Costco Chicken Garlic Butter Noodles

This recipe uses fourteen cloves of garlic. That isn't a typo and it isn't excessive. Garlic is the whole flavor engine here, and once you understand how garlic behaves in brown butter, you'll realize the quantity is exactly right.

When you cook minced garlic slowly in amber brown butter, something specific happens. The sharpness mellows. The bite drops out. The sugars in the garlic caramelize and release a sweet, toasty, almost nutty flavor that's completely different from raw or lightly sauteed garlic. Fourteen cloves treated this way doesn't taste like fourteen cloves. It tastes like the base of a restaurant sauce.

The technique is the whole thing. Melt eight tablespoons of butter in a wide pan over medium heat. Let the foam subside and the milk solids go amber, three to four minutes. Then drop all the garlic in at once and stir constantly for two to three minutes. The garlic needs to go deeply golden and sweet smelling. If it goes black, you started over. If it stops short of golden, the raw bite carries through.

The sauce layers on top of that foundation. Soy sauce, dark soy for color and depth, oyster sauce for that glossy savory cling, rice vinegar for acid, fish sauce for a funky bottom note, sesame oil, sugar, and scallions. It sizzles hard when it hits the butter. That's normal and desirable.

The noodles cook in the chicken stock first, in a separate pot, absorbing the stock as they go. Then they get tossed with the sauce and the shredded rotisserie chicken in the bag. The rotisserie drippings sneak in a layer of roasted flavor. Final drizzle of chili crisp, sesame seeds, black pepper. Enough for four people for under ten dollars.