Fragrant and juicy shredded poached chicken, flavoured with shaoxing wine and soy sauce. Spicy, salty and umtuous peanut butter and crispy chilli oil noodles. Together they make a truly delicious pairing! While I have combined these two together in this recipe, these noodles would go great with any asian main. You could try them with my char siu!

Inspiration For This Recipe

Recently, my social media has been awash with countless recipes for quick meals. Noodles always seem to be a popular option! They can be thrown together in a hot wok quite fast with quick-mix sauces to create really reat results! This is the basis for chow mein after all. Crispy chilli oil, such as this one that I use, is also having a big moment in the social media spotlight. I have seen it combined with peanut butter in quite a few videos so wanted to give it a go and wow, it’s amazing! After tinkering with other additions and quantities, I have now made what I think is the perfect peanut butter crispy chilli sauce for noodles.

I have also always enjoyed chicken chow mein. In restaurants and takeaways in the UK, the chicken is often poached before being stir fried in the wok, and I think this lends a really great texture to the end results. I wanted to incorporate that into this as a noodle dish.

This idea was further boosted when I came across a recipe from Comfort by Ottolenghi, a fantastic book. He has a recipe where he gently poaches chicken breasts, shreds them and seasons them with shaoxing wine. He then uses this in a salad with a peanut chilli dressing. This immediately called out to me as a great basis for incorporating chicken into my recipe, so I have adopted his method but created a different and more flavourful poaching liquid. I am also using a different seasoning for the chicken, to hold up against the punchy noodles.

Recipe Considerations

This recipe absolutely needs some vegetables in the noodles. They give some much needed crunch and colour, but also provide some real nutrition. I think green veg works really well here for the visuals alone. It’s always worth it to put spring onions in noodle stir fries like this as they cook down and mix in with the noodles really nicely. I keep the greens as inch long chunks, and slice the whites diagonally into long slices. The whites should be added first as they take longer to cook! I do tend to thinly slice a few of the greens and hold them back to garnish at the end.

Beansprouts are another classic noodle addition. These will be in any chow mein or similar style dish you get anywhere. They also cook into the noodles really well and give a nice crunch if not overcooked. They should be added more or less at the same time as the noodles to prevent this! A pinch of beansprouts stacked on top at the end can also make a really alluring garnish!

Finally, I have gone for green beans as an additional vegetable. These give a great earthiness, similar to the beansprouts, but provide more susbtance and can hold their crunch a little better. All i do to prepare them is trim the ends and slice in half. Of course, you could substitute in any veg you would like, but I have found this combination works really nicely.

A Footnote on Woks

The final consideration for this is the pan. You really cannot beat a carbon steel wok for cooking like this. It’s ability to get really hot and retain heat is excellent. It is also designed for tossing food in as you’re cooking it. Dishes like this require cooking ingredients hot and fast. You don’t want anything to sit at the bottom for too long and do not have the luxury of time to mix things by hand. Getting good at tossing food in your wok is a great skill to have. It feels great to do it and can really impress people if cooking for an audience!