Seafood Bird Nest (Mì Xào Giòn Hải Sản)

Seafood bird nest or Mi Xao Gion is a dish that you will most likely find in high-end Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants. It’s a tender, flavorful seafood and vegetable stir fry, served on a bed of crispy fried egg noodles that resembles a bird’s nest.

But you don’t need to go to a fancy restaurant to enjoy this. It requires a bit of preparation, mainly cutting up vegetables, but you can cook prep and cook up this dish at home in under an hour.

The seafood and vegetables are precooked separately then stir-fried together in a flavorful dark sauce with garlic, shallots and ginger.

The typical seafood for Mi Xao Gion includes squid (or similarly cuttlefish and calamari), shrimp and scallops. If you are not a fan of seafood, you can also replace the protein with beef, pork, chicken and tofu for a vegetarian option.

Make sure to clean the seafood properly and give it time to marinate. Since I already have a pot of oil for deep-frying the noodles, I also deep fry the seafood for that fried flavor. Dust it with corn starch starch and deep fry until just opaque. No need to cook the seafood all the way through. It will continue to cook in the stir fry. An overcooked shrimp, calamari or scallop gets rubbery and tough. No bueno.

The typical vegetables are a colorful array of bok choy, carrots, mushrooms and all colors of bell peppers. If you don’t have any of those vegetables, you can substitute with broccoli, cauliflowers, yellow squash, or whatever you have on hand, as long as there is a mix of colors.

I precook the vegetables (except mushroom) by blanching them in boiling water with a bit of salt and vegetable oil. The oil add a beautiful sheen to the vegetables and highly recommended.

No need to transfer the blanched vegetables to an ice bath. People do this to stop the cooking and to keep the colors vibrant. But this makes my vegetables ice cold. Instead, don’t overcook the vegetables. Since they are all cut into bite-size equal pieces, they only take a few seconds in the boiling water and no more than one minute for the denser vegetables. Once they turn vibrant in color, remove them from the boiling water and set aside.

The sauce for Mi Xao Gion is a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil, Shaoxing wine, oyster sauce and sugar. Tapioca starch is whisked as a thickening agent.

The egg noodles I’m using are made of wheat flour and always yellow in color. Look for packages that say “pan-fried noodles” for the best result. You can find these noodles in the refrigerated section. They are sometimes vacuumed-sealed or loosely packed in small plastic bags.

There is no need to rinse or boil the noodles. Divide them into individual servings and gently drop them into the fryer. Make sure that oil is hot. The dropped noodle should puff up immediately to get the crispy texture.

This noodle “bird nest” holds all that saucy seafood and vegetable goodness.

To make the fried noodles more into the shape of a bird nest, you can sandwich and shape the noodles between two equal size metal strainer, then deep-fried the egg noodles in this position. This will create a lovely bowl-shape. But this is too much work for me and create more things to wash. Also, no bueno.

To make things easier, I simply deep-fry them in my wok, which usually is flat at first. I transfer the noodles into a large bowl. While they are still hot, I gently press down on the noodles into the bowl with a large ladle. This creates a shallow well and is good enough as a “bird’s nest” for me.

This dish is best served immediately while the noodles are crunchy. Leftover noodles will soak up the sauce and even be more flavorful. It just won’t be as crunchy or crunchy at all the next day, but still very delicious.

Recipe below. As always, happy cooking!

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