Garlic Noodles | Kenji's Cooking Show

Hi everyone, I'm Kenji and we're making some

garlic

noodles

, so these are a classic San Francisco treat. Not the gift of St. Francis, which is rice and roni, but a gift of St. Francis that I really didn't know existed. Until I moved to the Bay Area, I lived, you know, 20 miles south of San Francisco. I didn't know this existed until I moved to Berry. I had never heard of them before, but it was created by Vietnamese American immigrants. at a restaurant called ten long that's outside sun set up in san francisco, where i've been, it's usually served with grilled crab, grilled dungeness crab, so dungeness crab is another san francisco street that's not the delicacy of san Francisco, that is. rice-a-roni but it's another gift from San Francisco um I was saying um as my neighbor and colleague and someone who I consider a dear friend even though I've never met him and don't you know we've barely interacted but him?

He feels like a friend because he makes everyone feel like a friend in his videos. uh, chef john from food wishes, said it in his video for the same dish, this dish goes with almost anything, and you can eat it alone, which is what I'm doing um, my recipe is a little different than yours , but they're basically all the same kind of process that you start with

noodles

. You can use handmade Chinese noodles or fresh egg noodles. I'm just using spaghetti. and this is some good lightning spaghetti and then I'm going to grab some

garlic

and let's see, I need some mortar and pestle, where was my mortar and pestle?

I moved everything, where was it? Well, I'll use my I'll use my multi head for now, this will work fine, so I have about a dozen cloves of garlic, so I'll make enough for two or three people, so half a pound of spaghetti is about 230 grams. About 220 grams, I think if you use actual units, this is just the peeled garlic that I get from the supermarket, you know, you can get it pre-peeled, it's not the best. I really cared about the perfect flavor of garlic right now, I would be peeling fresh cloves from a head of garlic, the reason is because when you buy pre-peeled garlic to peel them, the garlic is briefly blanched first and that deactivates some of the um the flavor there some of the compounds that form allicin um and uh it was my friend brad leone my new internet friend brad leone meets alison alice's and allison is important to the flavor of garlic who said you know this is fine what I would avoid what I use It's pre-chopped garlic because there's very little garlic flavor left in that material.

Brad and I, Brad Leone and I are working together on a project now, we're making a salt box, a salt shaker, people ask me about this one. the time I got it from an ex girlfriend who bought it in the UK and people ask me where I got it and where they can find a similar one because it's very good for salt, it's operated with one finger, the hinge is I'm working on this , but the ones Brad and I are building won't break. It's nice and wide so you can pick up salt easily anyway, so we're building something similar to these with reclaimed nuts.

You can go check out my social the social section of my um of my account and you'll find uh you'll find some news about that project that's coming that's coming so add a little bit of salt to your garlic when you crush it with a mortar and a pencil because helps when it comes to abrasiveness, oh, I know my other internet friend, um, Adam Ragusia, I know in one of his videos he speculated that salt actually helps more with crushing garlic through osmosis than, um , uh, abrasiveness, you're wrong about that and I. I know because I've done testing on this, so if it was just osmosis you would expect that the more finely ground the salt is, if you use it as powdered salt it would work much better than coarsely ground salt because it would dissolve faster and the osmosis It would happen faster, but it doesn't.

Coarse salt actually works faster and better at breaking down the garlic or whatever you're going to mash in here now, maybe at the end, once it starts spinning at a pace like this. Osmosis takes effect, but at this stage, no matter what salt you use, it will all have dissolved anyway, so anyway, yes, you add it in there for abrasiveness. You can also mince the garlic by hand if you feel up to it, for each quarter. pound of pasta we're going to make about a tablespoon and a half of butter this is a super fusion dish by the way you'll see and I'm going to put it into motion on this uh walk that I got here this walk is um a model that I'm trying out my friends in I have a lot of internet friends my internet friends on uh food 52 um they make the cutting board that has the little cell phone holder that I sometimes use in my kitchen that you have You've probably seen it if you watch this channel, but they're launching this new one carbon steel walker intended for the western mountain ranges, so I've been testing it a bit so I can give you some feedback so far.

Is very good. I know it has a much wider flat bottom than most flat bottom woks and I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it definitely makes it harder for me to stir fry, but on the other hand it makes it more versatile for others. things, um, I still don't know how I feel about this, well, I need to think about it a little more, so moderate heat, um, this is medium low right now and I'm just going to let the butter melt mostly part. and then I'll come back with my garlic vomit there.

I first ate this dish at 10 Long and Dusk Outside when I first moved to San Francisco and some friends of mine wanted to

show

me some. real a real gift from San Francisco um not rice-a-roni that's the real gift from San Francisco but a gift from San Francisco um and foolishly um I borrowed from my friends I didn't have a car at the time so I borrowed the moped from my friend vespa um and I wrote it from um the uh the mission where I lived at the time I wrote it from the mission to the sunset outside um across the hills uh at night and I very foolishly assumed that San Francisco can't get that cold because of the night So I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, um, and then I was heading home late at night, when it was dark, like 9 or 10 p.m. m., and it was very cold because it is very cold in San Francisco at night, um everything.

