Cookaholics Bulletin Board

So I've been cooking a lot of Japanese noodles lately, and all the good recipes want me to use fresh noodles (except for cold soba). Fresh ramen, udon or yakisoba noodles are sold in the Asian market in plastic boxes or bags with packets of instant soup or sauce. For example, the ramen I bought was for Miso Ramen and had little instant packets labeled "miso ramen soup base" (at least, I think so, they were actually labeled in Japanese. Maybe they actually said "contains silica gel, do not eat").

Anyway, apparently, this is the way you usually buy fresh noodles, even if you are Japanese. Several of the recipes in the cookbooks I have specifically address this. They say:



At this point I have 2 miso ramen soup, 2 shiro ramen soup, and 3 yakisoba sauce packets, which probably all contain the same interchangeable powdered mix of corn starch, soy, seaweed, spices and MSG. I can imagine that if you ate Japanese noodles all the time you'd soon have a shoebox full of them. But I've paged through the rest of the three Japanese cookbooks, and there is not one recipe to use up these reserved sauce packets.

So, what should I do with the sauce packets? Creative suggestions welcome.

Open trash can, insert.

Seriously, those things can't be good for you. If you're desperate to use them though, there's always that ramen noodle coleslaw that uses the flavour pack in the dressing.

Maybe sub them in places you'd use a bouillon cube?

Create your own art. Glue gun, frame with sturdy backing. Maybe add some noodles for that kindergarten feel.

Hi,

This reminds me of the orange sauce packets that are included with ducks. We had duck last week and opened a packet and were surprised how good it tasted. I thought about adding some gastric but it was already too thick. I added some champagne vinegar and it was really good.

Yes, it had about thirty ingredients, mostly industrial versions of toxic waste molecular gastronomy.

Tim

While I normally eschew the use of those kinds of industrial ingredients, there is one soup that I make where I cannot even get near the original recipe without them. I have fond memories of a chicken-based dumpling soup from my hometown that was made with about a metric ton of chicken base. I save the chicken flavoring packs just for that soup. And I, who can't abide a boxed cake mix or bread with dough conditioners, just love that soup. More ironic than an hipster convention...

If you don't want to eat it, maybe you could use it as plant fertilizer?

Geekboy has been known to make a steaming cup of ramen broth when he's feeling low on sodium.

Here you would be reselling them in your little sari-sari store. (Or your in-laws/neighbors would be.)