Lo Mein with Jet Tila | Ready Jet Cook With Jet Tila | Food Network

Hey guys, I'm Jet Tila and this is Ready Jet Cook, where I take the mystery out of Asian cuisine by showing you how to make some of my favorite dishes from shop to cook. But before I get into today's recipe, take one second and subscribe now. There's this misconception that Asian foods are hard to make, but Lo Mein is a really simple one pan dish. Yo, one pan dish, so easy, so little clean up. Let's break it down and you'll see how easy it is to make your own restaurant worthy noodles Most of you know that I'm the culinary ambassador to Thailand, but what you don't know is I'm ethnically Chinese. Both cultures actually use noodles. So for good Lo Mein, look for an egg noodle pasta similar to this. Any shape will do, as long as it's nice and springy. So no Lo Mein is complete without baby bok choy. In my opinion, it has great texture, color, and flavor, and is perfect in Lo Mein. So now that we're back from the market, let's get prepped out on our Lo Mein. I like to break up prep into three parts. First is going to be sauce, second will be vegetable prep, and then finally, protein. So let's get started on sauce. In a nice clean bowl, I'm always going to start with chicken stock. Chicken stock is going to be the base of the sauce because it's neutral, but it has a nice savoriness to it. To create a glaze, I want to use cornstarch. So as you know, when cornstarch heats up, it's going to thicken into a sauce consistency. So the next ingredient is going to be soy sauce. You've used soy sauce a million times. You know it's salty, and you know it provides a nice savoriness, but it also starts giving you that brown sauce color. Next is the king of all Chinese sauces. It's oyster sauce. Now, I know oyster sauce sounds a little scary because not everyone loves oysters, but using oyster sauce isn't like eating raw oysters out of the ocean. When you dry out the oysters and add them to the soy sauce base, it creates a phenomenal kind of sweet and savory flavor. And then finally, for a little bit of aroma, you want a little sesame oil. You don't ever want to stir fry with sesame oil because it has a low smoke point, but you do want to use just a little bit for some really amazing kind of aromatic notes. Just think about the lo mein sauce as a marriage of all these flavors and textures. The chicken stock gives you kind of a neutral base. Cornstarch helps thicken. Oyster sauce and soy sauce give you savory, sweet, and salty. And then sesame oil gives you a little aroma. So our sauce is done. Let's move on to our vegetable prep. I like to start with aromatics, and some of my favorite aromatics in the Chinese kitchen are going to be ginger and garlic. I think a lot of people are scared of ginger. Don't be. There's no reason to be. This is how you want to take ginger down. Firstly, take off all the little fingers. Square off the ginger. And I know my grandma would be mad that I'm throwing that away, but I'm sorry, Grandma. It's cheap and plentiful. It'll be okay. Squaring off the ginger on all sides, and you know that you've squared it off when it stands up straight. And you can just take the back of the knife and use it as a lever, right? And I'm just scraping the skin away. And just continue to do this on all sides. And once you kind of get down to the bottom where the skin is all the way around, just use that cutting edge and just push. Once the ginger is completely peeled through, I just want you to, again, square it off. And just remember, tile becomes a slice. A slice becomes a dice. So I'm going to cut eighth-inch tiles here. Gather those eighth-inch tiles together, and then cut them into eighth-inch slices. Boom. Blades of grass, eighth-inch slices. So ginger done. With garlic, don't overthink it. Give it a smash. Like I said, that's a tile. If I smash something flat, it becomes a tile. So two, three. So my garlic is flat into a tile. I can cut it into thin slices. And then if I want to take it out further, I do a quarter turn, and then a slice becomes a dice. And you don't need to take garlic down any further than that, because it's going to be hanging out in a 400-degree pan. And you want it thick enough so it can kind of saute, add its flavor, and not really burn. So the next ingredient is going to be scallions. I like to cut them in half first, put a slight angle on the knife, and then give it a slice this way. And look, I know it tastes the same, but it looks way cooler. And if it looks cooler, it'll plate cooler. If it plates cooler, people are going to think, wow, you're an awesome chef, and it looks super delicious. Our main green in lo mein is going to be bok choy. Translation, bok choy means white vegetable. Obviously, it looks green. As it mature, it turns totally white in the stock, and that's why it's called bok choy. I've just cut off the thickest part of the bulb, and you're going to discard that. And now you're left with these kind of top leaves. And you're going to do 45-degree cuts, thinner pieces of the stalk, larger pieces of the leaves, because what happens is the stalks are denser, and the leaves are more delicate. So if you cut the stalks smaller and the leaves bigger, they cook at the same rate. So my grandma always taught me that lo mein was the perfect dish to kind of clean out what was left in the fridge. Now I've got bok choy. Let's see what else I could use to kind of boost up this lo mein. So I found some carrots. Now I like these because they give color, they're crunchy, and they're super sweet. I'm going to show you how to make a coined julienne. Now I think a lot of chefs are like, oh, juliennes, you've got to square off all these pieces. No, this is the easy way to do it. Super extreme bias, meaning I want a lot of surface area. Cutting these into about a quarter inch thick, just like that, real simple. Lay the coins on top of each other, and I want you to take these tiles into slices. So the reason why I'm cutting juliennes is because I want the carrots