Buckwheat ramen noodles

Buckwheat ramen noodles’re quick to cook, hard to mess up and universally loved. Here’s the ultimate guide to the types you are most likely to encounter when shopping or eating out. Debate rages over who first struck upon the idea of adding water to flour in a ratio of about a third to one, then fashioning the resulting mess into long skinny things that today we call noodles.

Or the Italians, via Marco Polo, as many popularly believe? Arguably one of Asia’s most popular foods, you find noodles all over the region – particularly in China, where they’re a daily staple. They turn up in soups, salads, stir-fries, deep fries, stuffed inside flatbreads, spring rolls and fried pastries and incorporated into braises. They’re made from rice flour, buckwheat flour, rice flour, root vegetable and mung bean starches, tapioca flour and even seaweed.

Discover 31 new recipes and a bowl-ful of noodle stories in our interactive map. Have you actually met someone that didn’t like a noodle? With so many varieties of them though, the world of noodles can get confusing. Here’s the low down on the types you’re most likely to encounter at your local Asian supermarket, or when dining out. Wheat noodles This is the broadest – and potentially most confusing – category of noodles. It encompasses many dried and fresh iterations across every width and length imaginable. Copious brands are spawning inconsistent nomenclature so getting to grips with all the different types can be a curly proposition, particularly when it comes to Chinese wheat noodles.

Very pale, thick, chewy wheat noodles from Japan. Their neutral flavour makes them a great foil for strong flavours like soy sauce and ginger. Find them, pre-cooked, in vacuum packs of 200 g portions. Elegant, dried Japanese wheat noodles made very thin by stretching the dough – vegetable oil is used to facilitate this and originally the process was by hand. These days, somen are mainly machine-made.

Once formed, the noodles are air-dried. Very thin, long, dried Korean wheat noodles that are also called mak guksu. They’re used in both hot and cold dishes, particularly soups. They cook quickly, requiring about 3 minutes in boiling stock or water. As in China, Koreans associate long noodles such as these with longevity and it’s considered bad luck to cut them. A thick, creamy-coloured, chewy noodle that’s a good all-rounder for Chinese recipes, where a substantial noodle is called for. They’re particularly good in stir-fries and hearty soups.

These are readily available, fresh or dried, from Asian food stores. Chinese noodles are made by the skilful twisting, stretching and folding of dough into strands, using the weight of the dough to form the noodles. The thickness of the noodles varies and depends on how many times the dough is folded. Easily found in Chinese food stores, they’re a commercial emulation of northern Chinese knife-cut noodles, or dao xioa mian, made by hand in China and used fresh. You can find fresh knife-cut noodles in restaurants serving northern Chinese fare. A Korean noodle celebrated for it’s extreme chewiness, these are made from wheat flour and corn starch and are the star ingredient of a cold dish that has the same name. In it, the noodles are served cold with a variety of finely sliced raw vegetables, boiled egg and a sweet and spicy sauce spiked with plenty of gochujang.

Find jjolmyeon frozen, at Korean food stores. Thaw them at room temperature, or in the fridge overnight. H levels, such as lye water. The higher alkaline level encourages greater water absorption into the flour and strengthens the flour’s proteins, resulting in a firmer bite when noodles are cooked. A fresh, chewy noodle with a particularly robust texture and deep yellow colour thanks to the presence of alkaline agents, these resemble thick, yellow spaghetti. Popular in Singapore and Malaysia, they’re the basis of famous hawker dishes such as Hokkien mee, curry mee and loh mee.

Buy them loose-packed as opposed to vacuumed packed as these are invariably fresher. A Japanese wheat noodle that started life in China, fresh ramen are thin and very long, with a pronounced chew and yellow colour. Their toothsome texture comes from the addition of alkaline salts. Use to make this miso-based ramen bowl from Sapporo, the capital of Japan’s most northerly island.

Similar to Hong Kong noodles, but thicker, this long noodle can be purchased either fresh or dried. Their yellow colour comes from alkalisation, not egg, and they have a dense, chewy texture that takes well to extended cooking and absorbing robust flavours. Purchased dried, in large, fried tangled cakes, they’re round, very long and of medium thickness. When cooked they have a chewy-spongy texture. Buckwheat flour noodles Buckwheat flour is nutritious, containing plenty of fibre, protein and high levels of manganese.