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 ready jet cook where I take the mystery out of Asian cuisine by showing you how to make some of my favorite dishes from shop to cook but before I get into today's recipe take one second and subscribe now [Music] there's this misconception that Asian foods are hard to make but lo mein is a really simple one pan dish yo one pan dish so easy so little cleanup let's break it down and you'll see how easy it is to make your own restaurant worthy noodles at home [Music] most

of you know that on the culinary ambassador to Thailand but what you don't know is I'm F nicly Chinese both cultures actually use noodles so for good lo mein look for an egg noodle pasta similar to this 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 great texture color and flavor and is perfect in lo mein [Music] so now that we're back from the market let's get prepped out on our lo mein I like to break up prep into

three parts first is gonna be sauce the second will be vegetable prep and then finally protein so let's get started on sauce in a nice clean Bowl I'm always gonna start with chicken stock chicken stock is gonna be the base of the sauce because it's neutral but it has a nice savoriness to it to create a glaze I want to use cornstarch so as you know when cornstarch heats up it's gonna thicken into a sauce consistency so the next ingredients gonna be soy sauce you've used soy sauce a million times you know it's salty and

you know it provides a nice savoriness but it also starts giving you that brown sauce color next is the king of all Chinese sauces it's oyster sauce now I know boy stur stuff sounds a little scary because not everyone loves oysters but using oyster sauce isn't like eating raw oysters out of the ocean when you dry out the oysters and add them to the soy sauce space it creates a phenomenal kind of sweet and savory flavor and then finally for a little bit of aroma you want a little sesame oil you don't want everyone a

stir-fry with sesame oil because it has a low smoke point but you do want to use just a little bit for some really amazing kind of aromatic notes just think about the lo mein sauce as a marriage of all these flavors and textures the chicken stock gives you kind of a neutral base cornstarch helps thicken moister sauce and soy sauce give you savory sweet and salty and then sesame oil gives you a little aroma so our sauce is done let's move on to our vegetable prep I like to start with aromatics and some of my

favorite aromatics in the Chinese kitchen are gonna be ginger and garlic I think a lot of people are scared of ginger don't be there's no reason to be this is how you want to take ginger down firstly take off all the little fingers square off the ginger and I know my grandma would be mad they don't throw that away bit I'm sorry grandma it's cheap and plentiful we'll be okay squaring off the ginger on all sides and you know that you've squared it off when it stands up straight and you could just take the back

of the knife and use it as a lever right and I'm just scraping the skin away and just continue to do this on all sides and once you kind of get down to the bottom where the skin is all the way around just use that cutting edge and just push once the ginger is completely peeled through I just want you to again square it off just remember tile becomes a slice a slice becomes a dice so I'm gonna cut eighth inch tile is here gather those eighth inch tiles together and then cut them into eighth

inch slices boom blades of grass eighth inch slices so ginger done with garlic don't overthink it give it a smash like I said that's a tile by smashing a flat it becomes a tile so two three so my garlic is flat into a tile I can cut it into thin slices and then if I want to take it out further I do a quarter turn and then a slice becomes a dice and you don't need to take garlic down any further than that because it's gonna be hanging out in a 400-degree pan and you want

it thick enough so it can kind of saute add its flavor and not really burns so the next ingredients gonna be scallions I like to cut them in half first put a slight angle on the knife and then give it a slice this way and look I know it tastes the same but it looks way cooler and if it looks cooler it'll play cooler if it plates cooler people are gonna think wow you're an awesome chef and it looks super delicious our main green in low main is going to be bok choy translation bok choy

means white vegetable obviously it looks green as it mature it turns totally white in the stock and that's why it's called bok choy I've just cut off the thickest part of the bulb and you're gonna discard that and now you're left with these kind of top leaves and you're gonna do 45 degree cuts thinner pieces of the stalk larger pieces of the leaves because what happens is the stalks are denser and the leaves are more delicate so if you cut the stalk smaller and it leaves bigger they cook at the same rate so my grandmother

was talking that lo mein was the perfect dish to kind of clean out what was left in the fridge now I've got bok choy let's see what else I could use to kind of boost up this lo mein so I found some carrots now I like these because they give color they're crunchy and they're super sweet I'm going to show you how to make a coin julienne now I think a lot of chefs are like Oh julienned you got a square off all these pieces no this is the easy way to do it super extreme

bias meaning I want a lot of surface area cutting these into about 1/4 inch thick just like that real simple lay the coins on top each other and I want you to take these tiles into slices so the reason why I'm cutting Julian's is cuz I want the cares to cook very quickly because carrot is usually dense and I want to kind of give a nice visual pop to the lo mein and you just cut carrot julienne so I'm done with the vegetables I need to get them off the board cuz I'm moving on to