to cook very quickly because carrot is usually dense, and I want to kind of give a nice visual pop to the lo mein. And you've just cut carrot julienne. So I'm done with the vegetables. I need to get them off the board because I'm moving on to raw chicken, because those things should never cross. Now on cooking shows, you see a ton of these bowls. Don't do it that way. Take one plate, put it down, put all the vegetables on this plate, which means you don't have five bowls to wash, you just have one, which makes life a lot easier and keeps your partner from getting angry at you. There you go. So the last part of the lo mein prep is the protein. I'm going to be using chicken breast today. It's totally up to you as to what you prefer, dark meat, white meat, it's all good. The most important thing is you want to cut this into nice thin tiles, and let me show you what I'm talking about here. So this is half a chicken breast. I'm going to trim off any fat that there is. And then I'm going to kind of follow the grain first, so I can see the grain kind of running this way. I'm going to cut with the grain into about two to three inch wide pieces, and then take one of those pieces and now go against the grain. So when I do a slice, it's going to give me a really nice thin plank. The reason why I'm doing a nice thin plank is because you want the chicken to sear very quickly, cook evenly, but still be moist in the middle. If the chicken's kind of in funky pieces that are uneven, the chicken won't cook evenly. Now this rule also applies to just about any other protein, including tofu. So now that the chicken's cut, I'm going to bowl it up, clean everything down, wash my hands, and let's get cooking. The number one question I get with stir-fry is, what kind of pan do I need? Do I need a wok? And the answer is no, not at all. My favorite is an enamelized Dutch oven, because it's cast iron, it holds heat. If you don't have that, a simple pan with high sides that gets hot is totally fine. Another important rule for any stir-fry is the pan has to be ripping hot. And what I mean by that is when you get your high temperature oil in, you're going to start to see white smoke. And once that smoke starts going, you've got to get everything into the pan in the right sequence. So I like using a neutral oil, like canola or peanut. I don't like using olive oil or sesame oil. All right, so I'm seeing little wisps of white smoke. I'm going to add first my aromatics, which are garlic and ginger. I'm going to just saute these ingredients up until I smell them. I'm not really worried about color, because there's a long way to go with all these ingredients. All right, next, chicken. Because chicken takes a while to cook, I want to get it in sooner. Don't be scared to utilize the surface area of the pan. Really use the entire pan to cook your dish. I'm looking for that chicken to get about halfway, because I'm always thinking about what the total cook time of all the ingredients are. The next thing is don't be scared to scrape as you go, because if you're scraping them up now, they won't stick and they won't burn. All the little delicious bits of brown are going to add to the overall flavor. I mean, in French, we call this fond. Think about that as the foundation of all these flavors you're developing. So the chicken is about medium. I want to add my vegetables now, reserving those scallions for the top. This dish brings back a lot of memories of my grandma taking me to Chinatown as a kid on the bus. Her playing mahjong, us eating dim sum, and then buying all the groceries we needed for that night. You know, she really was my first cooking instructor as a kid. It was pretty obvious that I wasn't going to be a rocket scientist, so she was like, let's get this kid a trade. So I really got some one-on-one cooking attention from a very young age. I spent more than 10,000 hours in the kitchen next to my grandma cooking this dish. The veggies are moving along really well. The chicken isn't all the way cooked through yet. This is a good time for my noodles. It's going to be tough to find a noodle package that actually says lo mein. What you're really looking for in the package is something that's called egg noodle. It's got this kind of nice pale yellow color, and the ingredients should have wheat and eggs in it. If you don't have Asian noodles, don't freak out. I really love using things like fettuccine for this dish. You can cook the fettuccine al dente, rinse it off, let it dry out, and then add it to the pan here. So all the ingredients have cooked through a bit. I'm just going to add my sauce in there, making sure to really stir that sauce really well to get all the cornstarch in. As the sauce thickens, it really becomes lo mein. I know a lot of you have heard the word chow mein versus lo mein. All chow really means is crispy noodles. So chow mein means crispy noodles with gravy on top. Lo mein means soft noodles in a nice, really thick gravy. Lo in Chinese just means to stir. It's like imagine stirring these noodles into that beautiful gravy as it's tightening up. And you know, Chinese food's been in America for over 200 years. This here is OG lo mein. So what I'm looking for is the cornstarch to start activating, meaning it's starting to thicken up the sauce and it becomes a really nice glaze. Once that starts happening, turn the pan off and just let this continue to cook and all of the noodles and vegetables absorb this beautiful gravy that you've made. So you want to make sure to keep these noodles as long as possible. It's kind of bad juju to break your noodles, because noodles kind of symbolize your long life. And I want to get as much gravy on there as possible. So the lo mein is down, and I just want to garnish now with those simple sliced scallions. So there it is, my grandma's classic lo mein. I hope you guys enjoyed shopping and cooking with me. Please, cook this dish yourself, leave comments, tell me how it's going for you, and I'll see you next time on Ready Jet Cook.