Tim Chin is a professional cook and writer who has contributed to Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen. A graduate of The International Culinary Center, Tim has cooked at restaurants in New York and Boston, working at Rouge Tomate, Northern Spy, and BiSq.

Tim Chin

4 to 6 servings; about 700 g noodles (plus 100 g test batch of noodles)

Hor fun are thin, wide rice noodles that are perfect for stir-frying, and they’re the foundation for one of the most iconic dishes in Cantonese cuisine: <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/beef-chow-fun-gon-chow-ngau-ho">Beef Chow Fun</a>. Slightly porous, which makes them excellent at absorbing sauce, they’re also resilient enough to survive a spell in a ripping hot wok while retaining a pleasing chewiness, a perfect example of what Taiwanese call “Q” texture (basically, “al dente” for Asian people).You can buy hor fun noodles at any Chinese supermarket but making your own is worth the effort. Store-bought noodles tend to be brittle before cooking and mushy after, and they often get mangled during the cooking process. Making them from scratch isn’t complicated at all: Steam a thin layer of batter made from a combination of rice flour and tapioca starch until the starches fully gelatinize to produce smooth, slippery noodles with no hint of graininess. (The process is nearly identical to making <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/wheat-starch-noodles-liangpi">liang pi</a>.)Straight out of the steamer, these noodles might appear almost too chewy. But once they’re boiled in a soup or stir fried in a sauce, they hydrate further and soften slightly. Just make sure you make enough, since you’ll want to have these noodles in everything.

Hor Fun Noodles