ChineseCookingDemystified

Early Look: Fixing the Spaghetti Soup Noodle Problem, with Traditional Technique

Added 2024-09-02 04:33:14 +0000 UTC

I think there’s always a temptation for recipe writers to try to squeeze Spaghetti into Asian noodle dishes. You want to try to make things accessible for people, and perhaps there’s no noodle that’s more accessible than Spaghetti. You can find Brian Lagerstom reaching for it in his weeknighting series, you see Gritzner (cleverly) trying to morph his pasta into ramen… you’ve seen it before. It’s a common move.

Now, precisely zero judgement on my part. I’m all aboard the “no need to be culturally obsessive” train. But I struggle with calling for it myself, because… it’s different, right?

I think if you sat down and had a bite of Spaghetti side by side Sichuanese noodles, Japanese ramen, or Thai Kuaytiaw... the difference would be screamingly obvious. All the talk online seems to revolve around alkalinity, but I think that’s far from the real crux of the issue here:

Spaghetti is hearty as hell.

So in this video, we wanted to teach you an old (pretty simple!) Yangzhou technique that, we think, can solve the Spaghetti's Chinese soup problems. And either way? It's a very delicious, very... weeknightable... noodle soup.