Lucky Peach ramen noodles
25. Jul, 2011 
8 Comments
It would be hard to read the first issue of Lucky Peach and not come away with an increased appreciation – and appetite – for ramen noodles. From the instant noodles that students subsist on to the most obsessively produced restaurant ramen in Japan, the magazine lovingly explores every aspect of this bright star in the noodle constellation.
And not just as inaccessible food porn, either: although they do discuss a dozen or more Japanese ramen shops that you’ll never get to (and neither will I), the magazine’s authors also fully equip you to make your own ramen at home.
The first key to ramen is, naturally, the noodles. If you’ve made fresh Italian pasta before, then you know how much better it can be than dried noodles. While Italian pasta is defined by the inclusion of eggs, ramen is defined by the inclusion of an alkaline salt.
Alkalis are the opposite of acids; the most common one you see in the western European kitchen is baking soda. Calcium hydroxide is used in extensively in Mexican cooking to make nixtamal. And in East Asia, sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate are used in some noodle doughs. These ingredients affect the behaviour of the flour, making the noodles chewier and less prone to dissolving in broth, as well as giving them a yellow colour and distinctly eggy flavour.
So where do you get sodium carbonate? You make it, by heating sodium bicarbonate (that’s baking soda) at 250°F for an hour. The baking soda gives off water vapour and carbon dioxide, and leaves sodium carbonate behind. Once you’ve done this, you can make all the ramen noodles you like, which is just what I did. (The potassium carbonate isn’t strictly necessary.)
The recipe for alkaline noodles in Lucky Peach says that it’s a tough dough to work with, because there’s so little water relative to flour. Personally, I prefer working with these low-hydration doughs, because they stick to my hands less, and I didn’t find this one unusually difficult to handle. And although it takes a couple of hours to make the noodles, half of that time is spent sitting around waiting for the dough to rest, so it’s a fairly easy weekend project, and the flavour is worth it. What I would change next time is the thickness of the noodles. I rolled them to number 7 on my pasta machine, and thought the result was a bit too thin; they stuck together after cooking, though they loosened again in the broth. OK, it didn’t help that I probably overcooked them, too.
You can read more about cooking with alkalis in Harold McGee’s Curious Cook column. And if you haven’t yet bought a copy of the first issue of Lucky Peach (or you’ve lent yours to your friends), he even provides a similar recipe for alkaline noodles.
Matthew Kayahara
It should probably be noted that the recipe in Lucky Peach has been corrected by the publisher. The 4 T of baking soda should be 4 t. Luckily, I had out my food scale — the 12 g is correct. They were good, but I also found them a bit thin–I only rolled to 6. Think I should have hand cur rather than using the finer setting on the pasta maker. May invest in one more attachment for the machine. The slow cooked eggs from the same issue of the magazine is genius!
Thanks for adding that note! I weighed the sodium carbonate, so I didn’t encounter any problems. Next time I make them, I’ll definitely roll them much thicker, and see how that goes: I recently had ramen at Kintaro in Vancouver, and their noodles were very thick and chewy.
I made these noodles last night, and even with the 12 g of baked soda, the noodles had a very off, overly eggy taste. Mcgee’s article in the same issue says that the flour-soda ratio is usually 100:1. I’ll try something closer to that next time.
also, I rolled out to a 5 on my pasta queen and the shape was just perfect.
Thanks for your comment, Paul. It sounds like it’s certainly worth trying out a smaller amount of sodium carbonate. Did you weigh out 4 tsp., or just work from the weight given? Not having a lot of experience with ramen, I assumed that they were supposed to taste eggy!
I just weighed out the 12 g that was specified in the recipe. The noodles are definitely supposed to have an eggy flavor, but there was something off about mine.
Mcgee also mentions in his NYtimes recipe to avoid touching the baked soda with your fingers. Any idea why? I realized i touched the soda in order to pull out the few grams over that i put on the scale. I’ll just keep testing.
Anyway, I just found your site, and I love it.
Interesting. It’s certainly possible that 12g is too much. Or maybe Dave Chang just likes eggier-tasting noodles than you do! Or, of course, there could be differences in flour and water, too. As for touching the baked soda, I imagine it’s just because it’s more caustic than baking soda. I can’t imagine touching it briefly is going to cause serious harm, but I would wash it off promptly once you do.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the site!
I agree with Paul’s comments about the noodles. The egginess was enough to be slightly unpleasant to my taste. I’m going to try again but I’ll use maybe half the sodium carbonate, 2 teaspoons, this time.