In Indonesia, the dish is recognized as a popular Chinese Indonesian dish together with bakso meatballs and mie ayam, served from simple humble street-side warung to restaurants. Since the recipe is almost identical to the popular mie ayam, food stalls and restaurants that serving mie ayam usually also offering kwetiau ayam and bihun ayam.
Preparation and serving
The kwetiau flat rice noodles is boiled in water until it achieves an al dente texture and mixed in a bowl with cooking oil, soy sauce and garlic. The oil coats the noodle in order to separate the threads. The oil can be chicken fat, lard, or vegetable oil. The chicken meat is diced and cooked in soy sauce and other seasonings including garlic. The chicken meat might also be cooked with jamur (mushrooms).[1][2]
The soy sauce seasoned chicken and mushroom mixture is placed on the flat rice noodles, and topped with chopped spring onions (green shallots). Kwetiau ayam is usually served with a separate chicken broth, boiled chinese cabbage, and often wonton (Indonesian: pangsit) either dry crispy fried or moist soft in soup, and also bakso (meatballs). While Chinese variants might use pork fat or lard, the more common Indonesian kwetiau ayam uses halal chicken fat or vegetable oil to cater to Muslim customers.
Additional condiments might include tong cay (salted preserved vegetables), bawang goreng (fried shallots), daun bawang (leek), pangsit goreng (fried wonton), acar timun cabe rawit (pickled cucumber and birds eye chilli), sambal chili sauce and tomato ketchup.
Variants
The dish recipe is actually almost identical to the popular mie ayam that uses yellow wheat noodles instead. Thus variants might use almost exact recipe and ingredients while replacing the type of noodles; either common mi wheat noodles or bihun (rice vermicelli).
Although kwetiau ayam sometimes also called as kwetiau ayam kuah or kwetiau kuah (soupy kway teow), the recipe is actually rather different. Kwetiau ayam chicken broth soup is usually served in a separate bowl, while kwetiau kuah noodle is cooked and served in rich soup together in a single bowl, more akin to mie kuah.[3] Another similar variant including Kwetiau siram sapi (poured beef kway teow).
