Long before there were food delivery services that could bring meals from your favorite restaurants to your door in just a few taps on your phone, there were mobile food vendors. These vendors traversed the many residential neighborhoods of Bangkok on pedal cargo tricycles, bringing all kinds of food to peopleās homes on the labyrinthine side streets of the city.
Many neighborhoods had several, so each of these lone chefs developed a sound and rhythm of their own to let customers know they were nearby. Some would bang two wooden sticks together; some would use a cowbell-like instrument; others had a song in the manner of an ice cream truck. To get their attention, you would stick your head out of your front gate and flag them down. The kitchen on wheels would park right outside the gate, and the chef would start preparing your lunch fresh as you waited.
Of all the itinerant vendors I remember from childhood, no one was better than the vendor who told us to call him Ah Pae (a Teochew Chinese term for uncle). While many vendors got their mass-produced noodles, fish balls, meatballs, and roast meats from the same factory, Ah Pae came from the generation of true artisan street vendors who made their own ingredients. His tricycle wasnāt just equipped with a large stockpot, divided into two sectionsāone for blanching the noodles and one for the simmering bone stockāit also came with a small shelf for an icebox full of marinated meat and a small charcoal grill for grilling the meat on the spot. I loved everything about Ah Paeās tricycle. I was certain that I wanted to grow up to be a vendor just like him. And even nowādecades laterāI still hunger for his signature dish: a tangle of garlicky egg noodles with smoky grilled chicken thighs.
Bami haeng, literally ādry egg noodles,ā is essentially a noodle salad, though itās not regardedāor referred toāas such in Thailand. Instead, itās generally seen as the brothless option that every noodle cart and shop offers alongside its soupy counterpart, bami nam, literally āwater (broth) egg noodles.ā The bowl of blanched egg noodles, lubricated with garlic oil, comes with blanched or fresh vegetables and thin slices of Chinese-style barbecued porkāor sometimes lump crabmeatāon top. It arrives at the table almost entirely unseasoned, with the expectation that you will season your own noodles to taste with fish sauce, granulated sugar, vinegar with sliced fresh chiles, dried red pepper flakes, and coarsely ground roasted peanuts. The fact that you have a lot of control over how your noodles taste and you can play around with different seasoning ratios depending on your mood is what makes dining out at casual noodle shops in Thailand fun. Even a quick lunch outside in the middle of a workday feels more like a fun event than a mundane routine.
Whenever I entertain friends at my home in the Chicago area, bami haeng is a hit. I turn my kitchen island into a salad bar, with a large bowl of blanched egg noodles doused with garlic oil, a platter of sliced roasted or grilled meat, and three or four rows of bowls containing various add-ins and seasoning ingredients. It may look like a lot of work, but itās not. And people love it! They go nuts experimenting with different combinations of add-ins. Itās a great way to serve one dish but make your guests feel like theyāre trying multiple options.
This noodle salad is also great for cookouts, but not without a modification. Egg noodles are the traditional noodle choice for a reason; when cooked and enjoyed fresh, theyāre fantastic. However, when cooked egg noodles have been sitting for a while, they tend to clump up despite a generous dousing of garlic oil, and regardless of how carefully you try to separate them into individual strands in order to toss them with other ingredients to make a salad, they break. The tender, chewy texture, which is what makes them a popular choice to begin with, is no longer there. Rice sticks, a.k.a. pad thai noodles, behave the same way, so theyāre not a suitable choice, either.
Enter our unlikely hero: instant ramen noodlesāthe less-than-a-dollar-a-package option that can be found at nearly every supermarket and gas station convenience store. Instant ramen noodles arenāt as starchy as fresh egg noodles, so they donāt clump up easily; they remain tender, chewy, wiggly, and bouncy for hours. Theyāre easy to cook in advance and transport; and theyāre just as delicious when at room temperatureāor even cold right out of the fridgeāas they are when hot.
All you have to do is cook the noodles in advance, thoroughly coat them with the garlic oil, and transport them in a container large enough to hold two or three times their volume, allowing room for other ingredients. The vegetables and toppings should be prepped in advance and transported in individual zip-top bags. The dressing can travel alone in an airtight container or a small mason jar. The proteināeasy grilled chicken thighs, in this caseāshould be marinated ahead and transported in a separate container to be grilled at the cookout. Boneless, skinless chicken thighs cook so quickly that by the time you lay out all the salad components on the picnic table, theyāre done. All thatās left to do is simply tossing everything together and serving the salad with sliced grilled chicken on top.
If youāre headed to a picnic where you wonāt be cooking on the spot, you can also grill the chicken beforehand, slice it, and arrange it on top of the dressed noodles in the same container. Once youāve picked a nice spot to lay your picnic blanket and get the plates and silverware out of the basket, youāre only seconds away from enjoying your mealāall it takes at this point is to throw in the lettuce and the toppings. Everything about this salad is quick and easy, with minimum mess and maximum flavor. I think even Ah Pae would approve.
