noodsletter #.0018
How to make noodle aoup for lunch; Thai curry paste; a good board is hard to find.
Hello!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually at the end, everything else on top. No recipe this week, but I have a kind of guide to putting together noodle soups (the subject line has an intentional typo) at the bottom. Something like this:
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Happy Easter and Chag Pesach Sameach and Ramadan Mubarak to all who observe/celebrate.
A Cutting Board PSA
The Boardsmith is opening up its “seconds” for sale today at 12 pm CST.
I don’t own a seconds, but I do own a Boardsmith board and they are beautiful. The company is tiny and it’s family-run, the kids help with shipping out the boards. Definitely worth supporting, and I bet the seconds are high-quality and beautiful, too.
Some Book Business
Thank you to all of you who signed up to recipe cross-test for my book! I am flattered and surprised by the number of you who did so, so surprised in fact that I was a little intimidated. I’ll be sending out emails in the next week with recipes. If you did not sign up last time and would like to now, here is a link to the Google Form I used as a sign up sheet. If you did sign up and are wondering what the heck you were thinking, don’t worry, no pressure, I understand.
A Book Bit
The Golden Spike is one of the family-style Basque joints you can find across the west, the California west, the Nevada west, where a hundred ears ago the shepherds who left Spain settled. The model is “family style plus a meat,” so you get a lamb chop, or rib eye, or fish, and then there’s a salad of iceberg highly dressed, and sometimes a chickpea and lamb stew—presumably a taste of the Basque past—and tomato soup with barley or oodles. It’s ruinously expensive and not really very good but it excites me in some kind of primal way. I like the carafes of chilled red vinegar wine and the huge slabs of beef.
From The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling.
Can’t tell if I love that “highly dressed” or not but I’ve been thinking about it.
Two Recipes, One Paste
In noodsletter #.0005 I wrote about the curry paste package we ran back in 2021, and about the curry paste I winged using farmer’s market chilies, but I wanted to return to the subject again because we recently published a recipe by Derek Lucci for a chicken stir-fry as part of our big wok package (which was pegged to the publication of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s new book, The Wok). Needless to say, if you haven’t, please go check out the wok package and the book; I think the book is comprehensive, useful, has tons of interesting and, knowing Kenji’s track record, good recipes—in short, it’s amazing. Ditto the wok package, which features some excellent work by some excellent cooks (and please do check out the interview with Tane Chan by my colleague Yasmine Maggio.)
However, for me, the highlight was Derek’s recipe. I knew it would be even before I tried it, too, because it’s a simple chicken stir fry that uses his Southern Thai curry paste, which he used last year to make one of the best freaking things I’ve eaten in my life: Gaeng khua prik si krong moo. Now I’ve made this paste and this curry before, and they were excellent. My father says he makes the curry using the shortcut Derek suggests, doctoring store-bought curry paste with a few fresh ingredients, and he claims it makes an excellent curry, too. I think all of you should at least give making the paste a try, preferably using a mortar and pestle. It’s very hard to describe its flavor profile, but it has a medicinal kind of perfumey tang to it that comes from the galangal and fresh turmeric that is, for lack of a better phrase, intoxicatingly good, particularly when it’s competing with the truly alarming levels of capsaicin and black pepper heat.
The chicken dish is, if anything, better than the pork curry in a lot of different ways. It’s easier to prepare, and quicker, although it has an equally concise list of ingredients. What I found most interesting about it was Derek’s insistence that you mince the chicken thighs by hand, obviously slightly onerous, but well, well, well, well, well worth it; really, it makes the dish.
That being said, when I was eating this hand-minced chicken, essentially annealed to the hand-pounded paste, and when I was eating the pork curry, and when I was eating both the pork curry and the hand-minced chicken together, over rice, because that is the wonder of leftovers, I was thinking back to the pork curry Derek had prepared for our photo shoot, and how much better it was than the pork curries I’ve made using his recipe. Now this is not a criticism of Derek’s recipe; rather, it’s an acknowledgment that there are some skills that cannot be learned or acquired by simply reading text.
