Hello hi everyone! Welcome back to Wesley here. Today we’re diving back into our series dedicated to the wonderful weird world of Asian fusion foods with a request from the r/gifrecipes subreddit for a wok fried garlic noodle. For those not familiar, the concept of “garlic noodles” appears throughout MANY different food cultures, including but not limited to Chinese cuisine (it is, after all, not a very complicated concept). This of course gives us an endless amount of leeway for creative interpretation, so, for our version today, I’ll be drawing some inspiration from the Italian pasta dish “Pasta Aglio e Olio,” or more colloquially, pasta with garlic and olive oil (you may also recognize this as the pantry pasta dish from the movie “Chef”). 

This dish is most iconically done with spaghetti, red chili flake, parsley, and a whooole bunch of garlic that has been cooked on low heat in olive oil for an aromatic finish. For our version today, we’ll be borrowing this low and slow technique for our garlic, but then swapping in a few classic elements that you’ll likely recognize from more traditional Chinese wok cooking, which are some dry toasted Tian Jin peppers and Sichuan peppercorn (in lieu of our red chili flake), some thinly sliced green onions (in lieu of our parsley), some toasted sesame oil (in lieu of our olive oil) and finally, some super thin fresh noodles that we’re gonna wok fry for a wonderfully crispy quality that you’ll likely recognize from a lot of classic Chinese take out. Hope you try it.

It will be out on Friday November 19, 2021, so bookmark the recipe here, and be sure to subscribe and hit the bell on YouTube to get notified when it’s out!

Woo Can Cook is a series where we reproduce fun foods and recipes from my childhood. Some of them are authentically Chinese and/or pan-Asian, but a lot of them are odd Americanized versions that I inherited from my parents and grandparents while growing up in the Bay Area/California.

We're live streaming every Tues/Thurs at 6:30PM PST, with new recipes out every Friday!