‘After years of ruining stir fries, I learned secret of Chinese chow mein fakeaway’

‘After years of ruining stir fries, I learned secret of Chinese chow mein fakeaway’

I’ve always loved Chinese food, and growing up in London, I learned to appreciate the regional variations between Cantonese style and spicer Sichuan peppery dishes, and regularly went out for dim sum in Chinatown on Sundays.

When I moved out of the capital 25 years ago to rural Hampshire, I got the shock of my life when I visited the local takeaway in a busy market town and suddenly realised what the rest of the country had been eating for 30 years.

No criticism of the lovely hard-working Hong Kong family who making a living serving the local farm workers what they wanted – chop suey and chips, egg-fried rice which came out of the foil container in the shape and colour of a brick, and prawn crackers with a ketchup dip – but I wanted the real thing.

But if I was disappointed in the menu, I was impressed by the huge Chinese money plant growing in their front window – and indeed it proved to be lucky, because that family put their kids through school, sold the shop and flat upstairs for a fortune and are now enjoying a very comfortable retirement.

But the lack of local authentic Chinese food back then forced me to try and learn how to cook my own dishes. I started with stir fries, thinking they were the easiest to master, and inevitably they were a total failure because I realise now they’re actually they’re one of the most difficult styles of cooking to get right.

My main mistake was adding too many ingredients which meant they steamed in the wok rather than fried quickly. I don’t mind admitting that it’s taken me years to learn the secret to getting that authentic charred Chinese chow mein taste.

And all it needs is six ingredients: egg noodles, brown onions, beansprouts, light soya sauce, spring onions and groundnut oil. Asian cooking always uses peanut-based oil because it’s tasteless and can cope with the high cooking temperatures.

You can also add salt and MSG, and any number of chopped veggies like green peppers or broccoli, and even cooked cold chicken to turn it into chicken chow mein – but make sure it’s only in small quantities. Western cooking makes us worry we’ve not added enough, and it only ruins the result.

The basic chow mein dish is a thing of simple beauty and it starts by cooking your noodles briefly according to the packet instructions, and then rinsing thoroughly in cold water, and leaving to drain over the sink for 20 minutes so they dry out.

I’m not going to give you exact measurements because I’m home cook, not a qualified chef, but for one person I’d use a block of noodles, half an onion, sliced thinly, a generous handful of beansprouts, three spring onions sliced on the diagonal, and a few good shakes of light soya sauce.

Prep your ingredients first so they are all roughly the same shape and size, then heat your wok – it needs to be nice and hot before adding just enough oil to coat the surface. Be sparing as you don’t want it to be too oily.

Always start with the onions first, and move them around so they don’t burn. When half cooked, moved them to the edge of the wok, and tip in your noodles. The trick here to get that charred taste is to leave them cooking in the wok until they lightly char – I use a heavy grilling weight on top of them to speed the process up.

After a few minutes, flip the noodles and mix in the onions, add salt and MSG, if you’re using, and then leave to char lightly again. It’s at this point I add the beansprouts, which I have already rinsed in boiling water to clean and also soften, and then the spring onions.

I generously shake about a tablespoon-worth of light soya sauce all over the noodles and mix everything well, before leaving it for a final charring for a minute or two.

Serve in a warm bowl and add toasted sesame seeds and a bit of chilli oil to taste. It’s really that simple, and will give you instant authentic fakeaway results.

My teenage daughter is my biggest critic (in all things) and even she said this was a game changer and now asks me to cook it for all her student mates.

This did prove a bit of a challenge with a crowd as it’s easier to cook for one or two in a wok, but I just put a big glass casserole dish in the warm oven, and repeated the process a few times until it was full of chow mein. They even gobbled it up without covering everything in ketchup like they normally do, so I assume it was acceptable to their kebab-hardened tastes.

• The Mirror’s Siobhan McNally writes about easy chef skills everyone can learn to make cooking from scratch simple.

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