It’s not just that Derek is an excellent cook so of course when he makes his recipe it will be better (although there’s a little of that). If you spend any time around Derek, or even just look at his Instagram account, the thing that’s most striking about the stuff he cooks is the quality of his ingredients. Not just the beef, not just the seafood, not just all the pricier stuff (proteins) that we are all told ad nauseum (and, for some, like me, we tell in turn) we have to try to seek out and buy the best you can find and afford. I mean the aromatics, the basic vegetable ingredients, as well—the makrut lime leaves, the lemongrass, the fresh turmeric, the galangal. The other day, returning home from my local supermarket with a tiny container of drab looking rhizomes of “fresh” turmeric that cost me $4.99, I opened up Instagram to see Derek futzing with a turmeric specimen so gorgeous that I almost threw that $4.99 worth of turd-looking turmeric in the trash. When we were doing a shoot with Derek, he pulled out of his refrigerator a bundle of lemongrass that was fresher than any lemongrass I’ve literally ever seen, with large, fat bulbs, no dark spots at all, you could almost see the lemongrassiness of it all oozing from the supple leaves.
Making the pastes, trying Derek’s food, trying his recipes; all of it constitutes the kind of educational activity that I enjoy the most, namely ones that force me to look at things I’ve taken for granted with an entirely new perspective, all while wondering at the shabbiness of my previous assumptions. Although this particular activity is attended by a fair amount of resentment; I don’t understand why some things in my local supermarkets are sold in a disgusting state—turmeric, herbs, leafy greens, lemongrass—and why they’re also so expensive. Which brings me to my point: I’m paying out the nose anyway for these ingredients, so I might as well try to seek out better stuff where I can get it, and it’s likely to be less expensive, as it hardly could be more expensive than 5 bucks for a few orange turds.
Derek spends a fair amount of time finding these ingredients—or, rather, he’s spent time developing sources for many of these ingredients—and their quality accounts for not just the vibrant colors of his food, which is evident in everything he does, whether it’s preparing stuff for our photo shoots or making his lunch, but also in their aggressively good flavor. For those of you who, like me, live in New York and have truly terrible nearby options for the ingredients you’d need to make that curry paste and you can’t squeeze in a trip to a good Asian market, I’ve found Asian Veggies has generally good stuff. The frozen galangal is very convenient, the lemongrass is typically good quality (not like that other, beautiful lemongrass I saw at Derek’s place, but still quite good), etc., etc.
And once you make the paste, make both recipes!
“News”
Sad to see The Counter is folding. I hate to say this, but I didn’t read it as often as I could’ve, even though I knew they were doing some great work. Just sad.
Here’s a link to Hanna Raskin’s original story.
Nice piece on the cooking in Better Things, which, despite watching the first season, I haven’t really noticed all that much? (The cooking, I mean.)
“Here’s What Happens If Your Exhaust Gets Filled With Lamb Chops”
Amazing and urgent piece of data journalism out of Philly.
This is a funny piece, but it doesn’t seem to me that there’s all that much to be said by food media about defecating. What is there to say that this piece hasn’t? I say this as someone who grew up in India and was greeted at every doctor’s visit by the question: “And your motion?”
This honestly sounds like a nightmare to me (other people, eating with them, strangers? No thanks).
Congrats to these Substack food fellows, but Dennis Lee and Paula Forbes being skipped over doesn’t make sense to me at all!
Housing Ukrainian refugees on a cruise ship seems like consigning them to a fate worse than death, particularly in light of the track record of cruise ships in the COVID era. Aren’t they death traps?
Is it because it’s a steakhouse review that it’s full of cliché? Probably.
Answers the question of who goes to Morton’s Steakhouses: Arms-running yakuza bosses!
Every paragraph of this Dutch cheese heist story is funny, but I’m having a hard time understanding why an organized crime outfit would go to all this trouble for a mere $23,000.
Lab-grown salmon. The stats on declines in fish populations are always eye-popping in these stories.
Are Lucky Charms poisoning people? (Also, Iwaspoisoned.com lol)
Japan’s travel restrictions are I suppose understandable, but I haven’t seen my family in three years.
Still think this has to be a joke, but if you don’t want to get divorced don’t be a clueless twit about your annoying dish habits maybe.
