Kenji's Vietnamese American Garlic Noodles... With 20 Cloves of Garlic _ NYT Cooking

Hey everyone, this is Kenji Lopez-Altz, and today we're going to make some Vietnamese-American San Francisco-style garlic noodles. I first had this dish in 2014 at a restaurant in the Outer Sunset called Tan Long, which is actually where the dish was invented. So it's not a Vietnamese dish, it's a dish that was invented, in fact, in the U.S. in San Francisco. The story goes that Helene An, who was the owner of the restaurant, traveled to a restaurant in Knob Hill, an Italian area, and she had a bowl of garlic spaghetti, which she thought was bland. And so she decided that she wanted to take some of the ideas from the garlic spaghetti, apply some of her flavors, some of those Vietnamese flavors, and come up with a new dish that would be appealing both to her regular customers, and also hopefully draw in some new customers. So it's got soy sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce, butter, and Parmesan cheese. So the combination sounds a little strange, but when you get it all mixed up into a single bowl, it's really incredible. The dish has a lot of garlic, and I mean a lot. There's 20 cloves of garlic for four servings, so it's a lot of garlic in there. The way we cook it down and the way we emulsify it into the sauce makes it a little bit milder than it seems, but it is definitely a dish for garlic lovers. First thing I'm gonna do is start with some water. And I'm putting this in a skillet, as opposed to a deep pot, which I'll explain in a little bit when we're actually cooking the pasta, but first thing, I'm gonna get this going to a boil. At Tan Long, they use fresh wheat noodles. I like to make this dish at home with spaghetti because I find it to be, well, first of all, I always have dried spaghetti at home, and I rarely have fresh wheat noodles. And I also sort of like the nod to the more sort of Italian and Italian-American traditions, so using dried spaghetti works really well for this dish. Alright, and while that comes to a boil, I'm gonna start working with my garlic. So, 20 cloves of garlic. There's a number of ways you can prepare your garlic, and sort of depending on how you prepare it, you get different flavors out of it. So garlic, the flavor that we strongly associate with garlic, sort of the pungent, spicy stuff, those flavors don't exist in raw garlic. They only exist once you cut open garlic cells. These precursor chemicals come out and combine and form those flavor compounds that give garlic its sort of heat. And so, depending on how you cut the garlic, you're gonna form more or less of those compounds. Also, the more cells you rupture when you're preparing your garlic, the stronger that flavor is gonna be. And so, in order to sort of get the maximum amount of garlic flavor, I like to use a mortar and pestle because a mortar and pestle crushes as opposed to simply sort of shears apart cells. You know, it's like when Godzilla comes and steps on the shipping yard and crushes all those containers and really releases everything. So you get much more flavor using a mortar and pestle than just chopping it with a knife. So I'm gonna roughly chop those garlic cloves just to get them started. Add a little pinch of salt. The salt does a couple things. Early on in the process, it acts as an abrasive, so it really helps the garlic kind of grind down. And eventually, as that salt, you know, pretty quickly it's going to dissolve into the juices of the garlic that you're pulling out. So I'm not going for a total paste here. It doesn't have to be super fine. I think that looks about right. So there's still some kind of chunks in there. So now, butter. We don't want the butter to brown, though. We just want to kind of melt it. You know, we're going for sort of that milder, cooked garlic flavor that is not yet to the point where it's sort of browning or really developing any of those darker flavors. Oh man, that's pungent. Yeah, we're gonna let it soften and cook. Oh, and by the way, once you get it pounded in the mortar and pestle, those really stronger, you know, the kind, what are called the lacrimators, the things that get your that get into your eyes and get into the back of your nose, those flavor compounds will start to develop relatively rapidly. So you do want to make sure that you pound the garlic just before you start using it. Otherwise, it'll start to get a little bit too strong. This is also one of those situations where if, you know, you go to the farmer's market and you find that really nice garlic, the really nice fresh garlic, or some kind of special variety of garlic that you want to try out, this is a great dish to do that with. Alright, so our water's coming up to a boil. I'm not going to season it as heavily with salt as I would if I had like a big pot, because what's going to happen is this pasta water is going to get sort of very concentrated, and we're going to add it to our sauce later on. There's already a bunch of other salty ingredients going into the sauce, so we don't want to put too much salt in that water. Alright, so I think at this point our garlic is like on the verge of starting to brown, which I don't want to happen, so I'm going to lower the heat and I'm going to start adding my sauces. So soy sauce, fish sauce, and oyster sauce. So these three sauces, all of them are sort of, you know, what I refer to as umami bombs. So it's a big umami party in here. So