Chicken and Mushroom Sauced Noodles With Thai Basil

In a lot of noodle shops in China, there’s a choice between soup noodles and sauced noodles. While I usually gravitate toward soup noodles during cold weather, there's something very comforting about sauced noodles, where each strand is coated in a complex savory sauce that flavors the entire dish. This recipe—with its thick gravy, umami mushrooms, and garlicky chicken—has everything I look for in sauced noodles: spice, sweetness, and savoriness, all elements coaxed out by the layering of flavors. 

The sauce itself consists of tian mian jiang (sweet bean sauce) and red miso. The combination of these two fermented sauces, one sweeter and one savory, makes for complex, multilayered flavor—a technique that is the basic principle behind a traditional northern Chinese dish zhajiangmian.

This dish is equally inspired by Thai pad krapow, spicy minced chicken stir-fry tossed with holy basil. I’ve always had it served over rice, and it’s one of my favorite dishes to cook at home because of how quickly it comes together. Here, as in krapow, the aromatics from Thai chile and garlic infuse the meat and add a brightness that punctuates the rich sauce. 

A note on substitutions: You can use ground chicken instead of thighs, but chopping the thighs yourself will give you meat that’s more succulent and juicy. You can use regular soy sauce instead of dark. And if you don’t have or can’t find tian mian jiang, substitute hoisin sauce and omit the additional sugar. —Betty Liu