Yesterday I made Panzer Lo Mein: a mix of plain restaurant Lo Mein and my own stuff. I plan to write a detailed photo-recipe but for now I just want to write about my observation on how they made the plain Lo Mein at the Chinese place.

I walked in to my local Chinese place and placed an order for small Plain Lo Mein. On the menu small was $2.50 and large was $4.25. I then stepped aside so I could observe on how the cook is doing the noodles. Moments passed but the cook has not started making my order, but when he did, I noticed that the first thing he did was to fill the wok with water, and then he rinsed it out and poured the water again in the wok. The next thing that he did was that he placed the noodles (I don't know if they were precooked) into a very large bowl with 2 handles, which I assume was heated because it was on the counter and steam was coming out of it. This bowl was huge, maybe around 36-inches in diameter and at least 12-inches deep. You can probably cook 3-4 babies in it or 2 dogs in that thing. The noodles were in that bowl for around 90 seconds. While noodles were in the bowl, the guy drained the wok from the water. The cook then used the utensil and placed the noodles from the bowl into the hot wok. The flames under the wok were really hot, the flame was around 14-inches high. From here the things started to turn very fast: the cook threw 2 spoonfulls of some white powdery stuff into wok and stirred it with the noodles, then he squirted in some brownish liquid into wok. At first I thought that it was the soy sauce, but the liquid was too watery and light, it looked to me like some watered-down wine vinegar. Maybe 10-15 seconds later he poured some dark-brownish viscuous liquid into the work, this was probably the soy sauce. The whole wok stir-frying process took less than 1 minute. No way I could do something like this at home with regular stove.