This Chicken Lo Mein is a Take-Out Killer

Have you ever tried making lo mein at home, just like Chinese takeout, but you just can't seem to get it right? That's a takeout killer. That's because Chinese-American takeout spots do things you don't do. To me, lo mein is like the Chinese-American equivalent of spaghetti and meatballs. I think we should uncover the tricks to unlocking this at home for everyone. The right chewy noodle, soft, velveted chicken, a sauce that glazes around the noodle rather than swims in it. This is restaurant-style chicken lo mein at home. And if you can grasp these five steps, you're gonna leave this video a lo mein master. And the first step is velveting the chicken. Now, we're gonna be making one platter of lo mein, so I have one decently large chicken breast. Now, all chicken breasts sort of taper from one thick end to kind of a thin one. I'm gonna sort of find the breaking point and separate those two. Now, here we've got the thinner side. What I wanna do is just split that in half, just like a cutlet. Now, we can see that the grain is running this way, so I'm gonna take the strips and cut against the grain, little strips like this, mimicking, not exactly, maybe a little thicker, the shape of the noodle. Thick side, that might be able to get three slices. And it's all depending on the thickness of the chicken. And the grain, and cut across. Now, for our chicken, first what we're gonna do, we're gonna hit it with some salt. First key to velveting is some baking soda. So I'm gonna take the very tip of a spoon, maybe that much, just sprinkle it right on top. Then what I'm gonna do is immediately just start to work it. You wanna kind of be rough with it, you kinda wanna squeeze it, trying to get that baking soda to work its magic. Next, we're gonna add in some soy sauce, but we're just going to like kinda add enough that the chicken just soaks it up, maybe like a tablespoon. You don't really want any pooling at the bottom. Then, Shaoxing cooking wine, about a half a tablespoon, no more than a tablespoon. Again, it's the same idea, we don't want it drowning. Then like a heaping tablespoon of cornstarch, and we're gonna work that in. That's what it should look like, no moisture at the bottom. Now all this needs like 20, 30 minutes to marinate, do its work, and while it does, we can go into our mise en place. At the end of the day, lo mein means stirred noodles. So this is a stir fry, so a stir fry moves fast. And so step two is getting everything ready to go. You can only achieve success in this recipe with everything cut and in its place. And the prep for this is really an exercise in practicing knife skills. We're using noodles, and just like pasta, right, you want the things in there to sort of work with the shape of the noodle. So just like the chicken, we're looking to achieve similar concept with our vegetable shape. So now with the carrot tapers, just like chicken does, so I'm gonna cut it in half, and then I'm just gonna shave straight edges around the carrot, just to make it sort of relatively uniform. Then maybe like an eighth of an inch, we're gonna cut it into strips. Once you've got these sort of planks here, you can lay them down, you can stack them, cut it into thin strips. You get these little matchsticks. Doesn't have to be super uniform. You could have sort of a mix of thicknesses. Next up, bell pepper. So we got these sort of four thin sides. All we're gonna do, shave the cheeks off. You can take that, cut it into strips. Use your finger almost like a deli slicer guard, and then you just pull back. Next up, we've got an onion, right? So I'm just gonna cut the tops and the root end off. Cut it in half and remove the skin. Then as you can see, the lines kind of running up the onion. We're gonna place them down, and with our knife running along, we're gonna slice real thin. Push it off to the side, flip it onto the thicker edge, and repeat. Then I've got some leftover Savoy cabbage, right? Cut a little piece off the side. Strips. Then I got two green onions. Cut the dried off tips, and then we're gonna go with like two inch strips. Just the greens. And then we got some snow peas, right? All you gotta do to prep a snow pea, just like a sugar snap pea, take the tip off, and you pull that string. And then we're gonna leave these whole. Here's our little sort of the hard veg. We're gonna kind of put them into bowls that go in the same time. Carrots and the peppers, peas and the green onions, cabbage and onions are separate. Then we need some garlic, and a little nub of ginger. Remove the skin. Now I'm standing it with the fibers kind of cut open facing up, and I'm just gonna take my knife and smash it. Really fast way to deal with