Quick, flavorful stir fry: Thai Basil Shrimp with Rice Noodles

Thai basil adds a savory, anise-like, slightly spicy note to this flavorful shrimp stir-fry. Recipe below.

THIS YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE’VE PLANTED THAI BASIL IN THE GARDEN and it is not disappointing. Our Italian basil is still in the ehhhh, whatever mom sullen teenage phase, but the Thai basil is doing just great, thanks—growing taller and branching and just generally being cheerfully, eagerly productive. It wants to flower, so every few days I hack off the buds, to keep the leaves nice and tender. And every few days, we are rewarded with enough basil, plucked from our one plant, to make a vibrant, tasty dish.

One of our favorite uses for it, this summer, is this simple, classic stir-fry featuring shrimp, peppers and of course plenty of Thai basil. This dish comes together super fast—under half an hour start to finish. This time, we used a combination of sweet bell pepper and jalapeño, which is what we happened to have on hand, rather than the traditional Thai bird chiles. If you don’t care for spicy food, leave out the jalapeño and the chile paste or sriracha.

We recommend serving this with a nice witbier, like Hitachino Nest, or an IPA, like Bell’s Two-Hearted, or simple, crisp white wine, like a vino verde, or just a tall glass of lemony, slightly sweetened iced tea.

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Thai Basil Shrimp with Rice Noodles

Thai basil adds a savory, anise-like, slightly spicy note to this flavorful shrimp stir-fry.

Course Main Course

Cuisine Asian

Servings 2

Ingredients

• 6 ounces of rice sticks (wide dried rice noodles—see Kitchen Notes)
• grapeseed oil or another neutral-flavored oil
• 3/4 pound raw shrimp (we used shelled, deveined frozen shrimp with tails removed, thawed—see Kitchen Notes)
• 2 – 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 scallions, with white and green parts separated and then cut into one-inch pieces, or 1/4 cup chives, coarsely chopped
• 3/4 cup red bell pepper, seeded and sliced into bite-sized pieces
• 1 jalapeño, seeded and diced
• 1 cup fresh Thai basil leaves

for the sauce

• 1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 2 teaspoons Sriracha or chili paste optional

Instructions

• First, bring a pot of water to a boil—I used a 3-1/2 quart pot for this. When it is boiling, add in the noodles, give everything a thorough stir, and turn off the heat. Keep checking and stirring now and then if things look like they are stickling together, until the noodles are al dente. Then immediately drain them, rinse in hot water and reserve in the colander.
• While the noodles are cooking, mix together the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and prep the vegetables.
• Next, cook the shrimp. Heat some oil in a skillet or wok until it is very hot, then sauté the shrimp swiftly over high heat, 2 or 3 minutes, turning once. Transfer cooked shrimp to a bowl and reserve.
• Add more oil to the hot pan. Put in the garlic, the white part of the scallions (or chives) and the bell and jalapeño peppers. Stir fry for 30 to 40 seconds.
• Add in the cooked rice noodles. Stir fry, mixing everything together until the noodles are heated. I suggest using a pair of spatulas or ladles to lift, turn and mix everything. This part should take about 60 to 75 seconds.
• Add in the sauce mixture and the shrimp. Stir-fry everything until the noodles are uniformly colored and coated with the sauce, about a minute.
• Add in the green part of scallions (or the chives) and the Thai basil. Stir fry the whole thing just until the basil leaves begin to wilt—probably about 15 or 20 seconds. That’s it—you’re done! Serve right away.

Kitchen Notes

Rice noodles. These are Asian noodles that can be found in most Asian markets and some supermarkets. For those of us accustomed to cooking noodles in the European way—cook until tender in boiling water—this approach to rice noodles seems odd and even nerve-wracking. Try it! Note that the instructions set out on rice noodle packages tend to be inconsistent, to put it mildly. (I’ve seen some packages that have called for 15 minutes of soaking, which whoa! ) That’s why you should keep checking the noodles throughout the soaking period. They may come up in as few as five or six minutes, so be on the lookout.

Can you use regular sweet basil instead? No, don’t do that. According to Sam at the Culinary Compass, “In terms of taste, Thai basil smells like anise and has a more licorice smell with a slightly spicy taste.” Sweet basil is the kind most often sold in grocery stores and used in marinades, salads and pestos—a completely different flavor.

Which soy sauce? Some recipes call for light Thai soy sauce. I just went with traditional soy sauce. We recommend Kikkoman, since that is the most widely accessible and is also, for a commodity product, pretty darn delicious. Get the reduced-sodium kind if you can find it.

Fish sauce and oyster sauce: what kind should you buy? For the fish sauce, so many brands are so widely available that we’ve condensed our recommendation to this: buy fish sauce that comes in a glass bottle, not plastic. It will taste better. For oyster sauce, a popular, widely available brand which is often in our fridge is Lee Kum Lee.

The shrimp. We used frozen, shelled, wild Argentine red shrimp from Costco, tails removed. We recently learned that, these days, all shrimp is flash frozen, on the boat, when it is caught. This changed our thinking about shrimp. Of course you may use the shrimp you prefer. While leaving the tails on shrimp is having an aesthetic moment, take them off for this dish—much easier to eat if you’re not picking through your noodles to remove them at the table.

Other protein? You bet! We’ve also made this recipe with chicken—try it with boneless chicken thigh or boneless chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces before cooking. Once we even made this recipe using a lot of leftover roasted chicken, and that was good too. For the latter, we still sautéed it to start to give it a nice browning.