Using Your Asian Noodle
Stotter has cooked the noodles, chilled them with a splash of mirin to lock in the starch, and tossed them in a thin peanut sauce with Fresno chiles and scallions. “It makes a great cool noodle salad,” he says.
Rice to the occasion
Stotter’s also been playing with rice noodles, fresh and dried. “I’m obsessed with rice noodles right now,” he says. “Cold rice-noodle salads are just tremendous. The noodles are great in soups.”
We’ve recently been experimenting with different combinations of Asian noodles and Asian sauces. In the Kikkoman kitchen, we cooked up some Vietnamese vegetarian spring rolls using thin rice noodles and the translucent rice-paper wrappers traditional in this application. I simply boiled the rice noodles quickly to retain their bite, let them cool and mixed them with vegetables as a filling. The rolls needed a dipping sauce, so we tossed together a cross-cultural mix using Kikkoman’s Ponzu Citrus Seasoned Dressing as a base. It introduces a Japanese element to a Vietnamese classic, but its citrus notes are a perfect match for the fresh filling.
We also made a rice noodle soup. The linchpin to its profile was Kikkoman’s Thai Yellow Curry Sauce, which we added to the broth at about one part sauce to two parts chicken stock. Then we stirred in fish sauce and lime juice, parboiled wide rice noodles, shiitake mushrooms, chicken breast and bean sprouts.
The glass noodle ceiling
Beyond rice and wheat noodles, we find varieties based on more-obscure ingredients. Cellophane noodles, also known as bean-thread or glass noodles, are made from mung-bean starch and appear in soups, stews and Japanese sukiyaki, where they’re called harusame, which means “spring rain.” They have an irresistibly gelatinous texture and capacity for absorbing the flavors of their cooking medium. In sukiyaki, those flavors come from a delectable sake, sugar and soy sauce broth.
Sweet potato noodles are popular in Korea, where they’re called tangmyon. Functionally like cellophane noodles, they have a taste and texture that are similar, too. Japanese shirataki noodles, made from the konjac plant, are a low-carb, gluten-free alternative. They’re also low-calorie, thanks to our bodies metabolizing their main structural component, the hydrocolloid glucomannan, as dietary fiber.
Matches made in heaven
This ingredient-based taxonomy is by no means the only scheme for understanding Asian noodles. Stotter, for example, prefers to view them by use: soups, stir-fries, salads. “Within those veins,” he says, “you have rice noodles, for example, which make great chilled salads, as do bean threads.” He notes that using some sort of composed or finished soy-based sauce or peanut sauce makes the whole development job a lot easier. “It just depends on which sauce you want to pair with which noodle,” he says.
“Over the past 20 years,” Stotter says, “chefs have started to play with these noodles, evolving the cuisine and coming out with their own different interpretations.” At the same time, he adds, “the noodles themselves have changed, along with their accompaniments.”
So it was that Stotter and Chiang reexamined a dish that’s been on their menu for years: lo mein. Currently stir-fried with vegetables and beef, pork, chicken or shrimp, Stotter’s idea was to serve it with pulled chicken, peanut sauce, vegetables and peppers—“something really simple, really light,” he says. Another P.F. Chang’s dish that riffs on a classic is dan dan noodles. Sometimes called “Chinese spaghetti,” it’s successful in part because it resembles that Western favorite. “It’s like an Italian bolognese,” Chiang says, “but with ground chicken and spicy peppers.”
