Easy & Addictive Asian Garlic Noodles Recipe (2024)

29 Mar 2020

137 Comments

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I shared this easy pantry dish last week on IG stories and have heard SO much tasty feedback from you guys! It’s quickly become a comfort dish for us, so I love hearing that many of your families including little ones have lapped it up and requested it again. This is inspired by the garlic noodles that I’ve only been able to find at crawfish / seafood boil restaurants – these restaurants often have mixed cultural influences, so it’s no surprise they came up with a tasty fusion dish involving buttery, garlicky noodles with subtle Asian flavors.

This was Nick’s best attempt using what we had in our kitchen, so adjust the toppings and ratios per your tastes and based on what you have on hand. We used shrimp that we had in the freezer, but I’ve loved seeing your renditions with either mushrooms, spinach, fish, bacon, sausage, or served alone with a glass of wine – yum!

For more easy meal ideas, check out our past Extra (Ap)Petite recipe posts!

ANOLON NONSTICK FRYING PANS (love these)

Print Recipe

4.82 from 550 votes

EXTRA (AP)PETITE: ADDICTIVE GARLIC NOODLES

Servings: 2 people

Ingredients

Half a box or 8 oz of pasta*
Approximately 6 cloves of garlic minced
1 to 2 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil

For the sauce

1 Tbsp oyster sauce**
1 tsp soy or fish sauce***
1 Tbsp brown sugar

For toppings

Chopped scallions
Parmesan cheese
Optional: Drizzle of sesame oil, black pepper, Trader Joe’s chili onion crunch hot sauce

Instructions

Cook pasta per box instructions in lightly salted water, and set aside a little pasta water in a bowl for later. Drain the pasta, rinse under cold water to avoid clumping and set aside.
While pasta is cooking, chop up and heat the garlic in a large pan with the olive oil and butter over low-medium heat for 5 – 10 minutes, until garlic softens and is fragrant. It’s important to cook the garlic slowly on heat that isn’t too high, to avoid burning the garlic. You can let it sit in the pan and don’t need to constantly sauté it – maybe just stir once every few minutes. The goal is to infuse the garlic flavor into the butter and oil.
Note: if you’re including shrimp or other seafood, season it separately then simply sauté it in the garlic oil..S et your cooked seafood aside to mix in later.
Mix up the sauce in a separate small bowl. Soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar, and optional fish sauce.
Add noodles to the pan once the garlic is done sautéing, while keeping the heat on. Toss the noodles, garlic, sauce mixture and scallions. Add in a little of the saved pasta water to help everything mix smoothly.
Top with grated parmesan cheese and an optional drizzle of sesame oil and chilis!

Notes

Personally I like these noodles lightly sauced so you can taste the garlic and cheese more, but several of you mentioned doubling the sauce recipe – never hurts to have extra on hand!

* Pasta: Now that we’ve made this several times, it worked best with thinner (DeCecco linguini fini was so good for this!) or flat noodles where the garlic flavor and sauce sticks better. In these photos, we only had bucatini which is a thicker, hollow noodle so it didn't work as well. For any box pasta I would highly recommend anything DeCecco brand though!

** Oyster sauce is in a lot of Asian cooking for adding savoriness and depth, and can be found at most Asian grocery stores or at the international aisles of regular groceries. You can substitute hoisin sauce, but since that's sweeter, I’d reduce the brown sugar by maybe half. Some have also subbed Worcestershire sauce mixed with soy sauce.

*** Soy and fish sauce will each add a different type of saltiness to the dish, so you can use whichever you prefer or a mix. I love fish sauce on noodles so add 1 tsp in addition to the soy!