Two weeks ago I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Sesame Chicken Noodles My Way (Or Your Way) recipe from The Wok cookbook. It’s a cold noodle dish.

No unusual ingredients for this dish. Even the noodles are standard dry spaghetti, linguine, or fettuccine.

The noodles are cooked with Kenji’s baking soda technique, where baking soda is added to the cooking water to provide the alkalinity found in Chinese noodles.

The chicken is poached in water with ginger and scallions and then shredded.

The sauce starts with a thick mixture of peanut butter, roasted sesame oil, minced garlic, Chinkiang vinegar, soy sauce, sriracha, and sugar. After the chicken is cooked, spoonfuls of the chicken stock are added to the sauce until it's “creamy and loose.”

The final dish comes together in a big bowl. The chicken gets tossed with the sauce, then matchstick cucumber, finely sliced scallions, chopped cilantro, toasted sesame seeds, and sliced fresh chile are tossed in. Fried peanuts then go on top.

I thought it was good. The chicken was quite tasty. Megan said it was “better than expected” which I’m taking as a compliment given how much she dislikes cold noodles.

I would happily make this recipe again.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.