The week's pick: Spicy Firecracker Shrimp Noodles, a 20-minute stir-fry with 29 five-star ratings
Spicy Firecracker Shrimp Noodles, the week's most-rated new recipe on NYT Cooking, is a 20-minute one-skillet stir-fry with 29 reader ratings at 5 out of 5.
Spicy Firecracker Shrimp Noodles is the pick this week. NYT Cooking published the recipe on Sept. 28, 2026, and by the morning of Oct. 4 it had drawn 29 reader ratings at an average of 5 out of 5, along with 25 comments. It takes 20 minutes, serves 4, and happens in one skillet. 1
Nagi Maehashi wrote it. She is the Japanese-Australian cook behind the RecipeTin Eats website, and the recipe page links a video of her making the dish. 12
The 20 minutes is mostly hands-on stir-frying, and three shortcuts buy it. The sauce is three bottles stirred together in a bowl: oyster sauce, sriracha and kecap manis. The noodles are the fresh, refrigerated kind, ideally already cooked, so a minute in hot water loosens them and nothing gets boiled. The vegetables are scallions and choy sum, cut into lengths. 1
Heat is the one thing to settle before you cook. The recipe sets the firecracker sauce at 3 tablespoons of sriracha, drops to 1 tablespoon for a mild pan, and goes as high as 4 for anyone who wants the full burn. 1
Why it won this week
Reader counts decide it, and the gap holds up. Among the recipes NYT Cooking published between Sept. 28 and Oct. 1, three had collected ratings by the morning of Oct. 4, and the shrimp noodles' 29 was the largest, five ahead of the next. 13
| Recipe | Source and publication date | Reader signal | Time and yield | Main work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spicy Firecracker Shrimp Noodles | NYT Cooking, Sept. 28, 2026 | 5 out of 5 from 29 reader ratings; 25 comments 1 | 20 minutes; 4 servings | Stir-fry shrimp, then greens, noodles and sauce in one skillet. |
| Salad Pancake | NYT Cooking, Sept. 28, 2026 | 4 out of 5 from 24 reader ratings; 22 comments 3 | 30 minutes; 4 servings | Dip whole lettuce halves in batter and pan-fry them crisp. |
| Maple Cardamom Sticky Buns | NYT Cooking, Oct. 1, 2026 | 5 out of 5 from 8 reader ratings 4 | About 4 hours, 1½ of them active; 12 buns | Cook a tangzhong, knead and proof the dough, bake in a maple glaze. |
| Spinach and Cottage Cheese Lasagna | NYT Cooking, Sept. 30, 2026 | No reader ratings yet; 10 comments 5 | 1 hour 10 minutes; 6 servings | Mix a cottage-cheese filling, layer no-boil noodles, bake. |
| Cottage Cheese Meatballs | Bon Appétit, Sept. 28, 2026 | Reader ratings not disclosed 6 | 1 hour; 4 servings, about 30 meatballs | Roll and brown about 30 meatballs, then finish them in the oven. |
| Savory muffins meal prep | r/MealPrepSunday, Oct. 2, 2026 | 422 upvotes; 19 comments; 99.5% upvote ratio 7 | 12 muffins; about $1 each | Brown turkey, mix a cottage-cheese batter, bake and freeze. |
The two closest calls behind it ask for different weeks. Salad Pancake, from Eric Ripert's "Mindful Cooking," coats a whole head of wilted lettuce in batter and fries it, which is 30 minutes of work and a genuinely new thing to do with a salad. 3 Maple Cardamom Sticky Buns hold a perfect score too, but they want about four hours and a proofing dough, so they belong to a morning, not a Tuesday. 4 Spinach and Cottage Cheese Lasagna is the week's other weeknight dinner, a 1980s-style vegetarian tray bake that swaps cottage cheese for ricotta; the page had collected 10 comments and no ratings by Oct. 4. 5
Bon Appétit's new recipe for the week is Cottage Cheese Meatballs, an hour of rolling and browning that stretches a pound of beef into about 30 meatballs and freezes well. Bon Appétit publishes no public reader-rating total, so the row above cannot be compared on the same scale as the New York Times counts. 6
On r/MealPrepSunday, the top post of the week was the savory muffins: 422 upvotes, 19 comments and a 99.5% upvote ratio, with the poster reporting 12 muffins at about $1 each and a freezer plan. 7 Behind it, a photo set of the week's lunches drew 266 upvotes and 13 comments and carries no written recipe, and a macro-counted turkey and vegetable pasta bake drew 161 upvotes, 15 comments and 95.5% approval across eight portions of 510 calories and 39 grams of protein. 89 A Creole dirty rice prep, portioned with chicken and andouille, drew 143 upvotes and 20 comments. 10 Upvote counts, star ratings and comment totals are three different measures, so read them as separate signals rather than one leaderboard.
