Pasta and Noodle Recipes & Ideas

Fresh udon noodles are thick, chewy, and delicious. Frozen udon noodles are very nearly as good. But dried udon noodles cooked like spaghetti in boiling water are notoriously sub-par. If dried is all you have access to, don’t give up hope! We recently learned of a different kind of cooking technique that might help!In How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman describes a way of cooking dried udon that we’d never heard of before.

We picked up this tip in a blurb at the end of a recipe in one our favorite cookbooks, A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider:If you simmer beans in an uncovered pot, they will end up firmer and more intact. This perfect for dishes where you really want the beans to keep their shape without smooshing, like salads and pasta dishes.

When we think of gnocchi, our mind jumps straight to those soft little potato dumplings served in a lot of Italian cooking. But did you know there are actually several different kinds of gnocchi, each one very different from the next?There are three main kinds of gnocchi that we see called for in recipes and on restaurant menus:Gnocchi di Patate – This type of gnocchi is featured in a lot of Northern Italian cuisine and is probably what most of us actually know as gnocchi.

We wish we’d discovered this one back during Vegan Week! The Italians might call this topping “poor man’s parmesan,” but toasting bread crumbs in olive oil until they’re golden and crispy sounds pretty rich to us. Who knows? We might ditch the parmesan altogether.We’re not sure that poor man’s parmesan was ever intended to actually simulate cheese or convince your taste buds that it actually is cheese.

I’ve been to a lot of Japanese restaurants where the noodle soups have an option of udon or soba noodles. While they’re both Japanese noodles and are sometimes used interchangeably, there are quite a few differences between the two. Here’s what you need to know! Udon noodles are made by kneading wheat flour, salt, and water. These white noodles are sold dried, fresh or frozen. Dried udon noodles can vary in thickness and can be quite dense.

If you’ve been to Vietnam or even just the noodle aisle of your neighborhood Asian market, you might have been overwhelmed by the sheer variety of noodles available. Which ones are good for a stir-fry? Which should you buy fresh, and which are better dried? What even is the difference between all of those white, gray, translucent, and yellow noodles?

Fresh or dried, slurped or twirled, rice noodles are a great way to fill out a meal. They add texture and fun, no simmering required. What’s not to love? Here are five ways to eat more rice noodles this summer. Make a stop into your local Asian or Vietnamese market, and head for the refrigerated section first. If you’re lucky, you’ll find packages of fresh white rice noodles labelled bánh phở or bún, often translated to English as rice vermicelli.

Here's my go-to method.

“Resting time” in recipes is the bane of my existence. I’m a big fan of instant gratification, and I’m constantly forgetting to leave time for things like letting the meat rest or waiting for the cake to be completely cool before attempting to frost it. My puddings are always full of little fingerprints because I’m constantly poking them to see if they’re set yet, even though the recipe says they’ll need another three hours.

You’ve been making pasta for yourself since college or maybe even high school or earlier, right? You probably have a million (or at least a dozen) pasta dishes in your repertoire that you can make without even thinking about it. What if you’ve been making one big mistake this whole time, though?

If you’ve never made homemade pasta before, you might assume that it’s a lot of work and just opt for the boxed stuff instead. At least, that is, before you find out that all it takes is two ingredients (flour and eggs), a little elbow grease, and a sense of humor. Allow me to explain.

Watching cooking competitions on television like Chopped is one thing, but actually being in a real kitchen stadium and seeing, smelling, and even tasting what the chefs are making? File that under amazing. I just attended the Barilla Pasta World Championship in Milan, Italy, and saw 18 chefs from around the world compete in the ultimate carb-cooking contest. The championship is the Olympics in pasta cooking, complete with lots of patriotic flag waving and a gold trophy for the winner.

Plus, three grocery-store brands that actually taste good.

Pasta salad, when assembled correctly, is sublime. A great pasta salad is the star of any backyard barbecue or picnic potluck. All too often, though, it is subject to mediocrity, thanks to too much mayo, squishy pasta, and not enough salt. Don’t make these common mistakes! Let this be the year you master the perfect pasta salad. The wrong pasta type or size can make pasta salad soggy, slimy, or just plain hard to eat.

In these days of “fresh is better,” wouldn’t it seem like fresh pasta would be preferable to dried pasta? After all, fresh pasta is often locally-made and uses, well, fresh ingredients, while dried pasta is shipped over long distances and has been sitting on shelves for an unknown period of time.But not so–like red and white wine, like soft and hard cheeses, like the West Coast and the East Coast, neither kind of pasta is superior to the other.

A friend just got back from a trip to Arizona and brought us a pound of this blue cornmeal. We love its gritty texture and earthy smell, and we can’t wait to cook with it!The package comes with a tortilla recipe, but we’re wondering what other possibilities are out there. Any ideas?Tamales were our first thought, though we’re not sure if the cornmeal is ground fine enough. We might try running a cup through our food processor to see if we can get a finer grind.

Thanks for all the excellent blue cornmeal recipe suggestions, everyone! We think we’ll save it for something fun for the Fourth of July–stay tuned…As we were reading over the tortilla recipe on our bag of cornmeal, we noticed that the recipe called the flour “harinilla.”At first, we assumed that this was a Spanish term for blue cornmeal, but when we were looking up recipes, we learned that there’s actually a significant difference!

We certainly do love our pasta around here and we’re always on the lookout for new ways to jazz up our humble dishes. This pipette-shaped pasta recently appeared on our grocery store shelves, and we’ve quickly decided it’s our top choice for the coming cold season dishes!Their shape is somewhat similar to macaroni, but the tube is wider and actually dips down in the middle like the pipe it’s named after.

Al Dente; adjective, Italian: Literally, “to the tooth.” In practice, this means cooked just enough to still be firm, where the center still remains a bit under-cooked and the pasta still offers resistance when chewed.In medieval times, pasta was cooked for an hour or more until it was soft, mushy, and offered no resistance. This was typical of all cooking at the time (ie, cooking food to death!