raw chicken because those things should never cross now on cooking shows you see a ton of these bowls don't do it that way take one plate put it down put all the vegetables on this plate which means you don't have five bowls to wash you just have one which makes life a lot easier and keeps your partner from getting angry at you there you go so the last part of the lo mein prep is the protein I'm gonna be using chicken breast today it's totally up to you as to what you prefer dark meat white

meat it's all good the most important thing is you want to cut this into nice thin tiles and let me show you what I'm talking about here so this is half a chicken breast I'm gonna trim off any fat that there is and then I'm gonna kind of follow the grain first so I can see the grain kind of running this way I'm gonna cut with the grain into about two to three inch wide pieces and then take one of those pieces and now go against the grain so when I do a slice it's gonna

give me a really nice thin plank the reason why I'm doing a nice thin plank is because you want the chicken to sear very quickly cook evenly but still be moist in the middle if the chickens kind of in funky pieces that are uneven the chicken won't cook evenly now this rule also applies to just about any other protein including tofu so now that the chicken Scott I'm gonna bowl it up clean everything down and wash my hands and let's get cooking the number one question I get with stir-fry is what kind of pan do

I need do I need a wok and the answer is no not at all my favorite is an enamel eyes Dutch oven because it's cast iron holds heat if you don't have that a simple pan with high sides that gets hot is totally fine another important for any stir-fry is the pan has to be ripping hot and what I mean by that is when you get your high temperature oil in you're gonna start to see white smoke and once that smoke starts going you got to get everything into the pan in the right sequence so

I like using a neutral oil like canola or peanut I don't like using olive oil or sesame oil alright so I'm seeing little wisps of white smoke I'm gonna add first my aromatics which are garlic and ginger I'm gonna just start a these ingredients up until I smell them I'm not really worried about color because there's a long way to go with all these ingredients alright next chicken because chicken takes a while to cook I want to get it in sooner don't be scared to utilize the surface area of the pan really use the entire

pan to cook your dish I'm looking for that chicken to get about halfway because I'm always thinking about what the total cook time of all the ingredients are the next thing is don't be scared to scrape as you go because if you're scraping them up now they won't stick and they won't burn it all the little delicious bits of brown are gonna add to the overall flavor I mean in French we call this Fond think about that as the foundation of all these flavors are developing so the chicken is about medium I want to add

my vegetables now reserving those scallions for the top this dish brings back a lot of memories of my grandma taking me to Chinatown as a kid on the bus her playing mahjong us eating dim sum and then buying all the groceries you need it for that night you know she really was my first cooking instructor as a kid it was pretty obvious that I wasn't gonna be a rocket scientist so she was like let's get this kid a trade so I really got some one-on-one cooking attention from a very young age I've spent more than

10,000 hours in the kitchen next to my grandma cooking this dish the veggies are moving along really well the chicken isn't all the way cooked through yet this is a good time for my noodles it's gonna be tough to find a noodle package that actually says lo mein what you're really looking for in the package is something that's called egg noodle it's got this kind of nice pale yellow color and the ingredients should have wheat and eggs in it if you don't have a janu Dalls don't freak out I really love using things like fettuccine

for this dish you can cook the fettuccine al dente rinse it off let it dry out and then add it to the pan here so all the ingredients are cooked through a bit I'm just gonna add my sauce in there making sure to really stir that sauce really well to get all the cornstarch in as this sauce thickens it really becomes low I know a lot of you have heard the word chow mein versus lo mein all child really means is crispy noodle so chow mein means crispy noodles with gravy on top lo mein means

soft noodles in of nice really thick gravy low in Chinese just means to stir it's like imagine stirring these noodles into that beautiful gravy as it's tightening up and you know Chinese foods been in America for over 200 years this here is oh gee lo mein so what I'm looking for is the cornstarch to start activating meaning it's starting to thicken up the sauce and it becomes a really nice glaze once that starts happening turn the pan off and just let this continue to cook and all of the noodles and vegetables absorb this beautiful gravy

that you've made so you want to make sure to keep these noodles as long as possible it's kind of bad juju to break your noodles cuz noodles kind of symbolize your long life and I want to get as much gravy on there as possible so the lo mein is down and I just want a garnish now with those simple sliced scallions [Music] so there it is my grandma's classic lo mein I hope you guys enjoyed shopping and cooking with me please cook this dish yourself leave comments tell me how it's going for you and I'll

see you next time on ready jet cook you