Serious Eats' newest update, published Sept. 30, is the month's most-saved list, a ranking of recipes already in its archive. It added no new standalone recipe this week with an engagement count of its own. 11
What to buy
Everything below makes 4 servings. 1
- 5 scallions
- 1 large (12- to 14-ounce) bunch choy sum, or another leafy Asian green such as bok choy
- 2 garlic cloves
- 1 pound fresh refrigerated lo mein or Hokkien noodles, preferably pre-cooked
- 3 tablespoons neutral oil, such as canola
- 1 pound peeled and deveined large shrimp
- 1/4 cup oyster sauce
- 3 tablespoons sriracha, or to taste
- 2 tablespoons kecap manis
- Sesame seeds, for serving
- Rice, for serving
Two items carry the shopping trip. Kecap manis is a sweet soy sauce from Indonesia, dark and syrupy, made from black soybeans sweetened with palm sugar and often spiced with star anise or cinnamon, and it is thinner and far sweeter than the regular soy sauce on the same shelf. 12 Most supermarkets keep it in the Asian foods aisle; a store that stocks oyster sauce usually stocks it too. Choy sum is a Chinese flowering cabbage, a mustard-family green whose name means "heart of the vegetable," and its stems and leaves cook at different speeds, which is why the recipe has you cut them apart. 13
The cook-through
- Cut the greens. Cut the scallions into 2-inch lengths, keeping the white and pale green parts separate from the soft dark green parts. Cut the choy sum into 2-inch lengths, halving any thick stems lengthwise, and separate the stems from the leaves. 1
- Mix the sauce. Stir the oyster sauce, sriracha and kecap manis together in a small bowl.
- Loosen the noodles. If yours are pre-cooked, soak them in boiling water for 1 minute and drain. Raw noodles need a few minutes of boiling, then a rinse under the tap.
- Cook the shrimp. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large nonstick skillet over high heat. Add the shrimp in a single layer and cook, tossing occasionally, until pink and just cooked through, 2 to 3 minutes. Move them to a bowl.
- Start the stir-fry. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil to the skillet, still over high heat. Add the scallion whites and choy sum stems and toss for 1 minute, then add the garlic and toss for 20 seconds.
- Finish and serve. Add the choy sum leaves, the scallion greens, the noodles, the shrimp and the sauce, in that order. Toss until the noodles are stained with the sauce and the greens have wilted, about 2 minutes. Serve right away with sesame seeds and more sriracha.
Two moments decide the dish. The shrimp come out of the pan while they are just pink, because they keep cooking when they go back in at the end; leaving them an extra minute in the first pass turns them rubbery. And the sauce goes in last, off the heat of the toss, so the noodles take on color and stop there instead of simmering down to a paste.
Notes and substitutions
The noodles are the part that changes with what your store has. Pre-cooked, refrigerated lo mein or Hokkien noodles turn this into a 20-minute dinner; raw ones add a pot of boiling water and a few minutes. 1
The protein and the vegetables are slots, and the recipe says so. Any protein or vegetable you have works if you add them in the order they take to cook, longest first. 1
If curry powder, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, mirin, fish sauce or gochujang are regulars in your kitchen, kecap manis joins them: a soy sauce built to be sweet, not salty. 12
Bottom line
Cook Spicy Firecracker Shrimp Noodles if you want a 20-minute dinner out of one skillet, you are willing to buy one bottle of kecap manis, and you want the heat set where you like it. It is the best-liked and the fastest new recipe of the week, and it is also the most forgiving, since the pan takes whatever protein and greens you bring to it. 1
References
- 1Spicy Firecracker Shrimp Noodles recipe
cooking.nytimes.com
- 2Nagi Maehashi
en.wikipedia.org
- 3Salad Pancake recipe
cooking.nytimes.com
- 4Maple Cardamom Sticky Buns recipe
cooking.nytimes.com
- 5Spinach and Cottage Cheese Lasagna recipe
cooking.nytimes.com
- 6Cottage Cheese Meatballs recipe
bonappetit.com
- 7Breakfast prep: savory muffins!
reddit.com
- 8lunches for the week
reddit.com
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12Sweet soy sauce
en.wikipedia.org
- 13Choy sum
en.wikipedia.org
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