Some of you may be aware that this is my second attempt at homemade noodles. My first attempt was made of pie crust that had been sitting in the fridge for a while. I figured that it was dough, and noodles are made from dough — so I could probably turn it into some form of edible noodle, right? And if a little half-Asian girl is desperate enough for a noodle bowl that she turns to pie crust, who's to point fingers? This is what I made the first time:
...before I ruined them, or maybe they were born ruined, their tempting noodley appearance just a falsehood to lure me into trusting them. They tasted like soggy, sweet glue. (That's about on par with what happened when I tried to use nori sheets as a ramen additive. Yeah. Um. Unless you really like the taste of oceany oceany seaweed — like REALLY — I don't recommend doing that.) I have a suspicion that I may have neglected to actually get the water all the way to boiling before I threw them in ... or maybe there's just something in pie crust that makes it not work as pasta.
Anyway, I tried again from actual scratch tonight. You know. Like, I mixed flour and egg and water and salt, and kneaded it until I was sure I was going to pound it into mush. Then I flattened it out with a rolling pin, cut it up, and boiled it — harsh, I know, but it turned this:
...into this:
Which obviously has a couple of extra things in it. ;) And it was very nom.
I basically used these directions on Instructables, although my measurements weren't very precise. The only thing I bothered measuring was the flour; everything else, I just guessed at. Which meant I had kind of soggy dough to start with and I'm not sure if that's what supposed to happen, but I kept throwing flour at everything that wanted to stick, and kneaded and kneaded and kneaded, and eventually the dough looked kind of like a very small lump of rather elastic bread dough.
And while I did attempt to use parchment paper at first, it didn't get along well with the initially-super-sticky dough ... so suffice to say the kitchen counter now basically has swathes of dried glue on it.
But hey, it'll come off. And hey! I made pasta! Noodles. Same thing. Next time I need to figure out a way to boil the noodles IN the broth with the vegetables and tofu, because I miss the broth flavor being in the noodles. That might just amount to using an obscene amount of broth (so there's room for the noodles to move around in the pot AND room to fit the other ingredients), but someone who can make noodles from scratch should be able to find a use for some extra broth, right? ;D
I know what I want my next noodley leap forward to be ... but I'm not telling until I'm more certain I can actually do it. Wahahaha! The noodle-maker has a noodle mystery. ;)
