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Maritime Southeast Asia · Volume 45, The Mortar, the Wok and the Roti Board

Char kway teow

Penang and Singapore, Teochew and Hokkien hawker

Char kway teow, flat rice noodles wok-fried with egg, prawns, cockles and Chinese sausage: a dark plate of glossy, charred flat rice noodles studded with pink prawns, dark cockles, slices of red Chinese sausage and scrambled egg.

Illustration

Time
30 minutes

Penang's version omits the sweet dark soy Singapore's leans on, staying lighter and drier with a stronger showing of pure wok hei; Singapore's is sweeter, moister, and rarely served without blood cockles, an ingredient the dish's Teochew ancestor in Chaoshan never used, a genuinely Straits-specific addition.

As tradition built it

Serves 2, fried one portion at a time. The prawns soak 30 minutes first.

Ingredients

The chilli paste

  • 28 g dried red chillies, seeded and soaked
  • 2 fresh red chillies, seeded
  • 3 small shallots, sliced
  • optional 2 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 1 tsp oil
  • a pinch salt

The sauce

  • 5 tbsp light soy sauce
  • 1½ tbsp dark soy sauce
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • ½ tsp fish sauce
  • a scant ½ tsp salt
  • 2 dashes white pepper

The noodles

  • 12 prawns, shelled
  • 2 tbsp sugar, for the prawn water
  • as needed iced water
  • 454 g fresh flat rice noodles, loosened
  • 454 g, in shell blood cockles, shelled
  • a bunch bean sprouts, picked and rinsed
  • a bunch Chinese chives, in 5 cm lengths
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 4 tbsp oil, plus a little for the eggs
  • 2 eggs

Method

Before you fry

  1. Hold the prawns in iced water with the 2 tbsp sugar for 30 minutes.
  2. Mix the sauce ingredients well.
  3. Blend the chilli paste ingredients fine. Fry the paste in the teaspoon of oil until fragrant and set it aside.

Each portion

  1. Heat a clean wok over the highest heat until it smokes, and keep the flame high throughout.
  2. Add 2 tbsp oil and half the garlic and stir quickly.
  3. Add 6 prawns straight from the iced water. Stir until they begin to change colour.
  4. Add half the bean sprouts, then at once half the noodles and 2½ tbsp of the sauce. Stir hard to blend.
  5. Push the noodles aside and add a little oil. Crack in an egg, break the yolk and stir it into the white.
  6. Flip the noodles over the egg and wait 15 seconds.
  7. Add about ½ tbsp chilli paste and half the cockles. Fry a few seconds more, until the egg is cooked.
  8. Add half the chives, stir twice, and plate at once.
  9. Repeat for the second portion.

Notes

The recipe is Chang Pick Yin's, a cook who grew up in Penang and Kuala Lumpur. Grace at Nyonya Cooking adds Chinese sausage and fish cake, oyster sauce, no cockles, and serves it with sambal belacan and lime; Ohbin in Kuala Lumpur fries in oil or lard with sausage and oyster sauce. Sin Chew Daily writes that Penang seasons mainly with light soy and fish sauce, with little dark soy, over charcoal and with duck egg. None of the sources is Singaporean.

What a modern chef changes

Clarified pork fat, and cockles added back only at the last toss

Rung 4

Method

  1. Accept rung four's honest limit rather than fight it: no home setup, Big Green Egg included, will produce a hawker stall's wok hei, so put the effort instead into the noodle and the fat.
  2. Render pork fat separately and clarify it, so the frying fat itself carries no burnt milk solids to compete with the noodle's char, and cook the cockles apart, briefly, in the same fat, adding them back only at the very last toss, so they arrive barely warmed through rather than rubberised by the noodle's longer cooking time.
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