While I think the concern about botulism is overblown in the latest Bon Appetit/Brad Leone scandal (botulism isn’t that much of a concern when stuff is refrigerated properly), there’s a larger problem here with Leone obviously half-assing stuff for views and the BA leadership just kind of going with it. Soleil Ho’s point that BA is basically just selling out its rep for solid recipes/cooking advice so they can have an aged CookToker around is very good. (Also, Sohla continues to be proven right.)
How to Make a Noodle Aoup for Lunch
Every so often while “writing my book” I find myself mired in a kind of bottomless doubt, since the book is basically about making noodle soups, and making noodle soups is the easiest thing imaginable. When I’d take a bath as a kid I’d take all the little bottles in the bathroom and mix them together, making potions or elixirs or whatever it was I thought I was imagining (and thereby pissing off my parents), and I’ve long thought of making noodle soups as essentially the same activity, but edible. You’re just just mixing flavorful liquids together, and it’s fun, and it’s just for you, and so it seems impossible to mess it up.
Of course, there’s noodle soup and there’s noodle soup. Every noodle soup can be prepared thoughtfully, with a lot of attention to all the little details; by the same token, every noodle soup can be prepared badly or carelessly. Here, then, is my brief guide to making neither kind; here is a guide for how to make something in between for lunch, which I do probably once or twice a week.
You will need:
Noodles
Stock or broth
Salty, delicious substances
Flavorful fat
Some kind of onion
Garlic and ginger, why not
Some kind of vinegar or citrus juice
It will be better if you have (optional):
Spices
Sugar
Leftovers (either meats or vegetables, or both)
Other vegetables
Noodles. Noodles! What kind of noodles? you ask. Well. I am writing a book about ramen, so I’m going to say: not ramen. If I could tell you in a short emailblog how to make ramen well for lunch, my editor would be very mad about buying my book idea. However, you can of course use ramen if that is what you have. I prefer to use rice noodles for my quick noodle soup lunches, in part because rice noodles are delicious, but also because they are very one-note, very bland; ramen, depending on the kind you buy, has all sorts of other stuff going on, between additives like riboflavin, the alkaline salts, and the flour itself. I swear I’m not saying this because I have a vested interest in making ramen more mysterious. Anyway, if you use ramen, you’ll probably need to add a bit more salt, a bit more acid, than you would if you were using rice noodles. (In my opinion.)
My suggested noodles for this kind of thing is bun bo hue noodles, which are basically identical to jiangxi rice vermicelli. They’re tubular, similar in shape and size to spaghetti; they’re slippery and fun to eat; they are perfectly bland. I could eat them in almost any soup, I think. Their one drawback is they take about 20 minutes to cook. A superior alternative (not superior noodles, but superior for making a quick lunch like this) is these Yunnan rice noodles (mixian) you can pick up from Mala Market. They’re identical to bun bo hue noodles in every way except they are slightly thinner, and thus they take about half the time to cook. On any given day I might prefer one over the other, but the short cooking time is a real blessing when you’ve only got 30 minutes to make and eat lunch.
You can also use banh pho, if you like. Any noodles except dried pasta will do.
Other than that, the only tip I have is don’t cook your noodles in the broth pot. Cook them separately, drain them, then add them to your soup.
Stock or broth. I realize many people use packaged stock and broth products, and all of us in food media are supposed to say “that’s fine.” I wish I could, but I honestly have not made a noodle soup with packaged convenience stock and broth products in at least a decade, so I can’t say it’s fine from personal experience. This is less snobbery than it is a matter of necessity, although there is, of course, a bit of snobbery involved, too. I have broth and stock coming out of my ears at all times; right now I have two quarts of chicken/pork/kombu ramen broth in the freezer and two quarts of pork/kombu ramen broth in my fridge, and there’s a container of chicken stock/dashi in there, too, that probably, at this point, needs to be thrown away, even though I ate noodle soup three times this week. (A very good week!)
So I don’t know if packaged stock and broth products will work or be good, but if you use them for cooking, I bet they will work fine. The primary element you’re losing out on is gelatin, but a noodle soup need not be gelatin-rich, and you can compensate for that lack of gelatin by adding more fat and filling the soup with itty bits of vegetables to give it an interesting texture. However, best to use homemade stock for this. Doesn’t have to be some French-fancified stock with browned meat and bones and browned vegetables and tomato paste; it could just be a leftover chicken carcass, raw or roasted, simmered with water to cover along with a knob of ginger and a scattering of garlic cloves for several hours (or one hour in a pressure cooker). A freshly made dashi would work, too.