The weather, uh, freezing cold, coming back uh on a vespa in shorts and a t-shirt on a San Francisco night, is not a good idea, um, and yeah, okay, so the garlic we don't want to burn or dry out. brown too much. We just wanted to gently give off its aroma to that butter, um, so as soon as you start to see it turn slightly brown like that, now it's done. I'm going to come in here with a couple of teaspoons of that light soy sauce, there's a few big splashes of fish sauce, probably a couple of teaspoons of that as well and then this, which is oyster sauce, this is an oyster sauce. read kum kee, the fancier one is the one with the little boy and the mother on the boat with the oyster unlike the one with like the panda on the cover um this one has more oysters the first ingredient this is what you should check for when you buy oyster sauce um the first ingredient should be premium oyster extract or something that oyster extract is okay, so it's like garlic and butter and ultra umami.

You can think of this like you know Vietnamese alio olio, it says butter and garlic and then things are going to get even crazier the second after this pasta is ready. I try how it is here, are you? Why am I having so much trouble with these today? Let me grab my smaller sticks. Those sticks are. Those big sticks of mine are starting to warp, making them very difficult to grip with the tip. Alright? We're almost done there, so we're late, we're waiting for it to get just shy of al dente. Not quite not quite cooked.

A little chalky in the center still, but mostly al dente is what we're looking for. because and now what I'm going to do is throw it here with whatever liquid comes with it. I'm not going to be careful about straining that liquid because of the way I cooked this pasta in a pan, you can see that it concentrates the starch, which is good for a dish like this because it makes the sauce creamy, but I didn't put salt to the pasta water and the reason I don't put salt in the pasta water is because there is a lot of There are a lot of salty elements in this sauce, the soy sauce, the fish sauce and the oyster sauce.

If you add salt to the pasta water, everything is too salty, so there is no salt in the pasta water. By the way, you know, soy sauce, fish sauce. and oyster sauce, those are common ingredients, you don't need to use all three, you can use them as a subset, select a subset of them, you can also use magi seasoning, so yeast extract or Worcestershire sauce is also an ingredient common in this. any of those things you really just want umami rich sauces and finally I'm going to go in here with some cheese so this is pecorino Romano.

Normally you would use parmesan in this parmesan fish sauce. This is Pecorino Romano just because I like it. flavor and I happen to have a little bit, but you can do whatever you want, any type of grated hard cheese is what you're looking for, I'm just going to stir it hard, you can see how rich and creamy that sauce has become. of the reduced pasta sauce, the pasta water, emulsified with the butter and the other ingredients, you know what I'm going to do to finish this, I'm going to add a little bit to make it as is, but I'm going to do it. some scallions, I'm going to add a thin slice of scallion and, you know, I'm also going to add, I think this will be good, this is um tarako, which is a Japanese row of salted cod that comes in its egg sac and I Lo we roast it and then eat it to crumble it over rice and eat it for breakfast.

Something I grew up eating and can find here. It's definitely not a normal ingredient in garlic noodles, but I think it will be delicious. um something similar is something similar to you know, it's the Japanese version of Italian bottarga that's also cured with salt, I think mullet roe maybe it's cod and you know, some kind of salt and little cured fish eggs that are delicious. with pasta, not Too careful with how I cut these chives. Okay, let's leave some for garnish and this will go right in here and we'll just throw them in and let the residual heat from the pan and the pasta cook them so if they start to brown. a little too tight like this just added a splash more pasta water to thin it out, and the only thing to remember with pasta is that, like eggs, it will harden a little and dry out a little time it is. on the plate, so you always want to make sure the pasta is a little looser than you want in the pan than it will be on the plate.

This looks perfect to me, so let's flip it over and we'll see that it's nice and creamy. The sauce has turned and boy oh boy does it have garlic in it? This would go great, obviously, with grilled crab, but you also know it could go great with sautéed shrimp, grilled shrimp, any type of seafood, I think it goes really well with, but like our my chef friend John said it goes good with anything, so I'm going to finish it off with more spring onions and then some of this row of salt cod, how does that sound to you all?

I think it looks very good, let's eat some by the window. It looks good, it smells good, how does it taste, it tastes great, oh sorry guys, you can't eat garlic, but you know what? There's too much garlic for the dogs here, but they can sit down a little, good girl, a little cheese sandwich, okay, garlic. noodles a San Francisco delicacy, not the San Francisco delicacy, which is riceroni, everyone take care, stay healthy, eat well, guys, girls and binary friends, see you next time, bye.