How to Make Lo Mein with Jet Tila | Ready Jet Cook With Jet Tila | Food Network

Hey guys, I'm Jet Tila and this is Jet Cook, where I take the mystery out of Asian

cook

ing by showing you how to

make

some of my favorite store-to-

cook

dishes, but before we jump into today's recipe, take a second and subscribe now . There is a misconception that Asian

food

is difficult to prepare, but lo

mein

is a really simple one-pan dish, a one-pan dish, very easy and with little cleanup, let's break it down and you'll see how easy it is to

make

your own restaurant-worthy noodles in At home, most of you know that about the culinary ambassador to Thailand, but what you don't know is that I'm actually Chinese.

Both cultures actually use noodles, so for a good lo

mein

look for an egg noodle pasta similar to this one, any shape will do. as long as it's nice and springy, so no lo mein is complete without baby bok choy, in my opinion it has a great texture, color and flavor and it's perfect in lo mein, so now that we're back from the market, let's get

ready

for our lo mein I like to divide the preparation into three parts: the first will be the sauce, the second will be the vegetable preparation and finally the protein, so let's start with the sauce in a nice clean bowl.

I will always start with chicken broth. The chicken broth will be the base of the sauce because it is neutral but has a pleasant flavor to create a glaze. I want to use cornstarch so you know that when cornstarch is heated it will thicken to the consistency of a sauce, so the next ingredients will be soy sauce. I've used soy sauce a million times, you know it's salty and you know it provides a nice flavor, but it also starts to give you that brown sauce color. Next is the king of all Chinese sauces, it is oyster sauce, now I know that all sounds a little scary because Not everyone loves oysters, but using oyster sauce is not like eating raw oysters from the ocean.

When you dry them and add them to the soy sauce space, it creates a phenomenal kind of sweet and salty flavor and finally for a while. for aroma you want a little bit of sesame oil you don't want everyone to sauté with sesame oil because it has a low smoke point but you do want to use just a little bit to get some really amazing aromatic notes just think of the lo mein sauce as a combination of all these flavors and textures, the chicken broth gives it a kind of neutral base, the cornstarch helps thicken the moister sauce and the soy sauce gives it a sweet and salty flavor and then the sesame oil gives it a little aroma to that our sauce is

ready

.

Let's move on to our vegetable preparation. I like to start with aromatics and some of my favorite aromatics in Chinese cooking will be ginger and garlic. I think a lot of people are afraid of ginger. No, there is no reason to have it. How do you want to remove the ginger? First, remove all the little fingers from the gingerbread and I know my grandmother would be mad if they didn't throw that away. Sorry Grandma, it's cheap and plentiful, we'll be fine coping. the ginger all over the side and you know you've squared it when it's straight and you can take the back of the knife and use it as leverage, and I'm just scraping the skin off and keep doing this on all sides and once you get to the bottom where there is the skin everywhere, just use that cutting edge and push once the ginger is completely peeled.

I just want you to square it again, just remember the mosaic. becomes a slice a slice becomes a dice so I'm going to cut an eight inch tile it's here put those eighth inch tiles together and then cut them into eighth inch slices boom blades of grass eighth inch slices inch so ginger made with garlic don't think about it too much give it a whack like I said it's a tile breaking a flat it becomes a tile so two three to make my garlic flat on a tile I can cut it into thin slices and then, if I want to take it out more, I make a quarter. flip and then a slice becomes diced and you don't need to take the garlic any further than that because it will be hanging in a 400 degree pan and you want it thick enough that it can be sautéed and add its flavor and it doesn't really burn so The next ingredients will be chives.

I like to cut them in half, first put a slight angle on the knife and then cut it this way and look, I know it tastes the same but it looks much fresher and it does look. Fresher, it will look fresher if you have fresher dishes, people will think, wow, you're an amazing chef and it looks super delicious. Our main green in the low main course will be bok choy. The translation of bok choy means white vegetable, obviously it looks green. Ripe it turns completely white in the broth and that is why it is called bok choy.

I just cut the thickest part of the bulb and you're going to discard it and now you're left with these kind of top leaves and you're I'm going to make 45 degree cuts, thinner pieces of the stem, bigger pieces of leaves because what happens is that The stems are denser and the leaves are more delicate, so if you cut the stem smaller and the leaves are larger, they cook at the same rate, so my grandmother did it. Speaking of the lo mein was the perfect dish to clean up what was left in the refrigerator, now I have bok choy, let's see what else I can use to improve this lo mein, so I found some carrots, now I like these. because they add color, are crunchy and super sweet.