Salty, delicious substances. You almost certainly have these in abundance in your fridge. Soy sauce, fish sauce, miso, fermented black beans, doubanjiang, tamari, tomato paste, Golden Mountain sauce (green cap)…you must have these on hand, right? If you don’t, pick some up! They keep forever because they are very salty and they are delicious because they are very salty. For the purposes of this discussion, they don’t even have to be of particularly good quality, but I would be remiss in my duty here if I did not say that buying quality soy sauce, fish sauce, miso, etc. etc. is well worth the money.
Flavorful fat. This could be anything (except…butter? I haven’t tried using it in this way). Lard is, of course, the king, a flavored lard would be even better. Sesame oil? Everyone has sesame oil, right? Chili oil, or the oil that rises up to the top of all those fashionable chili crisp products, works. If you make ramen already, or have made some recently, aromatic oils like scallion oil and shallot oil and garlic oil—all good! If you don’t have a flavored oil? Don’t worry about it, just use some neutral oil, you can flavor it in a couple minutes before you add stock to the pot.
Some kind of onion. Every soup needs an onion, I don’t care what soup you’re making. If you’ve got green onions, great, perfect, slice them up and add them toward the end. Same goes for Welsh onions (naga negi). If all you’ve got is shallots or a globe onion, you can dice them real fine and add them at the end, or you can cut them up a little bigger and fry them in whatever oil you’re using at the beginning.
Garlic and ginger, why not.
Vinegar or citrus juice. One underappreciated element of noodle soups—or soups in general—is that good ones are always slightly acidic. Pho gets a squeeze of lime, ramen has an acidity that hovers around 6 pH. It’s important not just because acidity makes all things taste good (balance, etc.), but also because a good noodle soup should have a fair amount of flavorful fat slicking its surface, and that fat can have a deadening effect on the palate. You need an ample quantity of salt to cut through that, and having an acid in the mix helps.
Rice vinegar is perhaps the vinegar I use most often, red wine vinegar the one I use the least. Chinkiang vinegar is excellent (a rice and wheat bran vinegar) for noodle soups, as is red Chinese vinegar, which is a blended product and has some sugar and salt added. Recently I’ve been using a 10-year aged Baoning vinegar and I can’t recommend it enough. It has a kind of heat to it, a kind of burning flavor (that sounds silly, but there it is), that is so, so good.
If you don’t have any of that, a squeeze of lemon or lime always works in a pinch, and are sometimes preferable.
The Process
Part of the appeal of making this is its quick. You start boiling your noodle water as soon as you enter the kitchen, and by the time the noodles have cooked, you’ve got your lunch.
Once you’ve got the water heating up on the hob, immediately roughly chop up some garlic and ginger, just a clove and about a half-inch, respectively. If all you have is a non-long onion, you want to give it a chop, too. Any scraps—the end of the onion, the scrappy end bits of green onions—hold on to those, just make sure they’re not dirty. If you have other vegetables in your refrigerator you want to add and need to chop, do it now, too: celery (amazing in noodle soups, particularly the leaves) and cabbage (amazing in noodle soups, particularly napa) are particularly handy to have around just for this purpose. If you produce scraps while chopping those up, hold onto them, too.
In a separate pot, add about 2 tablespoons of your oil. (If you have multiple oils and you’re fancy, just use slightly less oil for the frying step to compensate for the fancy oils you’re adding later). Heat it up over medium heat and add the garlic and ginger, the onions you want to cook into the soup, and any scraps from the vegs; fry all that up until it smells amazing, about 2 minutes.
At this point, if any of your salty, delicious substances benefit from being cooked, like doubanjiang, miso, tomato paste, fermented black beans (or paste… a lot of pastes in this step!), toss them into the oil to bloom—a shy tablespoon is more than enough to season a single bowl of soup, although you can use less. Once the paste seems to have imbued the oil and other stuff in the pot with its flavor (about a minute), add in your stock and bring it to a boil over high heat then take it down to a simmer. How much stock? Well, that’s up to you. I generally add anywhere from 350mL to 450mL…it doesn’t really matter how much; all you have to keep in mind is more stock will require more seasoning in the end.
