This time I was set on getting the noodles right. So I made them from scratch.
I started off with the goal of authenticity…Oh how far I fell. I went looking for a good noodle recipe in Beyond the Great Wall by Jeffrey Alfred and Naomi Duguid. There’s a whole chapter on noodles. Surely I could find some long life noodles, or just some noodles I could make really, really long. I ended up taking the recipe for a type of Tibetan fettucine noodle called Gya Thuk. Basically I did this because I wanted to knead the dough in my pasta maker, and extrude it through the machine to save myself a whole lot of work. The Chinese recipe actually called for the same amount of flour (2 cups) as you’re supposed to use in the pasta maker so it seemed like it would work fine. The only difference was the Chinese recipe had salt and no oil. Simple enough.
So I put the flour and salt in the pasta maker, turned it to ‘MIX’ and drizzled in the whisked egg through the convenient little opening in the top of the machine. Then I added the 1/2 cup of lukewarm water. This is where I got a little scared. In all the pasta recipes that come with the pasta maker you add the egg, oil and water at the same time, and it never seems to use that much water. Once I used way too much water by accident and spent the next 30 minutes trying to adjust with more flour. The result was tough, over-kneaded, under-egged pasta-like glue. Appetizing, I know. Since that mistake I’ve never added too much water again, being too scared to have to try and fix it.
But I trusted the book (come on, it has a whole chapter on noodles!) and threw in the 1/2 cup of water called for. Immediately I knew this was a mistake. The Italian pasta recipes always say the dough should become pea-sized lumps after 4 minutes and should not stick to the blades. Maybe Tibetans don’t like following the same rules with their pasta makers…but I knew that when I switched from ‘MIX’ to ‘EXTRUDE’ all the noodles would come out separate but quickly clump together. So I took emergency action. I shut off the machine, took out the sticky dough and dumped in another 1/4 cup of flour. It’s too bad because I’d wanted to extrude the dough through the “Chinese Noodles” pasta die (an attachment that shapes the pasta). Apparently to Italians there is only one kind of Chinese noodle. This is slightly larger than spaghetti. There are, however, about 25 other kinds of Italian pasta and corresponding pasta dice…ah, intercultural understanding…
I knew I couldn’t add too much flour without adding more egg, and my eggs don’t come in 1/2 teaspoons. So I was being stingy with the flour. I kneaded, added a little more flour, kneaded, added more flour, and when it wasn’t too sticky anymore I put it in a bowl covered with plastic wrap and left it for 30 minutes, like the Chinese recipe said (though I didn’t trust the recipe anymore…). I just hoped the dough wouldn’t taste like glue. All I could picture were lumps of flour/water paste sitting in my stomach on little couches watching the Olympics, refusing to digest.
Everything got better from here. I made the sauce. I decided to go back to Bonnie Stern’s Jewish American cookbook HeartSmart: The Best of HeartSmart Cooking
I skipped the tofu and bean sprouts. Everything else was right. I made a sauce with 1/3 c. homemade vegetable broth. It specifically said homemade. I actually had homemade, but it was frozen, and certainly not in 1/3 cup. quantities…So I hacked off some chunks of frozen broth. Now that I was covered in pasta and broth I figured the worst was done. Noodle soup’s not such a bad thing to be.
Then I added 2 tbsp of tamari, 1 tbsp sugar, and 1 tbsp mirin to the now defrosted broth in a small bowl. I thought I had bought sesame oil, but no, I had forgotten that I indeed had not…Unfazed, I immediately went to the fridge. My roommate piped in here: “Probably not a lot of people have sesame seeds sitting in the fridge,” to which I responded, “Toasted. I know, ridiculous…” They were actually also a little pre-crushed in my mortar and pestle, not too much, so they kept their freshness. What kind of 23-year old has a pantry stocked with things like slightly-crushed leftover toasted sesame seeds? So I took two teaspoons of the sesame seeds along with a teaspoon of olive oil, called it a tablespoon of sesame oil, and added it to the sauce…
I grated a few carrots, thinly sliced two leeks and 1 red pepper, diced a shallot (instead of green onions), 2 tbsp of ginger, and 2 cloves of garlic. I heated a little olive oil in a skillet and added the garlic, shallot and ginger, cooked it for 45 seconds and added the tablespoon of thai green curry paste in my fridge along with a teaspoon of my homemade Guidhou Chile Paste. Really, this should have been yellow curry paste and there shouldn’t have been anything thai about it, but since China and Italy and North America had already played prominent roles in this meal, I figured one more country wouldn’t hurt. I cooked the paste for 20 seconds and then added the leeks, carrots and red pepper. They cooked for 5 minutes and then I added the bowl of combined sauce.
At this point I had to turn off the stove and go back to the noodles. The dough was sticky again. I threw a layer of flour onto the clean counter and divided the dough into four pieces. Then I took a bottle of olive oil-turned-rolling pin and rolled the dough out into appropriately-sized lengths. By now I didn’t really care to follow the book’s specifications for 6″/14″ rectangles. The noodles were going to be whatever they were going to be. There was so much stretch in the dough, though, that I hung them up while I was rolling each subsequent piece so they wouldn’t shrink…
Then I took my mezzaluna (half moon) and cut the noodles into whatever length they wanted to be. They’re were supposed to be 1/2″ widths and that’s almost what the double edge on the mezzaluna would give me. Good enough. The lengths then went back to hanging.
Then it got easy. Brought a big pot of water to boil, threw in the fresh pasta in batches, rinsed it under cold water when it got to my preferred ‘al dente’ state (a few minutes) and added it to the sauce and vegetable mixture which I had brought back to a boil.
Oh, it was so worth it. I was a bit covered in flour, the clean-up had been ongoing, and my laundry rack had to be dis-infected from the raw egg in the dough, but the pasta tasted like real, fresh pasta. The sauce was spicy, sweet and salty, and had a heat that you only felt afterward. It was satisfying and beautiful. A real model for World Peace.
Leave a Reply