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Noodles News: A Quick Tour Of The World's Best Carb

Noodles are great. You can boil them, fry them, drop them into a soup, or eat them cold with a peanut sauce. Pretty much every place on earth has its own kind of noodle. Italy has spaghetti. Japan has ramen and udon. China has lo mein and a hundred other kinds. Vietnam has pho. Korea has japchae. The list does not really stop.

What a noodle actually is

The basic idea is simple. Take some flour, mix it with water or egg, and stretch it into a long thin shape. Cook it. That is it. The variations come from the flour — wheat, rice, buckwheat, mung bean, sweet potato — and from what you mix in with it. Italian egg pasta, Chinese hand-pulled wheat noodles, Vietnamese rice vermicelli, and Japanese soba are all the same idea applied to different starches.

Why every culture has them

Noodles solve real problems. They are cheap. They store almost indefinitely when dried. They cook fast. They stretch a small amount of expensive ingredients — meat, broth, vegetables — across a lot of bowls. That combination is hard to beat in any era, which is why noodles show up wherever grain agriculture does.

You can read more about all this here.

Cooking the ones in your pantry

• Dried pasta. Use way more water than feels right — at least four quarts for a pound. Salt it like seawater. Boil hard, not at a gentle simmer. Pull the pasta a minute before the box says and finish it in the sauce.
• Instant ramen. Cook the noodles in a separate pot from the broth if you want clear soup. Drop in an egg in the last two minutes. The seasoning packet is mostly salt — start with half if you are adding anything else salty.
• Rice noodles. Soak in warm water until pliable, then stir-fry briefly. If you boil them they turn to mush. For pho, dip them in hot water for thirty seconds and then ladle broth on top.
• Soba. Boil, rinse under cold water, drain. Serving them warm makes them gummy.

The case for fresh

If you ever get the chance to eat fresh hand-pulled noodles at a real noodle shop, do it. The chewy bite is something dried pasta cannot reproduce. Even at home, a pound of fresh egg pasta from a decent grocery store will be noticeably better than the dried version for the same cooking time.

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