Thought that would get your attention. Ignore the adverts from supermarkets selling you lo-cal, lo-carb, lo-taste, hi-price ready meals – only last month they were stuffing you full of booze and cheese offers that would make a gout-ridden king balk.
New year, eat a bit less, drink a bit less, run around a bit more. But never sacrifice flavour and taste, eating is one of life’s pleasures that you get to do everyday.
Ok, back to the recipe. Calorie free noodles. Essentially, a spicy ramen broth, stabilised and thickened with agar, then piped through a silicon tube.
The broth is pretty simple, lemongrass, ginger, chilli, garlic, coriander, kombu and a vegetable stock cube. Add a litre of water and bring up to a high simmer – looking to get as much flavour as possible out of these ingredients into the broth. Twenty minutes should do it.
You could stick the ingredients in a cream whipper and do a rapid infusion, but you get great flavour simmering these for a short period of time anyway.
Strain the broth, and add a teaspoon of xanthan gum and blend into the mixture. This will stabilise the broth and provide a more homogenous texture.
Next set up your spaghetti making kit. One syringe. One 2m length of food grade silicon tubing. One ice bath. One cream whipper loaded with an NO2 charge. Are you having a laugh? No. Please use responsibly.
Weigh the stock – my litre of water produced 700g of stock, enough for one bowl of noodles (They are packed full of flavour though so an entire bowl would be way too rich, this should serve two people). The ratio of agar to liquid is 1.6%, so in this case 11g of agar. Blend this into the stock and bring up to a boil to activate the agar. Remove off the heat to fill the syringe, then slide the pan back on a low heat to keep it from setting.
Attach the syringe to the tube and gently and consistently push the liquid into the tube. A 30ml syringe, and 0.5cm tubing works well, with a full syringe coming close to filling an entire tube. Plunge the tube into an ice bath to set for a couple of minutes. Finally, attach the cream whipper to the loaded tube and very gently, force the noodle out of the tube. Without a cream whipper you can use the syringe I guess to force it out. Maybe.
Repeat until you’re out of broth!
It’s a bit of a pain reusing the same tubing, next time around I might order more so I can do batches quicker, but for a first attempt am really pleased. Nobody died.
The end results are fantastic – the noodles are firm enough to hold together and have the texture of cooked spaghetti, but unlike konjac noodles (which are calorie free but basically a non food, that you don’t even digest) these agar noodles are packed full of flavour! They can be eaten hot or cold – although heated above 80deg they’ll melt. Pair them with seared beef and maybe a yuzu dressed salad or spiralised courgette and enjoy!
500fires 