While the stock is simmering, your pot of noodle water has probably come to a boil. If you’ve got stuff that benefits from blanching (cabbage definitely does, celery can go either way), blanch it in that water and fish it out before cooking the noodles. Nothing to blanch? Toss in the noodles and cook them until they’re done.
While the broth simmers and the noodles cook, get your serving bowl ready. You can heat it (I do—fill it with water and stick it in the microwave for 3 minutes), but it isn’t necessary. With your warmed bowl or your cold bowl, pour in about 2 tablespoons total of salty seasoning liquid, whether that’s soy sauce, fish sauce, something like Golden Mountain sauce, or some combination thereof. However, if you have added some salty, delicious thing to the soup pot (miso, doubanjiang, tomato paste), you’ll have to compensate for that already added saltiness by adding less salty, delicious seasoning liquid to the serving bowl. Added a hefty tablespoon of doubanjiang to the pot? Add a small tablespoon of soy sauce to the bowl. (Don’t worry, you can always add more seasoning, or more soup, or water, to balance out the seasoning of the final soup). This is the point when you add a glug of acid to the bowl, and you can also now add the raw vegetables you want in the soup, like the celery, if you didn’t blanch it, or some scallions, or onions, as well as any blanched vegetables.
When the noodles are basically cooked, strain the broth into your serving bowl, toss the strained material out, then strain the noodles and add them to the bowl, too. At this point you can add a fancy oil if you’re using one, then taste the soup. Is it very tasty? Is it salty enough? If not, this is a great time to add salt. Think it could use a bit more vinegar? You’re just mixing potions in the bathtub in earnest at this point, do what feels right until the soup tastes right to you.
I want to emphasize that the soup should be salty. It should be approaching if not touching the line, wherever it is for you, of almost being too salty. While you are tasting just the soup, remember that the salt you’re tasting in the soup has multiple roles; it is seasoning the soup, yes, but it is also the main seasoning for the noodles, for all the raw and cooked vegetables in the bowl, for all that fat floating on top.
And there it is:
Now, optional ingredients. Spices can be added to soups to give them a little bit more character and, in some cases, like Szechuan peppercorns, an additional hit of sodium. If you have, say, cumin seed, some coriander seed, a pod of star anise, a beetle of black cardamom, you should add them (whole) to the pot when you’re frying stuff in oil; that will help draw out some of their oil-soluble flavors before you add the stock. Cassia and dried chilies are also good additions at that time.
I rarely use sugar because I have a basically dead palate that can only perceive chili heat, salt, and animal fat, but it can be helpful to round out the aggressive flavors/saltiness of the other ingredients. Add a little, maybe a quarter teaspoon at a time, to the bowl and taste as you go.
Leftovers are a great way to make your simple noodle soup lunch more filling or nutritionally complete. Stir-fried greens are always welcome in a noodle soup, for example. However, if you exercise some restraint in seasoning your soup and you have something like, I don’t know, a chicken adobo or some kind of curry or braised dish in your fridge, adding a couple tablespoons of the leftovers liquid to the bowl will transform the noodle soup into [insert leftovers name] noodle soup. Use your best judgment here, it’s really hit or miss. Also, warm up the leftovers separately before adding them to the bowl (dry vegetable leftovers can just go in cold for the most part).
So to recap the basics:
Use ~400mL stock for a single bowl
Use ~2 tablespoons (30mL) TOTAL of salty, delicious seasoning. (Highly recommend at least half of that being soy sauce.)
Fry aromatic ingredients/spices/veg scraps in oil before adding the stock to the pot, which will give you a nice, aromatic, flavorful oil in your soup and bloom some of the flavors of your ingredients.
Add some kind of acid to the soup.
Taste and adjust the seasoning, add salt, sugar, and/or more acid.
This was a wonderful primer for a quick and delicious noodle soup. Thank you! (Think I can mimic Afuri at home this way? Just kidding…maybe) I also definitely checked to see whether “aoup” was something I had never heard of.
And perhaps there are some judgey pros reading your newsletter, but this slack-jawed amateur thinks your mise and plating are just fine.
Great noodsletter this week!