Recipe: Kata Yakisoba / Fried Noodles with Real Fried Noodles (Patreon)

I *love* regular yakisoba/fried noodles. But even more I love kata-yakisoba/deep fried noodles. They sell pre-deep fried noodles here in Japan, but I don't know if you can get them where you are. So here's the fry your own noodle version.

I've been experimenting with this for years. I don't particularly like deep frying anything (so much oil, so expensive). So I just use the noodles from a regular yakisoba package and crisp them up with a couple spoonfuls of oil in a fry pan.

Here's what the pre-deep fried noodles look like.

They come in thin, medium, and thick-sized noodles. So if you can get something like these or a Chinese fried noodle variety that would be perfect and easy as well.

Or you can just crunchy up your own noodles using a package of regular yakisoba. I found one with English on it.

The first wonderful thing about this dish (officially called ankake kata yakisoba in Japanese - ankake is the thick sauce you pour on top) is you can top the noodles with ANYTHING. You can go all veggie, or seafood, chicken, or sliced pork and veggie like I did. Kind of like a stir fry, you can be as creative as you dare.

So with this recipe I used all three bags of noodles (for two people) and then made enough of the topping for last night's dinner and had some left over to put over rice the today. 

For the (anything goes) topping: 

4 shiitake (sliced) -- any kind of mushroom works well, I think

2 green bell peppers -- Japan's are tiny

1 red pepper -- actually, I probably used 1/2, super expensive

1/2 carrot

1/4 head of cabbage -- Chinese cabbage or hakusai is also good 

1 onion (forgot to put in photo) - long onions, spring onions, any onions also okay

Some baby corn -- "young corn" in Japanese!

※Again practically everything goes well in this dish. Bamboo shoots, kamaboko fish cakes, quail eggs, even broccoli if you add near the end so it doesn't cook too long

Then cut up like this:

Before I stir fried that, I mixed today sauce below in a bowl. 

Sauce: 

1 cup and a 1/2 of chicken stock (or your favorite stock)

2 tablespoons cooking saké  -- or sherry, what have you, I used some Chinese cooking wine

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

grated ginger -- as much as you like, I used about a tablespoon

a little salt and pepper to taste

For later: 

2 teaspoons of potato (or corn) starch to thicken, add it to some water to dissolve 

sesame oil (just a little for flavor)

---

*First, mix all the sauce ingredients together except potato starch in a bowl. Set aside.

*Then stir fry up all the veggies. Add meat or seafood, too. 

Marinating Meat Note: 

Some recipes have you marinate the meat before hand, but Japanese sliced pork is so thin it just absorbs the flavors easily, so I didn't. But if you want to you can marinate meat in 1 teaspoon sake, 1teaspoon sesame oil, sprinkle of salt, some grated ginger, 1 tablespoon of potato starch -- mix thoroughly and let rest in fridge while you are cutting up veggies or longer). 

Here's some thinly sliced pork. I used about 300 grams. Would have used shrimp, too, except the tiny supermarket we went to smelled like low tide and I've had near off fish from their before, so... no shrimp. 

After everything is nicely cooked, add the bowl of sauce. 

Next, in a different fry pan add about 2~3 tablespoons of oil and heat. Take the noodles and breakup slightly and place them in the pan. Fry those puppies up to the level of crispy you like. 

I lightly salted and peppered my noodles. You probably don't have to do this. 

So, one recipe I watched had you mush them down and completely crisp up one side. Then slide that out onto a plate, flip it and crisp up the other side. 

I sort of used tongs to mix up the noodles, hoping for an all around crunchy noodles. 

Looking something like this. Again, brown those noodles to taste! 

Toward the end spoon in one or two teaspoons of sesame oil to add a nice fragrance.

I divided these in half and put on plates. Heated back up the stir fry topping, tasting to make sure it was flavorful enough. Think I added a little salt. 

Once the liquid boils, I added the potato starch and water mixture (stirring first to make sure it was dissolved) and mixed well until it turned into a thick sauce and coated everything nicely. 

Then topped the noodles. I had a lot so saved about half to put over rice the next day. 

This is how mine turned out. Topped with sesame seeds, of course! 

Here are some scrumptious versions for inspiration.

Squid, shrimp, scallops, the dark brown is a wood ear mushrooms (kikurage), and carrots cut like little saws. 

Here we have a bit of the same but using chingensai or bok choy for green.

With shimeji mushrooms and it looks like minced meat instead of sliced. 

You can always add garlic or make it spicy, too.