Char Kuay Teow

Looking for a quick and simple dish for lunch or dinner? You can whip up this hawker style stir fry hor fun in no time with just a few ingredients from your fridge. The key to the success of this dish is the wok flavoured hor fun noodles and the egg cracked in the last moment to combine the dish together. 

Char Kuay Teow means fried rice noodles, it is a stir fry Chinese inspired rice noodle dish with origins from Singapore and Malaysia and has grown popular with locals over the years to become a classic stir fried dish. 

Growing up in Singapore, this dish is one of many readily available in hawker stores. The good ones usually have long queues and you know you are in for a good feed. Traditionally, they are fried with cockles but overtime with the public being more health conscious cockles are now often omitted from the dish. They key components to this dish besides the hor fun are lup cheong (chinese sausage), egg omelette with sweet sauce.  

My girls enjoyed hot food so they loved how the dish is served piping hot with their favourite protein of choice. They loved the fresh hor fun noodles which is now readily accessible from Chinese supermarkets such as the Sunlit chain supermarkets in Australia. It is also a very versatile dish where you can change the protein from prawns to chicken.

So the key components of the dish are:

• Hor fun – Fresh rice noodles available in Chinese supermarkets. You can beat fresh but you can substitute it with dry rice noodles that have been rejuvenated by boiling it or soaking it in hot water. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions. These dry rice noodles are found readily available in most Asian section of the supermarket isles.
• Prawns – This is our protein of choice. We have recently discovered frozen Australia wild caught prawns which is handy to have in the freezer. They are of lovely size, firm and sweet. 
• Fish Cake – Available in most supermarkets nowadays, this fish cake is made up of fish minced and mixed with a starch ingredient and fried till golden. We have them in our freezer and we defrost the fish cake for stir fry dishes or put it in noodle soup.
• Lup Cheong (Chinese sausage) – this is made up of pork and pork fat that has been smoked, sweetened and cured for some time. Like all sausages they taste different and we are lucky to get our chinese sausage from a family friend in Sydney. Apparently, its restaurant quality.
• Bean sprouts – For that extra bit of crunch in the dish, toss in fresh plump bean sprouts to get that springy bite when you eat into your hor fun. Also readily available from supermarkets, I sourced mine from Coles supermarket and while a bit more expensive. My girls don’t mind the bean spouts and growing up in Singapore, my parents cooked some classic home made dishes with them. I still remembered the taste.
• Chives/Spring onions – Of course, to add that colour into the dish, we must have chives or alternatively spring onions. Available in most grocery stores, they are alway handy to have in the fridge. Great for omelette, to spruce up your soup and just good old stir-fry dishes. 
• Eggs – last but not least the egg. You don’t have to whipped it up before you throw it into the wok, all you have to do is cracked it in. If you love your eggs like our family do, you can be generous and throw in two eggs. The key trick is to coat the eggs with the ingredients that are all in the wok and combined them together like a dream team.

Let’s talk about the sauces which make this dish come alive.

• Soya sauce – my family go to soya sauce is the Kikkoman soya sauce which is ironically made in Singapore. How cool is that! Nowadays, Kikoman soya sauce is readily available in most grocery stores but they are slightly more affordable in Woolworths. These soya sauces has that deep flavour due to the way the sauce has been processed. 
• Oyster sauce – we get the Lee Kum Kee premium oyster sauce which is a tad expensive than others but hey the flavour is the bomb! Also available in most grocery stores but slightly cheaper in Woolworths.
• Kecap Manis sweet soya sauce – growing up this is the brand we use and that is the ABC kecap manis sweeet sauce and we still love it. A little 275ml bottle goes a long way and makes a great dipping sauce fried spring rolls, pan fried radish cake and more. 
• Fish Sauce – now this is quite a pungent sauce but it does gives this dish a but of extra umami and we have been gifted the good ones from friends and I tell you a bottle of that can last a long time. Living in Australia, we use the Squid brand fish sauce also available in major supermarkets.

We hope you have fun making this dish and its quick and easy meal for all. We will probably get the older girls to give it a go and will let you know how we go. Enjoy!