The BEST Duck Lo Mein You Will EVER Make | School of Wok

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Duck low mein. [music] So, let's slow braise duck with flash fried vegetables and bean sprouts over the top. Really simple cooking. Give it some love [music] and you will love this dish yourself. As with most Cantonese style dishes, we're going to start with our base core ingredients, ginger, garlic, spring onion. And I want to get a lot of flavor into the sauce.

[00:00:28]So, I've got a fair bit of spring onion here.

[00:00:32]First things first, we're going to blanch the duck legs and that's just to sort of get rid of the, you know, any excess sort of fatty impurities. Once the duck legs have been blanched, then just place them skin side down into your pan. You want to start on a relatively low heat and it will start to draw out the fat. Just to help it along, a tiny amount of oil will help that. And you're going to keep on this heat for about 2 to 3 minutes before you then add your ginger, garlic, and spring onion. So, now my duck sort of got this slight crisp outer edge of the skin. I'm just going to take all my ginger, garlic, and spring onion. You do want to allow the sort of duck fat to caramelize on the bottom of the pan a little bit. And also, more importantly, the the ginger and garlic and spring onion to sort of char a little on the edges.

[00:01:26]And that will add flavor to the dish.

[00:01:29]Now, it's time for the sauces and I'm going to go one by one and just start to build the sauces into this braising liquid. The first one here is just some hoisin sauce. So, that's going to add a lot of sweetness to the base flavor of this braising sauce.

[00:01:48]Oyster sauce, savory flavor. Notice I'm starting with the thicker ingredients. Brown sugar will work with that.

[00:02:00]And then the light soy and dark soy will lift all the flavor off the bottom of the pan. And what you want to do is scrape all that sort of stickiness off the bottom. That sugar will start to caramelize pretty quickly.

[00:02:18]So, you do need to keep sort of stirring this because with that sugar, it will start to stick.

[00:02:24]You're going to do this for good 2 to 3 minutes. My meat at the moment is skin side down so that that skin can take in as much of that flavor as possible. And I've got a whole bowl here of Shaoxing rice wine. I'm going to pour all of that in. And that's just sort of we're starting to add more liquid to pretty much cover the duck legs. Rice wine in.

[00:02:44]Bring that to a boil. Let that sort of alcohol bubble away a little bit. And then we're going to cover the rest with chicken stock. And you want to make sure all that meat is covered with stock or just top it up with water.

[00:02:57]So, bring that to a boil.

[00:02:59]And then turn the heat down to a simmer.

[00:03:01]Let it just simmer away without a lid on for a good at least 45 minutes. If not, push it to an hour and a half or 2 hours. I've got some sugar snaps and some sweetheart cabbage here. And I'm just going to use this to sort of layer like texture and a bit more veg and natural crunch over the noodles when I dish this up. And I've got my little mini wok clock of ingredients here. I've got these washed and picked bean sprouts that will add a whole load of crunch to the top of this lo mein.

[00:03:38]Wok clock's ready. Noodles ready. Duck's cooking. Simple. So, my duck >> [snorts] >> has had a good hour and you can see it's sort of sitting off the bone already. My sauce is pretty sort of thickened.

[00:03:53]And you should, in theory, be able to just wedge a fork into it and just start to shred the duck off the bone. The sauce itself is quite strong. So, I'm just going to sort of dip this meat into the sauce before then finishing off the noodle dish. And all the flavor of the noodles is going to come from that really sort of deep savory braising liquid.

[00:04:25]So, from here on in, it's really easy cuz your duck's ready, it's all done. To be honest, the whole dish is easy. It's a little bit of oil, smoking hot.

[00:04:34]Your noodles go in.

[00:04:37]Don't toss it too much cuz you want them to warm through nicely and get that sort of crisping. You don't want them crispy, just a a light crisping, if that makes sense. Once you got those dry-fried noodles and you can feel that they're nice and hot, then you can serve those out.

[00:04:57]So, I can go straight on to my wok clock of ingredients and I'll start with my cabbage. Cabbage in.

[00:05:08]Again, we're making this little nest of noodles and veg.

[00:05:14]Every layer cooked separately from my wok [music] clock.

[00:05:21]Smoking hot.

[00:05:26]Again, just flash fried.

[00:05:30]Because they're sliced so thinly, you want to keep their texture.

[00:05:37]Now, what I'm going to do is take my duck at this point before my bean sprouts.

[00:05:47]Just sit that into the center of my noodles.

[00:05:52]You can see my wok is smoking hot here, ready for my bean sprouts. Tiny amount of oil required for this.

[00:06:00]You want it to be this smoking hot cuz when your bean sprouts go in, you want to hear that sizzle.

[00:06:05]Flip that through a couple of times.

[00:06:08]Lay those nicely over the top.

[00:06:13]Nice and piled high.

[00:06:18]I should have used a bigger plate.

[00:06:20]But, that looks delicious.

[00:06:23]You know, I try to be as polite as possible when I'm eating it, but as you all know, that is not usually the case with me.

[00:06:33]Mhm.

[00:06:35]It's a great balance of sweet and salty. [music] You know, although when you taste the sauce just by itself, it could feel it would taste quite strong, but once it's wrapped around the noodles, it's just right. What's your favorite noodle dish? Let us know in the comments below.