Beef Chow Fun

I’m pretty excited to share this. It’s my first deep dive into a recipe. It’s taken me a while to practice this dish to use as high heat as possible on the noodles at home. I decided to split this into separate posts so if you want to try and make this, you can pull up the recipes and look at them more directly. 

This is hands down one of my favorite Chinese dishes and there are two versions to this. One is served “wet” 湿炒牛河 sap chaau ngauh hoh because it comes with a black bean sauce and the other prepared “dry” 干炒牛河 gon chaau ngauh hoh which doesn’t have the sauce. (FYI, if you can say this these in Cantonese,  you can now order it at restaurants.) I prefer the dry version because I can make it so the noodles have crispy spots while retaining chewiness of the noodles and I get more of the breath of the wok when it’s still freshly made. My parents prefer the wet version because the sauce makes the dish more silken in texture.

Noodles = Hoh Fan 河粉

A key to making these noodles is simply to have access to fresh hoh fan noodles. If you can go to a noodle factory easily and pick it up there, that’s the best option. Otherwise, when you pick it up at a grocery store, you should always gently press the noodles in the package. Go for the ones that feel springier by touch. If the noodles are one day old, you can feel how much more rigid they will be. Old noodles like this are still acceptable for use in soup noodles for breakfast, but they still tend to break more when they’re older.

During the days when my dad would work on the line in Chinese restaurants, he said a trick that restaurants would do to restore older noodles would be to dip the noodles in a big pot of simmering water for a few seconds, quickly drain them, and add them to the wok. This is impractical and impossible to do at home, not only for keeping a separate pot of simmering water for this purpose, but a stove top burner at home is just not strong as commercial wok burners in restaurants to quickly evaporate any excess water left behind.

Some stores will sell it pre-cut or in big sheets. I don’t have a preference for any since cutting them takes very little time and I like the width pretty close to the pre-cut versions already. I just buy the springiest package of noodles.

My mom said that cooking these noodles in a non-stick skillet can work well and I can only imagine this is true. However, with my preference for a dry version, I want that higher heat from cast iron to crisp up the noodles and you cannot sear things as well with non-stick equipment. As I learned how to make these noodles, one mental trick that helped me was to start treating the noodles as if you’re searing a steak. Minimal tossing will sear the noodles better and keep them from falling apart, but you need a good balance of oil so they don’t stick and the dish doesn’t get oily. Making these noodles well takes finesse and care.

Beef

There’s a few ways of dealing with the beef. If you use something like a tougher cut such as flank, you can always toss a tiny amount of baking soda and tenderize the meat this way. If you ever wondered why beef in many Chinese restaurants have a particularly soft texture, it’s probably because they use a tougher (cheaper for cost of ingredient) cut of meat, and use this technique to make it better.

I do this once in a while because the Vietnamese grocery store that I go to sells flank very cheap. It’s cheap not because it’s low quality as many people unfortunately associate with non-white grocery stores. It’s cheap because they leave on a lot of the connective tissue and fat to this cut. It’s a little extra work, but well worth the time.

My mom does something a lot more baller. For a lot of beef stir fry dishes, she now only uses rib eye. I do this once in a while a prep some when I see it on sale and yes, it makes a difference. There’s enough marbling in a cut like this that you don’t need to use baking soda to tenderize it.

For 8 oz, of tougher beef, I usually add two pinches to the meat. After it’s tossed, you should let this sit for at least an hour or up to overnight.

Vegetables

As far as vegetables go in this dish, the classic combination would be onions, bean sprouts, and green onions (green parts). However, I like to mix it up and at the time I wrote this, I preferred to treat the white ends of green onions as onions. I think bean sprouts and green onions add important elements to the dish so they’re both non-negotiable.

The bean sprouts add textural contrast so make sure they’re fresh. Green onions (green parts) add a lot of nice aroma to the dish as well. When buying them at the store, go for the younger ones. The younger ones are smaller in diameter at the root. If they get very mature, green onions tend to taste very spicy and oniony all around.

As far as other vegetables used in this, I’ve seen green bell peppers as well. I think this can be good too, but you don’t want to add too much.

Wet vs Dry

When making this dish, it’s mostly the same. I think there are two differences is that for the dry version, you should use a little more seasoning of the noodles because that’s the only time seasoning will be added to the noodles. From tinkering around with soy sauce proportions, I also ended up liking the dry version with mostly dark soy sauce. As for the wet version, you should be a little bit lighter with salt for seasoning because the black bean sauce will also add some salt to the overall dish.

Prepping and Bowls

Most of the cooking will be done over the highest heat possible with your stove. So it's still important to do all your prep work before hand. As usual stir fry technique goes, many times you par-cook the longest to cook ingredients before adding them back to the work for final cooking. Don't toss your prep bowls/plates in the sink unless you're absolutely sure you're done with them. Before you heat the wok, make sure all containers are open so you're not wasting time doing things like opening a container of corn starch and looking for a spoon.