MORE FUN THAN HOR FUN

Beef with hor fun noodles is a great dish, the slippery rice noodles darkly stained with rich soy sauce. But you can’t always get fresh rice noodles, so here’s what to do.

If you’ve been to Chinatown, you’ve probably had beef hor fun, or chow fun. It’s one of the simplest, meatiest noodle dishes in the Cantonese kitchen, and long a stalwart of Singaporean hawker stalls.

Its main claim to fame is a combination of massive savouriness and slipperiness.  The beef is marinated in cornflour, rice wine and soy, which gives it a silken quality, and the fresh rice noodles soak up the soy and oyster sauce until they look positively lacquered. Or French-polished, at least.

A mix of light and dark soy is best for balance: you want the saltiness of light soy sauce, but the gorgeous dark noodle-staining colour of dark soy.

Traditional recipes for beef hor fun use a lot of ‘cooked-oil’ (often lard), that has been heated and cooled, and very few extras. Feel free to disagree. I play down the oil and add whatever I feel like.

Gai laan is great in this, finely sliced into lengths on the diagonal so it cooks faster, or Chinese cabbage, shredded.  Garlic chives, also perfect.

Dried mushrooms, soaked and sliced. Or swap out the beef for fresh mushrooms, why not?

Dried shrimp, because dried shrimp is so fabulous, like polite blachan.

Canned Chinese preserved radish, oh so good. Just a tablespoon, rinsed first.

Ginger is a nice addition, cut into slivers, BUT HAVE YOU SEEN THE PRICE OF GINGER LATELY? I escorted my ginger back to its supermarket shelf from the check-out counter, thereby saving myself $11.

As for the noodles, I have a good cheat for those who can’t source fresh rice noodles. I always have those squiggly white udon noodles from the supermarket in the cupboard for spontaneous miso soups and salmon bowls – and now for this.  They’re not even rice noodles, but wheat.  Not hor fun, but more fun.

If you do have access to fresh rice noodles, just pour boiling water over them, squiggle them apart with chopsticks, then drain and rinse under cold water before using.

Finally, get everything ready before you start cooking. Not just the ingredients ready to go, but the warm bowls, the chopsticks, the music, the wine and the people.

More fun than hor fun

Serves  2

200 g eye fillet, rump or sirloin

4 spring onions, cut into 5 cm lengths

200 g udon noodles, ready to go

2 tbsp vegetable oil

200 g bean sprouts, rinsed

1 tsp sesame seeds

Marinade:

1 tsp cornflour

1 tbsp Chinese rice wine

1 tsp sesame oil

2 tbsp light soy sauce

Cooking sauce:

2 tbsp oyster sauce

2 tbsp dark soy

1 tsp sugar

MIX the cornflour, rice wine, sesame oil and soy sauce together for the marinade.

SLICE the beef finely across the grain and toss in the marinade. Leave for 20 minutes.

MIX the oyster sauce, dark soy and sugar together for the cooking sauce, add a dash of water to lighten, and set aside.

POUR boiling water over the noodles, gently jiggle with chopsticks to separate, and drain.

HEAT 2 tbsp of oil in the wok or frypan.

ADD the beef and its marinade and half the spring onions and toss well over high heat for 1 minute until the beef starts to change colour. Remove to a warm plate.

ADD the noodles to the pan and let them char for a few seconds on the base, then add the bean shoots, tossing well.

ADD the cooking sauce, tossing well until the noodles are dark and glossy, then return the meat and remaining spring onions to the pan and toss to heat through.

SCATTER with sesame seeds and serve hot.

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Thanks for reading – feel free to add a comment, share with a friend, or hit subscribe for more Jill Dupleix Eats in your inbox every Thursday. 

And special thanks to my right-hand man, Terry Durack, for going along with what he considers to be an appalling compromise in noodle purity. He’s the one who usually goes into Chinatown and searches for a block of uncut rice noodle that is still warm and fresh, and hasn’t been refrigerated. Which is great, but sometimes you’ve just finished work and you’re really hungry and you have to get dinner on the table in the time it takes to twist the cap off a bottle of wine.

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I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands and waters upon which I work, live, cook and play; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I fully support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to be enshrined in Australia’s Constitution. It’s about time, folks.