I’ve had a craving for Hong Kong style crispy pan-fried noodles for a while. When I was young, this would almost always be one of the dishes that my family would order whenever we went to a Cantonese restaurant. This was, however, also the one dish that my friends didn’t really care that much so I don’t get many opportunities to eat it unless I order it for myself. Not many people like their noodles crispy, I guess. So, when I saw the recipe for it in J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok, I immediately put it on my “to-try” list. After much time, I finally got the chance to finally break in this cookbook and make something from it.

Making the Noodle Cake

The official name for this dish is “liang mian huang,” or “two yellow face”, referring to the yellow noodles. Though the dish is popular in the Cantonese/HK communities, I was surprised to learn that it actually originated from Shanghai/Suzhou when immigrants brought the dish over, moving from China to HK back in the 1950s. Different from being stir-fried, these thin egg noodles are panfried over medium heat into a “crunchy cake” and topped with sauce.

I first parboiled the noodles for ~45 seconds before spreading it on a baking sheet to dry out for 10 minutes. After arranging the noodles in a circle on a plate, I gently slid it into a shallow wok of hot oil (it’s less oil than you think you need). To make sure that the noodles cook/fry evenly, I tilt the wok around in a circular motion until the noodles released from the bottom of the wok as a cake and then kept it cooking for another 8-12 minutes before flipping it over and cooking it similarly on the other side until both sides were crispy/golden brown.

The noodle cake was slightly smaller than I expected but this later proved to not be an actual issue in the end.

Vegetable/Shrimp Topping

I cooked the shrimp and the vegetable toppings separately as the noodles were cooking (goes to show that you don’t have to swirl the oil in the wok continuously). For the vegetable topping, I sliced up some bok choy and king oyster mushrooms. First, to reduce the liquid in the mushrooms, I stir-fried those first before adding the bok choy, some garlic, and green onions, followed by some Shaoxing wine, chicken stock, soy sauce, oyster sauce, white pepper, then some cornstarch liquid.

The shrimp was a little less straightforward. Mr. Lopez-Alt specifies the need to marinate shrimp in ice cold water with salt and baking soda. I decided to skip the water and just toss in the shrimp with salt and baking soda. This later turned out to be a mistake and made my shrimp taste alkaline and salty due to the lack of dilution with water. I stirfried the shrimp shells with some ginger and scallions to make some fragrant shrimp oil. One step that I elected to ignore was to make a 10-minute shrimp stock that I decided to skip. Using the fragrant shrimp oil, I stirfried the marinated shrimp and scallions and then added the cornstarch liquid. I realized that again, missing out the stock or at least not adding the equivalent of water back was a bad call in hindsight because the cornstarch mixture immediately clumped in the wok with the absence of liquid, making the shrimp look like some version of honey walnut shrimp.

At this point, the final step was to spoon over both toppings over the noodle cake. I was so excited to eat this.

Overall

Overall, the dish was a little bit salty for my taste (probably due to the shrimp) but it was really good. Very crispy, almost on the verge of being too crispy, I think I could’ve panfried both sides for a less amount of time since the inside was also pretty crispy or let the topping sit and soak into the cake for longer before eating it.

It tasted like what I would get at the restaurants so I was pretty satisfied. I think the brown sauce vegetable topping would be something that I would eat just by itself with some rice. This adequately satisfied my nostalgia craving for good Cantonese food. I would make this again, just with some minor tweaks as I’ve mentioned earlier.