XO Prawn Noodles Recipe

XO Prawn Noodles that are easy, fuss-free and perfect for the weeknight after a looooong day at the computer. Here’s how!

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XO Prawn Noodles are not hard, especially when everything you need for this comes out of packets, and all the chopping is restricted to onions and garlic. This easy, quick recipe is

• Perfect for weeknight cooking
• Doable with a handful of pantry-ready ingredients
• Perfect with chicken, fish or even pork
• Very customisable to your liking
• Made with ingredients that are already in your pantry

 Out of a Jar, or more

Let’s make it clear from the start, I love to cheat in the kitchen. Especially at the end of the long workday when chopping, washing and waiting for a pot of curry to boil is just not on the top of my list. So I cut corners wherever possible, be it using a bottled sauce for quick-fix pasta or store-bought paste for Green Curry. 

Would you like to try your hand at making a Green Curry Paste from scratch?

For these XO Prawn Noodles, cutting corners is essential. The base for this is made up of three significant ingredients: XO Sauce, Oyster Sauce and Soya Sauce. All of these come from their respective bottles! I would highly recommend using a XO Sauce base here that you like the most because that can totally make or break the dish here. 

Greens in Noodles

Greens are essentials in all my recipes: I love adding vegetables to noodle dishes like these so that I don’t have to worry about them too much getting my protein and the bevvy of other vitamins and minerals that comes with consuming vegetables. This recipe uses frozen spinach. I discovered frozen spinach a few years back and I can honestly say I have not bought the fresh ones since. Fresh spinach is fantastic – it’s usually organically grown and highly nutritious BUT it is also time-consuming. Spinach comes with a lot of ground soil which needs to be washed off. Plus, you’ll have to buy a rather large quantity to get a small output. In order to save time and effort, frozen spinach is my go-to every time I need it. This can be used in fried rice, or pasta dishes too! 

I used frozen prawns here as well, just a few pieces I retrieved from almost a kilo of frozen prawn stashed in the freezer. The noodles used here are hor fun noodles, from NTUC/COLD storage. They barely cost $2 and can cook up to 4 servings of noodles when you add the various sauces and meats. 

Vegan Alternatives

You can find vegetarian XO sauce in the market: Woh Hup brand does a good job of capturing the flavours of XO Sauce with a mushroom base. Likewise, you can also get a vegetarian Oyster sauce, made from mushrooms. I can’t guarantee that it’ll taste the same, but it’ll still hit the right spot once you combine it with chilli padi. 

Here are some ways you can change up this recipe for vegan and vegetarian diets. Essentially, this would involve replacing the chicken with any or a combination of the following ingredients: 

• Chickpeas (soaked and boiled, the canned ones will just become mush)
• Tempeh
• Tofu (fried or baked beforehand to toughen its exterior)
• Tempeh + Tofu (similar to sambal goreng)
• Vegan meat substitutes (I recommend Quorn)

Love Noodles?

I love noodles – they make the perfect dinner in my opinion and they don’t always have to come out of an instant noodle pack! Here are some recipes for noodles that I’ve made over the years: 

• Spicy Nyonya Noodles

• Chicken Curry Noodles

• Instant Hakka Noodles

• Sambal Olek Noodles

• Noodles from Around the World

Making these noodles

The ingredients for this come easily out of a package or can, and there’s no easier way to get it done than to just have it by your side then throw it into the pan as we go. You want to start with the egg. I’ve honestly just fried the eggs with some fish sauce here, thinning it out with some water if needed. I also used a handsome amount of oil – I like that ‘deep fried’ effect on my egg. 

The base of this recipe is plenty of chopped onions, just like many of my other recipes. I find onions to be a great flavour base, though of course you’re entitled to disagree. In which case, I would recommend just going with chopped garlic alone. If you’re not in the mood to chop anything, then just go straight in with the XO sauce. A good XO sauce comes packed with plenty of flavours and you can’t go wrong with adding it straight to the pan without a primer. 

If you’re not into frozen greens and think spinach is too cumbersome to clean and chop, I would recommend using Xiao Bai Cai. These green are easy to prepare, and cook/wilt down pretty quickly. 

I’ve also used frozen prawns here, you can choose to use fresh or any other kind of protein you have in the fridge. I find shredded chicken breast to be very good here. 

When you add the noodles, you’re pretty much done with the recipe. You’ll notice that I did not salt this dish – the soya sauce has plenty of umami and I find that this dish does not need the additional salt. You can use an alternative salty addition, such as fish sauce if you’d like to amp things up a bit.