“Garlic noodles are not the San Francisco treat. That would be Rice-a-roni. But garlic noodles are a San Francisco treat and one worth making for yourself.”

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

If anything, that quote is the one thing I took away from this experience. It was a little bit of work to find a recipe for the garlic noodles that I was looking for. Merely googling “garlic noodles” would get you a variety of different results but I was specifically looking for the garlic noodles one would eat at a Cajun boil restaurant. Luckily, it appeared that The Wok had a recipe for this. I found the video equivalent for this recipe here, as well as on NYT Cooking here.

The best thing about this recipe that it can be easily made using seven pantry essentials in your house in about 20 minutes–nothing fancy required, which made it perfect to make for a last-minute Friday team dinner potluck with the theme, “things in your fridge/freezer.”

Kenji talks about the history of this dish, starting with its humble origins in an SF-based restaurant called Thanh Long as an answer to elevate a bland bowl of garlic spaghetti. This was a uniquely not Vietnamese, but Vietnamese American dish.

So I started with mincing about 20 cloves of garlic, which did not take as long as I expected. I then melted 4 tbsp of butter over medium heat but ended up having to dial it down after noticing that it was melting quite quickly to the point where I was dangerously close to making brown butter. I tossed in the garlic and cooked it for the next few minutes, taking some care not to brown it too much. Then came the easy work of adding 20 mL of oyster sauce, 10 mL of fish sauce, and 10 mL of soy sauce. After letting that cook for about a minute, I put it off to the side and focused on the spaghetti noodles.

I didn’t read the recipe quite thoroughly so I’ve wasted some time waiting for a pot of water to finish boiling (which took about ten minutes) and dumped the pasta in. The recipe actually mentions to boil 1.5 inches of water in a skillet, not a pot, for less water to boil–it makes water to boil faster and concentrates the amount of starch in the water to be reserved for later.

I waited for about 11 minutes (though in hindsight, could’ve boiled it for less time) before using a pair of tongs to transfer the noodles into the garlic sauce at high heat and add in some store-bought shredded parmesan. In hindsight, I should’ve used freshly grated cheese since the shredded parmesan seemed to clump up almost immediately when I started tossing the noodles in the garlic sauce. I ended up supplementing this with some leftover mozzarella cheese from my pizza adventures. The cheese added a gooey aspect to the dish that I enjoyed.

I ended having to add more pasta starch water since the noodles looked a little dry. This is where I think using less water for more concentrated starch would’ve worked better in my favor since I ended up transferring very little pasta water to the sauce when I transferred the noodles, probably because of how wet it was.

Nevertheless, while the dish appeared a little darker and drier than I expected, I enjoyed it. It had a nice garlic flavor with some umami flavor profile due to the oyster-soy-fish sauce combo. Very addicting to eat and easy to make. I think this could be a solid potluck dish if I added maybe some extra protein like shrimp or something.

Fun casual dinner.