Bacon & Soy Sauce Spaghetti (Hokkien Mee Pasta)

Author Notes

One of my favorite comfort meals in Malaysia is a noodle dish known as Hokkien mee. While not as famous to the rest of the world as its noodly brethren like char kuey teow or wonton noodles, like many Malaysians, I’ve craved this more times than any other hawker dish out there. It’s the sleeper hit of Southeast Asian noodles if there ever was one.

The dish itself is made with wheat or egg noodles coated in a slick, sweet-and-salty soy sauce-based gravy, tossed together with slices of pork belly, prawns, cabbage leaves, and bits of crispy pork lard. (Note: there exists two wildly different versions of Hokkien mee. People from the Northern states of Malaysia refer to a soupy, prawn noodle dish as Hokkien mee. But the version I know and love is this soy sauce-based Kuala Lumpur version.)

While I’m big on sharing the flavors of Asia with the world, a lot of dishes — Malaysian ones especially — are built upon specific local ingredients, or require a particular set of tools and techniques which most people, myself included, don’t possess. And this is definitely true for Hokkien mee. The traditional version is made with thick, bouncy, wheat noodles or egg noodles that are barely found outside of Asia. And the best Hokkien mee are cooked over the fiery flames of a jet burner hawker stove, in a wok seasoned by thousands of nights of cooking, giving it a char and character like no other. So, disappointing as it is, it’s probably impossible to replicate the dish to a tee in the average home kitchen.

Having said that however, I came up with a home cook-friendly version recipe to get you 90%, maybe 95% of the way there! It’s made with ingredients available in most parts of the world, and it follows the typical way of putting together a plate of Hokkien mee, with a few key changes to the classic.

First, instead of using traditional Asian wheat noodles, I made it with pasta. I used spaghetti as it is most similar in shape to the Hokkien mee noodles, but any long, noodly pasta would work. And don’t get mad at me, but the pasta has to be overcooked. Al dente pasta won’t work as well here, because overcooking the pasta will fully hydrate it, allowing it to absorb more of the sauce, which leads to tastier, softer strands of noodles, bringing it closer to the much more tender, yielding texture of the original noodles.

Another key change is instead of having to cook it in a wok over a too-hot-to-handle fire, this recipe is frying pan-friendly! Yes, you won’t get quite the same smokiness and char from a searing-hot wok, but to make up for this, I replaced the pork belly slices with smoky bacon. By starting off the cooking process with some bacon-frying, you can get a certain smoky, Maillard reaction going, lending more depth to the eventual dish.

One thing that is inescapable though, is making the crispy pork lard bits — the final garnish to every plate of Hokkien mee. While you can technically omit it, or replace it with crispy bacon, I think its crackly crisp texture and bursts of fatty richness elevates the dish to a whole other level. So if you can spare an extra 20 to 30 minutes rendering down bits of chopped up pork lard, letting it fry in its own fat until golden — don’t worry, you can do this easily in a saucepan, and it’s all detailed in the recipe below — you’ll be greatly rewarded.

So while the classic fast and furious, wok-fried, hawker-style Hokkien mee might be a challenge to recreate at home, with this recipe, hopefully it’ll edge you towards trying it out, falling head over heels with it, eventually turning this sleeper hit into a blockbuster classic! —Jun