Flaky, oily scallion pancakes are one of the great joys of going out for Chinese food. I like them enough that I’ve been known to make them at home. Occasionally. To distribute the scallions throughout the pancake and get the feathery layers, you have to use a fiddly rolling method: You roll out the wheat-flour dough into a circle; brush it with oil and sprinkle it with scallions; roll it up into a cigar shape; coil it into a spiral; and roll it flat again. Even after you master it, which takes many tries, it’s slow. It’s a lot of work for a snack, which is why I usually leave it to the professionals.
There are lots of simplified scallion pancake recipes floating around, but all the ones I’ve tried miss the point. Most have you mix minced or puréed scallions into a batter and cook them like regular pancakes. The result is very green and tastes like a breakfast flapjack with scallions in it. I saw one recipe where you begin with flour tortillas. This was not tempting.
The other day, however, I was rummaging through the fridge and thinking about dinner, and I decided to make a pan-fried noodle cake, something of a Chinese-American classic. I boiled fresh Chinese egg noodles and tossed them with scallions, then threw all the noodles into a large skillet and fried them in peanut oil, pressing down with a spatula so they’d adhere into a cake. When the noodles were browned, I cut the cake into pie wedges and topped it with stir-fried cabbage, red peppers, and shrimp. Everyone agreed that it was a good dish and that the noodle cake was the best part.
“You could put in more scallions and make smaller noodle cakes, and it would be like scallion pancakes,†suggested my wife, Laurie, who is the idea person in the family. I tried it the next day, and there was nothing to it: I boiled the noodles for two minutes, drained them, tossed them with lots of sliced scallions, and arranged them in the hot skillet (nonstick or cast-iron, please!) in four-inch circles—well, sort of circles. You know those imported, dried fettuccine that come in little bird’s-nest shapes? That’s what the noodle cakes looked like before I flattened them. They cooked about five minutes per side over medium heat. My daughter and I ate them for an afternoon snack.
There are two kinds of Chinese egg noodles at my local supermarket: a spaghetti-like noodle and a linguine-like one. I liked the linguine better, but both worked well. For a dipping sauce, I like to mix chile-garlic sauce, soy sauce, chicken broth, and rice wine vinegar.
Two caveats: First, get the cooked noodles into the frying pan quickly or they’ll stick together. You can’t toss the noodles with sesame oil to prevent sticking, because then they’ll never hold together in a pancake. Second, many scallions will fall out and end up kicking around loose in the pan. That’s just how it goes.
I’ll be making these again. Sure, they’re a little greasy, but so are real scallion pancakes.
(This originally appeared on Gourmet.com, but I moved it here for editorial reasons that are, trust me, boring.)
