It’s a good start, but there’s a lot of countries in Asia and each one has multiple types of noodles.
The links below aside, I have come to use what’s at hand and not worry too much if I have exactly the right noodle. So sometimes I’ll use capellini or fettucine if I don’t have the right Chinese wheat noodle, or Indian vermicelli in place of mai fun, and so on. Doesn’t work for very specific things like Japchae where you need the right texture, but for plenty of other recipes it will get me to cook the dish without too much delay or fuss.
Here’s a good guide for Chinese noodles:
And one for Japanese:
Andrea Nguyen has a bunch of guides for different Vietnamese noodles (search noodle 101 or guide):
I don’t have a sense of smell so that has never been an issue for me, but my husband says they do have a peculiar odor in the package. However, he isn’t bothered by it once they are rinsed, and he absolutely loves the noodles once they are sauced. They are a very light and refreshing alternative to grain-based noodles even if you’re not watching your carb intake!
I ate them for a while when I was limiting my carb intake (more than I am now). I found them palatable in soups, but they don’t taste like much. You don’t realize how much the taste of noodles (wheat, rice, whatever) adds to a dish until it’s absent.
True - I think that’s why I don’t care for them in Italian sauces or things like mac and cheese. They also lack the starch that helps oil or butter based sauces emulsify. None of this bothers me in Asian sauces, though.
Yum! My favorite! In the past week, I winged a sauce for cold squiggly noodles with sesame paste, sweet soy, and sambal. And over the weekend, it was cold rice vermicelli with pork, assorted veg and herbs, and sauce with nuoc cham. I really enjoy cold noodles in the warmer weather. I had done pad thai the week before that, which was ok. But my tamarind concentrate was old and had to some extent crystallized so there were these odd grainy bits all throughout the dish. I guess I shouldn’t have frugally scraped the sides of the jar.
I’m low-key obsessed with Japanese cold soba noodles with dipping sauce, but have never made them.
In a similar vein: last summer, the NYT published a cold noodle-with-cherry-tomato dish that reaaaaaallllly helped me work through my monthslong cherry tomato harvest. Looking forward to making that again.
We didn’t make these, but I wanted to share a couple bowls of ramen BF and I had from Tajima in San Diego. We were in town for Comic-Con and BF had found Tajima with coworkers back in February during a business trip. He said the minute he tried the ramen, he knew he had to bring me when we came back. He wasn’t wrong. The noodles are thin, but remained nicely springy in the broth. The broths were very flavorful. I was very impressed, also, with the marinated bamboo shoot that was included in my bowl, as well. I got the creamy chicken ramen; he got the carnitas ramen.
Last night I made Cold Noodle Salad with spicy Peanut Sauce from the NYT. Soba noodles, raw zucchini, radishes and green peppers all matchsticked, Sauce of peanut butter, soy, sesame oil, lime juice and chili oil. They include honey which I omitted, but otherwise followed the recipe. Garnished with cilantro, green onions, peanuts and served with lime wedges. Definitely needed the lime at service. I’m anxious to try this after it sat for a day. It seemed to be missing something but I’m not sure what!
I’ve had these on autoplay since I first made them using this recipe from Vietnamese Food Any Day (Andrea Nguyen), though there are many variations.
I usually mix in some long-sliced onions, mixed mushrooms, occasionally cabbage, spinach if it’s around, and, of late a bit of carrot for sweetness and texture.
They are great on their own, but also fabulous with any Asian-leaning protein (tonight: with gochujang calamari).
Making a note of possibly my favorite Asian noodles, ho fun – which I adore as both Beef Chow Fun and Pad See Ew.
No access to the fresh noodles at the moment (and no inclination to make them from scratch, though I have before), so I’ll just crave them for a while longer.
I often make some variation of these—so delicious. One question, though…did you intentionally break up the noodles or did they fall apart during cooking (and maybe that’s what is readily available in India)? I ask because I bought what I thought were fancy, bronze-die cut spaghetti for a clams and linguine-style dish on a recent trip to Vancouver Island. They annoyingly fell apart, resembling the noodles in your photo; it was difficult to eat the short pieces that got trapped in the clam shells. I saw a Canadian product and went with that, bypassing plain ‘ol Barilla. I could swear the same thing has happened to me in Iceland.
