How to cook rice noodles without making them soggy, clumpy, or broken.
Rice noodles are not difficult to cook, but most people don’t know how to handle them. The #1 reason why your rice noodle stir fries are a soggy mess is that you’re cooking them before cooking them.
In other words, after boiling the noodles until they are perfectly cooked, people frequently put them in a pan. However, there is a lot of liquid produced during stir-frying because of the sauce, the meat, and the vegetables. Rice noodles can easily overcook, so if they are already cooked when they are put in the pan, they will almost certainly do so in the end.
It should be noted that egg noodles don’t overcook nearly as quickly as other foods; in fact, you want the egg noodles to be thoroughly cooked before you stir-fry them.
Choosing the Right Noodles for the Job
For noodle soups you want to go small. Anything from the vermicelli to the medium size is fine. This is because rice noodles are flavorless and the broth will be the only source of flavor. Little noodles give the broth a lot of surface area to adhere to. If you eat too much, each bite will taste like too many boring noodles and insufficient flavor from the broth.
The exception is fresh wide noodles, or ho fun noodles; these can be used in soups as long as they’re not overly thick because they’re more delicate and less dense than the dried kind.
In reality, there are two varieties of fresh wide noodles available in Thailand: one is thinner and more delicate and is used for soups, while the other is thicker and more durable and is meant to withstand breaking in the wok.
The good news is that you can use any of these for stir fries; the texture you like best is really up to you.
1. Do not boil dried noodles. Soak them.
To make noodle soups or stir-fries, all dried noodles just need to be soaked until completely rehydrated.
We prefer to soak rice noodles instead of boiling them because they can easily become overcooked. After soaking, which enables the noodles to hydrate uniformly, the heat from the pan cooks the noodles by utilizing the water that the noodles already contain. This minimizes the possibility of overcooking and produces internal cooking that is uniform.
Using the following guidelines as a guide, soak them in room temperature water (note that times may differ between brands).
- Rice vermicelli: 5-15 minutes, depending on the brand. While Erawant takes up to 15 minutes, Wai Wai brand is smaller and only takes five.
- Small size: 20-30 minutes.
- Medium size: 50-60 minutes
- Large size: 90 minutes to 2 hours
- Since they are typically used to replace fresh rice noodles, the XL size is a bit of an exception. To soak them, use hot, just off the boil water, and then drain and rinse under cold water. By now, these should be partially cooked and prepared to be placed in the pan.
When you pick up the noodles, they should fall to the ground entirely and not defy gravity. They’re not ready if they’re still attempting to maintain their original shape.
