New Year New Dish!
Live from 2021, it’s the Return of the Rahul, this time with a mushroom lo mein in hand!
Hello everyone, we finally made it to 2021! Congrats! This year was eventful (to say the least), and it’s not like all the issues around the globe have suddenly disappeared as of January 1st, but hopefully with three approved vaccines, we can finally see hints of the light at the end of the tunnel. Anyways, I bet you, dear reader, are sick of the recaps of 2020, so I’ll add nothing more except toss in a recommendation for Death to 2020 on Netflix, made by the creators of Black Mirror!
As some of you may know, the second half of 2020 was filled with a major transition in my life, namely from living at home doing schoolwork online to a real job at Tesla in Palo Alto, California! This involved nothing short of a cross-country move from the East Coast to West Coast filled with uncertainty and excitement alike as I began a new phase of my life out in the SF Bay Area. Needless to say, my cooking adventures took a backseat, but I am thrilled to mark the blog’s grand return in 2021 with one of my favorite dishes: the wild mushroom lo mein from the iconic Myers+Chang restaurant in Boston’s South End!
I got this recipe from the restaurant’s cookbook, and chose it because it’s my family’s favorite dish by far at the restaurant itself! Not only is the restaurant itself quite famous in the Boston area, but one of its founders, Joanne Chang, is basically a celebrity in the culinary world: alongside Myers+Chang, she founded the iconic Flour Bakery chain across Massachusetts, and even beat Bobby Flay at his own game with Flour’s notorious sticky buns. I personally think she is nothing short of legendary, and with how this dish turned out, my opinion has not changed.
The ingredients for the mushroom lo mein are pretty simple, but can be daunting if you have limited experience cooking East Asian food (like myself). The sauce is the most complex part of the dish, featuring soy sauce, black Chinkiang vinegar, toasted sesame oil, ground black pepper, and a bit of cornstarch, none of which I’d cooked with before extensively! Once you get past that, however, the recipe becomes very similar to a traditional Italian pasta or traditional Chinese noodle dish, not that I’d had much experience with those either. 😂
The next steps are perhaps the most important and have to do with the mushrooms themselves. You toss the mushrooms together with mint, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then heat it in a wok for a few minutes. I must say, these grilled mushrooms are quite good on their own even without the lo mein! Once they’re made, all you need to do is mix up the mushrooms with the sauce from before and some boiled lo mein (as well as some leeks in canola oil), and you’re pretty much done!
The final step to this delicious dish is to stir up a small miso paste and unsalted butter mixture to give the food some more texture. Something I wish I had known before shopping for ingredients is that in many grocery stores, miso paste is labeled as “soybean paste”, so if you can’t find miso by its name, you are probably not out of luck at all and should look for soybean paste instead! That simple tip would have saved me 20 minutes at Super 88… 😬
Regardless, the dish was delicious! While I do not claim to cook anywhere near the level of the chefs at Myers+Chang, I would feel confident taking this dish to a potluck or cooking for friends (in a vaccinated era, of course). It tastes a lot more like an Italian pasta in terms of texture but definitely more East Asian in taste alone, which makes for an incredibly flavorful combination. If you are able and curious, I would highly recommend buying a copy of the restaurant cookbook! The recipe for this dish is on Page 200 of the print version of the book.
The original recipe calls for some additional ingredients that I ended up not using, including water chestnuts and radicchio. The only modification I would suggest to the recipe is to go light on the salt when preparing the mushrooms, as it is surprisingly easy to over-salt them. Regardless, I am super thrilled to finally be back in the kitchen and blogging in 2021! I’m not sure what’s up next, but if you have any ideas, drop me a DM!
