Lets change it to u-DO
June 13, 2011 5:20 PM   Subscribe

Udon noodle soup recipes. Lay em on me.

BabyHotBot and I love udon noodle soup we get take out (from Ollies, for any upper west siders). The soup we get is roast pork and wanton soup, with a yellow (chicken?) broth, but we are very flexible about the stuff in the soup other than udon noodles.

Easy is good, but yummy is better.
posted by shothotbot to Food & Drink (7 answers total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wanton soup - as in the powdered stuff?

I've made pretty good ramen stock out of chicken carcasses and pork hock bones (with lots of marrow). Add the usual stuff; big ol' carrots, celery tops, Chinese cabbage, an onion, garlic, &c. Since you'll strain most of this stuff out near the end, save some remainders to cook in the clarified broth.

I've replaced chicken once with a couple of (raw) turkey carcasses I had on hand and it was amazing.

Tip: for clear broths, boil the bones/carcasses in salted water until all the blood gets squeezed out. At a roiling boil with plenty of water, this should take 5 to 10 minutes. A bit longer if you have a lot of material. Dump all that into a colander/strainer and rinse off the grey bits. Start a new boil with the "cleaned" material.

Tip: Go to Chinatown and pick a "soup decanter" thingy. They're large-teapot-sized plastic jugs. You pour liquids in there and wait a couple of minutes for the oil to separate to the top. Since access to the spout is only from a small hole at the bottom, you can easily de-fat any stock that you make.
posted by porpoise at 6:47 PM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


heathen - but my favorite way to eat udon is cooked in soy with a dash of wasabi. Most of the liquid boiled off. It's how I ate it in Japan but it worked for me
posted by TravellingCari at 8:10 PM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


If you're going to have udon dry/semi-dry, I boil the udon, rinse quickly, drain. Oil a large pan/pot with butter and a little sesame oil. Bring butter to browning, then add drained udon. Sprinkle liberally with ponzu (citrus flavoured light soy) sauce and mix well. Add a tablespoon+ of Sa Cha* per serving and mix further.

Good hot or cold. For cold, use vegetable oil instead of butter.

*sa cha can be pretty pricey when they come in small bottles. "Bull's Head (brand) Korean BBQ Sauce" is actually a decent sa cha and a 737mL can if it costs only about half again as much as a 233mL bottle sa cha from LKK.
posted by porpoise at 8:19 PM on June 13, 2011 [2 favorites]


Traditionally the soup udon is served in is made from dashi, a fundamental Japanese stock. You can probably find instant dashi in some Japanese supermarket, or if you're feeling adventurous you can make it out of kombu (dried kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes): see this recipe. Once you've got dashi, you can just add some soy sauce and get a nice soup stock for your udon. You can then add chicken meat, mushrooms, chopped scallions, fishcake, etc. depending on what you feel like eating.

One of the most amazing things about dashi is how it is such a flavourful stock, yet takes so little time to make, compared to say chicken stock.
posted by destrius at 1:07 AM on June 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


Also, for more ideas: Cooking with dog

They have a bunch of udon recipes.
posted by Tarumba at 6:37 AM on June 14, 2011


Seconding destrius on the dashi-soy base. Here's an udon soup I made recently, which went down very well (serves two):

Make up a marinade from 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 2 tablespoons of mirin (Japanese sweet cooking wine) and 2 tablespoons of sake. Take about 225g (8 ounces) of salmon steak, cut it into bite-size pieces, and marinate for half an hour.

Heat up 750ml (~ 1.5 US pints) water in a large saucepan and stir in 3 tablespoons of soy sauce, 3 tablespoons of mirin and a sachet of instant dashi powder (10g, probably about a tablespoonful). Bring it to the boil.

Add the salmon, and the marinade, and simmer until the salmon's cooked (this doesn't take long - just a few minutes).

Add more soy to taste. The original recipe (with which this version has very little in common) called for 12 tablespoons in the soup stock; I made it with 6 instead, which was delicious but still pretty salty. Starting with 3 and moving up from there seems like a safe plan.

Add two packets of fresh udon and simmer for a further 3 minutes. (If you can only get dried udon, you'll need to have cooked it first, separately; follow the instructions on the packet.)

At some point in the simmering process you'll want to add some vegetables. I prefer most vegetables crunchy (hot but not really cooked), so I add them right at the end; last time I made this, I used 400g (14oz) of mixed fennel, chestnut mushrooms, yellow pepper, pak choi, spring onions and mangetout.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:59 AM on June 14, 2011


try MSG you'll love it.
posted by Infernarl at 7:53 AM on June 14, 2011


« Older Have you hired a private investigator?   |   What's a good thank-you gift for a company? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.