the reason I'm cooking this spaghetti in a smaller skillet as opposed to a big pot, you can see it already, the water's starting to get kind of cloudy and starchy, and that's all starch that's being boiled off from the pasta itself. That starchy pasta water obviously is going to help our sauce emulsify later on and make it really nice and creamy, so that all the spaghetti gets coated really well in that sauce. If you were to boil this in a very big pot, you end up diluting that starch, so it doesn't work as effectively. I used to work in an Italian restaurant. You know, at the beginning of service when the water was completely fresh, it was really hard to get pasta sauces to emulsify properly, and then over the course of the evening as you were cooking, you know, you used the same water to cook pasta, so it would get starchier and starchier and starchier, and so the pasta dishes would actually get better as the night went on. So if you got a late reservation at an Italian restaurant, you're probably getting better pasta than if you got that first reservation. You know, the one thing when you cook in a skillet like this as opposed to a big pot, you do have to stir it a little bit more, because at the very start, especially, there's a chance that, you know, the surface starch on the pasta's going to get it all to stick together, so you want to make sure that those strands of spaghetti are separated from each other. So we're going for a chai of al dente, which means we want the pasta to be tender, but still have more than a little bite in the center, so the very center of it should actually taste a little bit undercooked. I'm not going to drain the pasta, I'm just going to lift it with tongs, and whatever water sort of comes with it, stays with it. I'm going to keep this skillet of pasta water on the side, just to adjust things as I go. It's always a good idea to keep, to reserve that pasta water, because there's nothing better for sort of adjusting the consistency of your sauce at the end. Once you get the pasta in your skillet like this, it kind of enters what my friend and colleague Daniel Gritzer over at Serious Eats, he calls it pasta bullet time, where essentially once you get it into the sauce, it cooks slower than it would in just the plain water, mainly because there's acid in the sauce, and so the way the pasta absorbs water, the way the starch cooks, is a little bit slower, and a little bit different, so even though in here it probably would have been done in about a minute, we now probably have like two or three minutes to get it done in here, so it buys you a little bit of time. Alright, so I can hear, it's kind of sizzling, which tells me that there's not enough water in there. That sizzling is the sound of frying, which indicates that the water has boiled off a little too much, so you want to hear more of like a sputtering as opposed to a sizzle. We don't want to fry the spaghetti, we want to get it nice and creamy. I'm doing this at the highest heat, by the way, because we want to sort of encourage real rapid boiling, because that also is going to help with the emulsification. Alright, so we are now basically at al dente, which means this is done. I want it to be actually slightly looser in the pan than I want to serve it, because as it cools, it's going to thicken up a bit, and of course, in the time that it takes to get that pasta to the table, it's also going to absorb some of that liquid. But you can see here how nice and sort of creamy this sauce has become, and that's just from all the starch in the pasta. Alright, so at the very end, we're going to shut off the heat. We'll add our cheese. I'm going to reserve a tiny bit to sprinkle on at the end. Add some scallions. Scallions are totally optional. I think typically not even in the dish at the restaurant, but I like them. Another thing I like to add here is any kind of sort of salted, preserved fish eggs. You know, I like to do it with mentaiko, so Japanese salted pollock roe, but you could also do it with something like shaved butarga. You could do it with flying fish roe. I think fish eggs go really nicely in this. Alright, so we're just going to give it a few turns until that cheese is distributed and everything's nice and creamy. And so what you want to see is this sort of creamy texture of the sauce clinging to the spaghetti. You don't want to see it watery. You don't want to see your spaghetti kind of just pull up loose. You want it to really cling to there, and I think we're at that point. Alright, so this is it. You saw I added the cheese off heat by the way. The cheese and the scallions off heat. The cheese is really sort of the more important part to do off heat. If you add it while it's on the heat, you sort of increase the chance that the cheese is going to clump up and turn into sort of like a congealed ball of parmesan instead of staying creamy and emulsified. You know, the amount of pasta water we had in here and the starchiness of that pasta water really goes a long way in making sure that doesn't happen, but it's still a risk, and so to mitigate that risk, you always add the cheese off heat and toss it in. I like to see the garlic clinging to it like that. Super garlicky, really umami. I mean, no, it has like all the things that you want out of like garlic spaghetti. You know, it has a little bit of that sort of like cacio e pepe, real intense sort of cheesiness to it, umami flavor. That's a good bowl of noodles.