ginger, and we can do the same thing with the garlic. Cut little strips, stand them up, smashed garlic. I always do a little bit more garlic than I do ginger. And these are gonna get added together so they can go into the same bowl. Step three is the brown sauce formula. Now you don't just throw soy sauce in here and call it a day. We got a rough guide to get you the right flavor. And we're gonna start with the base. Oyster sauce, soy sauce, dark soy sauce, and sesame oil. So we're going with one tablespoon of the oyster sauce, two tablespoons of soy sauce, one tablespoon of dark soy sauce for color, one teaspoon of sesame oil, pinch of salt, pinch of MSG. Never hurt nobody. About a teaspoon of white pepper, a tablespoon or two of sugar, and then we need some chicken broth. I found this really cool brand, refrigerated, full of collagen. It's a beautiful thing. We're going with about a quarter of a cup of the chicken stock. Taste balanced, might need just a touch more sugar. You can just sort of adjust it to your taste. Got a bowl here. I'm gonna add about a quarter of a cup cornstarch. I'm gonna stir in a little water, and we can add our sauce to the slurry. Now our sauce is ready. Now step four was the part that tripped me up, and that is the noodle. Now I scoured the place for the right noodle, but I stumbled upon a video by Jason Farmer, who actually suggested a specific type of noodle that I was then able to find at H Mart. Now hard boiled noodles are not ideal, but they're gonna work best to achieving the right type of noodle that you've come to know lo mein to be. Now we have a pot of boiling water over here. These are frozen, so basically we just need to throw them into the pot. Now there's no instructions on the noodles. It just says cook till they're done. So all I'm gonna do is use these little tongs and just sort of gently try and break it up. You wanna be gentle. These are long noodles, and noodles signify longevity. You don't wanna break the noodles. Bad luck. Once they're ready to go, just drain the noodles out into a strainer and then rinse the noodles under cold water to stop them cooking. And here you've got beautiful long lo mein noodles. Now the final step is the wok execution. We're gonna get this on high heat and let this get as hot as possible. Once our pan is ripping hot, we're gonna add in some high smoke point olive oil around the ribs. It's gonna smoke a little bit. We're gonna swirl the oil and then add the chicken. Just gonna spread it out and then let it sit. Looking to develop a nice brown on that first side. Once you can see the edges starting to brown underneath, we can start to shake it up and start to break up the little clumps of chicken. Continue stirring them until they're about 85% of the way cooked. The velveting also helps achieve a nice golden brown. Once the chicken's cooked, we can just take the strainer we used to strain the pasta, drain the chicken and hold it while we move on to the aromatics. And then we're gonna go ahead and add in the aromatics. We're gonna cook those for about 20, 30 seconds until they begin to brown and smell nice and roasty. Then we're gonna go in with our onion. We're gonna give that about 30 or 40 seconds to start to soften and brown before adding the carrots and the peppers. And with some salt, once the carrots and peppers soften, then we can go ahead and add in the cabbage. Cook that for about 20 seconds. Let that kiss the heat. Then we can go ahead and add in the chicken. Once the chicken's in the pan with the rest of the vegetables and it's cooked for about 10 seconds or so, we're going to deglaze the pan with some of the Shaoxing cooking wine. And then we can go ahead and add the noodles back to the pan. And then the snow peas and the green onion. Toss that up before starting to slowly add in little bits at a time of the sauce while stirring to begin to form the glaze. You should not see a pool of sauce accumulating. You either didn't add enough cornstarch or your flame is not hot enough to activate it. Once you start seeing the noodles get glazed, kill the heat, get everything nice and tossed before serving it on a platter. See how the noodles hold up? They're not falling apart. That's the right noodle. Sauce is glazed, right? The pan's clean. There should be no sauce left over. And there's no sauce pooling at the bottom of this dish. Crunch still in the vegetables. And that's sort of what it's all about. Soft, velvety chicken, chewy, tender noodles, crisp vegetables. That's a takeout killer. And if you want to be the master of your lo mein, recipe's going to be down in the description. That's all that I have today. I'll see you next time. Until then, take care of yourself and go feed yourself.