Now I'll show you how to make a julienne coin. I think a lot of chefs say, Oh, julienne, you have a square of all these pieces, no, this is the easy way to make it super extreme bias, which means I want a lot of surface area by cutting them into about 1/4 inch. thick, it's that simple, place the coins on top of each other and I want you to take these sliced ​​tiles, so the reason The reason I'm cutting Julian's is because I want the cares to cook very quickly because the carrot usually be dense and I want to give a nice visual touch to the lo mein and you just cut the carrot into julienne strips, so I finish with the vegetables.

I need to get them off the board because I'm going to move on to raw chicken because those things should never come across on cooking shows now, you see a lot of these bowls, don't do it that way, take a plate, leave it, put all the vegetables on this dish, which means you don't have five bowls to wash, you only have one, which makes life a lot easier and prevents your partner from getting mad at you, there you have it, so the last part of preparing the lo mein is the protein. I'm going to use chicken breast today, it's totally up to you what you prefer: dark meat, white meat, everything is fine, the most important thing is that you want to cut this into nice thin pieces and let me show you what I'm talking about. here, so this is half a chicken breast.

I'm going to remove any fat and then I'm going to follow the fiber first so I can see the fiber running like this. I'm going to cut the grain. into pieces about two to three inches wide and then take one of those pieces and now go upstream so when I make a cut it will give me a very nice thin board. The reason I'm making a nice thin board is because you want the chicken to brown very quickly, cook it evenly but still be moist in the middle. If the chickens are in irregular, uneven pieces, the chicken will not cook evenly.

This rule also applies to almost any other protein, including tofu. Scott's chicken, I'm going to prepare it in a bowl, clean everything, wash my hands and start cooking. The number one question I get with stir-frying is what type of pan do I need. I need a wok and the answer is no, no. Not at all, my favorite is a Dutch oven with enameled eyes because its cast iron retains heat, if you don't have that, a simple pan with high sides that heats up is totally fine. Another important thing for any stir-fry is that the pan has to be very hot. and what I mean by this is that when you put the oil at a high temperature, you will start to see white smoke and once that smoke starts coming out, you need to put everything in the pan in the correct sequence, so I like to use a neutral like canola or peanut I don't like using olive oil or sesame oil so I see little wisps of white smoke.

I'm going to add my aromatics first which are garlic and ginger. I'm going to start with these ingredients until I smell them. I'm not too worried about the color because there is a long way to go with all these ingredients. Alright, next chicken, because chicken takes a little while to cook. I want to do it before, don't be afraid to use the surface of the pan really use the entire pan to cook your dish. I'm looking for the chicken to come halfway because I'm always thinking about what the total cooking time is for all the ingredients.

The next thing is don't be afraid to scrape. go because if you scrape them now they won't stick or burn, all the delicious little brown bits will add to the overall flavor. I mean, in French we call it Fond, think of it as the The base of all these flavors is developing, so the chicken is at a medium size. I want to add my greens now reserving those chives for the top. This dish brings back a lot of memories of when my grandmother would take me to Chinatown when she was a kid on the bus and she would play mahjong. us eating dim sum and then buying all the

food

you need for that night.

You know, she was actually my first cooking instructor when she was a kid. It was pretty obvious that she wasn't going to be a rocket scientist, so she said, "Let's get this kid." a trade, so I really received personalized attention in the kitchen from a very young age. I have spent more than 10,000 hours in the kitchen with my grandmother cooking this dish. The vegetables are moving very well. The chicken is not quite there. the way they are cooked but this is a good time for my noodles you will be hard pressed to find a package of noodles that actually says lo mein what you are really looking for on the package is something called egg noodles it has this type pleasant pale color. yellow color and the ingredients must have wheat and eggs if you don't have janu Dalls, don't be scared.

I really love using things like fettuccine for this dish, you can cook the fettuccine al dente, rinse it and let it dry. and then add it to the pan here so all the ingredients cook a little bit. I'm just going to add my sauce in there making sure to stir that sauce really well to incorporate all the cornstarch as this sauce thickens, it really gets low. I know many of you have heard the word chow mein versus lo mein, all boy really means crispy noodles, so chow mein means crispy noodles with sauce on top lo mein means soft noodles with a very thick and nice low sauce in Chinese just means stir. it's like imagining stirring these noodles in that beautiful sauce as it hardens and you know, Chinese foods have been in America for over 200 years, this here is oh geez, so what I'm looking for is the cornstarch to start. to activate which means it's starting to thicken the sauce and it turns into a really nice glaze once that starts to happen turn off the pan and let it continue to cook and all the noodles and vegetables will absorb this beautiful sauce that you've made , so make sure you keep it. these noodles as long as possible, it's kind of bad to break the noodles because the noodles symbolize your long life and I want to put as much sauce as possible in there so that the lo mein is low and I just want a garnish now with those simple sliced ​​scallions , so there's my grandmother's classic lo mein.

I hope you enjoyed shopping and cooking with me, please cook this dish yourselves, leave comments, tell me how it goes and I'll see you next time ready to cook.