Easy Chicken Chow Mein {One Pot} (2024)

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This delicious Chicken Chow Mein recipe is super quick and easy – a dream of a family friendly one pot stir fry. Rustle it up in about 20 minutes and you’ve got a nutritious fakeaway noodle dinner with those scrumptious Chinese-inspired flavours.

Welcome to another favourite takeaway one pot dinner, made at home – Chinese Style Chicken Chow Mein.

Technically we need a couple of extra bowls in the mix when preparing this easy Chicken Chow Mein recipe (one for mixing the sauce and one for soaking the noodles), but it’s still definitely a one pot meal as it all gets cooked in just one pan.

It’s also unbelievably easy to make and delicious.

Why you’ll love this Chicken Chow Mein recipe

⭐️ Better than a takeaway – healthier, cheaper, quicker

⭐️ Super speedy and simple store cupboard ingredients

⭐️ A one pot midweek saviour!

About Chicken Chow Mein

The origins of a traditional centuries-old Chow Mein dish come from China, where it was a ‘chaomian’.

It’s a dish that includes stir fried noodles, vegetables and usually meat, with chicken being the most common.

The dish travelled across to America with Chinese settlers, where it became the dish we know well today (‘chow’ meaning stir-fried and ‘mein’ meaning noodles), although food historians have noted that the flavours and style of the dish does vary around the United States these days.

This version of the recipe is very simplified, but if you fancy trying out a more authentic Cantonese Chow Mein, take a look at this recipe from the blog Made with Lau.

How we came up with this version:

In the first version of this recipe we tried prepped all of the veggies from scratch, but after the next test with the shop-bought prepped ingredients (we used the one from Aldi), we weren’t looking back.

It does have sweetcorn kernels in it, which wouldn’t be my first choice for the recipe, but for us it was worth it for the time saved on lots of chopping.

Of course, if you’d prefer to prepare your own veg for this recipe, go ahead (see instructions below).

We also tested with less soy and oyster sauce, as this sauce can be quite salty, BUT in the end we opted for more as it gives that classic takeaway colour and tang.

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Chicken Chow Mein Ingredients

For the sauce:

• Cornflour
• Soft dark brown sugar
• Garlic – this can be fresh or from a jar
• Dark soy sauce
• Oyster sauce
• Chicken stock

‌For the stir fry:

• Sunflower oil
• Chicken breast
• Chinese 5 spice
• Stir fry veg bag – Or separately prepared veg (see below)
• Dry noodles

How to make Chicken Chow Mein

1. Mix the sauce ingredients together in a bowl and set aside. Place the noodles in a bowl with boiling water to soak.

2. Fry the chicken in hot oil and 5 spice as per the recipe below.

3. Add in the vegetables until softened.

See Also

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4. Stir in the sauce and coat the ingredients before adding your noodles in.

Substitutions

• Vegetarian: You can replace the chicken with a protein alternative if you want to make it a veggie dish. Also swap the stock to vegetable.
• Stir fry veg: You can choose a bag of whatever you’d prefer in it. Some supermarkets offer a choice. Anything that stir fries in about 5-10 minutes is ideal.

Top tip

Prepping your own vegetables

If you can’t get a bag of stir fry veg, replace it with:

• 1 medium carrot, sliced into batons
• 1 red pepper, sliced
• 1 green pepper, sliced
• 1/2 cabbage, shredded
• 150g bean sprouts

FAQs