A recent jaunt to a Thai restaurant left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Not least because the food was only average and the services below par but also because they managed to botch an all-time favourite and Thai essential 'pad thai noodles', and my absolute lovely 'pad see ew' and dear oh dear how they ruined it.
Needless to say, the entire experience was rather unsatisfactory and I have blacklisted that restaurant, and never again shall I enliven their doors with my presence again; the story, however, doesn't end there.
I decided to give my own spin on these noodles with my own rendition, seeing how I had these noodles and almost all ingredients to make up for the bad taste, and today, for lunch I readied myself with the ingredients.
I'm no novice to noodles. Having cooked all shapes and forms of almost all types of noodles I didn't think cooking these flat rice noodles would be a challenge, when in fact I have cooked similar flat rice noodles before.
So I set about with my cooking paraphernalia. Boiling water and what not and here's the thing, after I'd submerged the said noodles in the pot of boiling water I checked on them after a few minutes, only to find them a hard as a spine, and most odd this. So anyway I let them cook for a few minutes more, and there wasn't much change in their texture.
Needless to say, I had to cook those babies for almost 40 minutes to get the required soft chewy consistency and texture that is most desirable in pad thai noodles.
Now, here's why I was so surprised because these noodles take hardly any time to cook. I mean I don't have to let them boil for over 3-4 minutes and yet these particular ones seemed adamant about exhausting my patience reserve.
How disconcerting.
I don't know what the reason was but the end result was satisfactory, to say the least.
I ate a rather big bowl of pad see ew but not once did I stop wondering about these noodles that took forever to cook.
Perhaps they were a different brand? in fact, they came in a clear plastic bag with no name, so really they didn't belong to any brand as such.
Maybe they were a different form of rice noodles, or maybe they were a local version that didn't adhere to regular rice noodle norms.
Next time when I cook them, I'd perhaps try soaking them in water a few hours before cooking.
Needless to say, the entire experience was rather unsatisfactory and I have blacklisted that restaurant, and never again shall I enliven their doors with my presence again; the story, however, doesn't end there.
I decided to give my own spin on these noodles with my own rendition, seeing how I had these noodles and almost all ingredients to make up for the bad taste, and today, for lunch I readied myself with the ingredients.
I'm no novice to noodles. Having cooked all shapes and forms of almost all types of noodles I didn't think cooking these flat rice noodles would be a challenge, when in fact I have cooked similar flat rice noodles before.
So I set about with my cooking paraphernalia. Boiling water and what not and here's the thing, after I'd submerged the said noodles in the pot of boiling water I checked on them after a few minutes, only to find them a hard as a spine, and most odd this. So anyway I let them cook for a few minutes more, and there wasn't much change in their texture.
Needless to say, I had to cook those babies for almost 40 minutes to get the required soft chewy consistency and texture that is most desirable in pad thai noodles.
Now, here's why I was so surprised because these noodles take hardly any time to cook. I mean I don't have to let them boil for over 3-4 minutes and yet these particular ones seemed adamant about exhausting my patience reserve.
How disconcerting.
I don't know what the reason was but the end result was satisfactory, to say the least.
I ate a rather big bowl of pad see ew but not once did I stop wondering about these noodles that took forever to cook.
Perhaps they were a different brand? in fact, they came in a clear plastic bag with no name, so really they didn't belong to any brand as such.
Maybe they were a different form of rice noodles, or maybe they were a local version that didn't adhere to regular rice noodle norms.
Next time when I cook them, I'd perhaps try soaking them in water a few hours before cooking.
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