This week I made the Chow Mein with Beef and Peppers recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. It seems similar to last week’s Cantonese Superior Soy Sauce Noodles, but as a main instead of a side.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a recipe that called for beef tenderizing, but this one does. So the first step is thinly slicing the beef, vigorously washing it in water, vigorously massaging it with baking soda, and then vigorously working in a marinade of soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, sugar, and cornstarch.

The noodles are cooked briefly in salted water and then spread out to cool and dry on a sheet pan, as has been the norm for these chow mein recipes.

For the stir-fry, the noodles are fried in a couple of tablespoons of oil for a minute, then flipped and fried on the other side for another minute. They are then removed back to the sheet pan and spread out again. This gets some of the noodles crispy, but most of them still soft.

The beef is stir-fried in two portions and removed to a bowl. Then green and red bell pepper and onion are stir-fried until “lightly charred in spots and…tender-crisp.” This was a large volume of peppers and onions, and the moisture they released seemed to hamper the charring. These vegetables are then removed to the bowl with the beef.

Garlic and ginger are barely cooked in the wok before the noodles are returned. Then the beef and vegetables go back in with some mung bean sprouts, and a sauce of roasted sesame oil, light and dark soy sauces, oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine, pepper, and sugar is poured around the edges. All of this gets tossed and stir-fried “until the beef is fully cooked and the sauce coats the noodles.” This was a large volume of food for my wok, but I did eventually get the sauce distributed throughout.

This is another dish where the vegetables kind of disappear in it. I thought it was fine. I find beef feels a bit heavy to me these days. Megan thought it was similar to a japchae recipe we make (with the beef and the thinly sliced vegetables and the noodles), which she really likes. My son really liked the beef.

I might make this one again.

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