Cooking questions

[ilzolende]

Question: What kinds of noodles with a long shelf life is good in soup with things like a spicy miso and mock beef broth, kale, egg, kimchi, etc? I end up near Asian markets sometimes, and stuff which keeps in the fridge is fine as long as it keeps a long while and I can cook it one serving at a time. I'm a fan of ramen noodles so far, so if there's a good cheapish not-the-deep-fried-kind form of those or something similar that would be ideal.

Another question: Is it safe to cook with a pot that has a lot of patches of nonstick coating missing? I wouldn't be cooking sticky stuff if I did use it, but I don't want flakes of coating in my food or something.

I regularly like to make myself a ramen-like noodle soup by first cooking instant ramen noodles until slightly underdone along with cooking-requiring vegetables, draining and cooling them, putting them in a bowl, and then making broth with stuff in the pot and pouring it into the bowl over the noodles. I then top it with green onion, kimchi, and sesame oil. This process has made me aware of how oily the instant ramen noodles are, and this seems kind of suboptimal, since it's not a tasty oil and it's probably not a healthy one either. I also don't need the flavor packet.

Comments

[zenolalia]

It's not ideal to cook in a pot like that. If any of the coating flakes off into your food, such as when stirring or boiling, that's not great. But as long as you aren't heating a nonstick pot when it's empty, you should be fine. Fumes/smoke from overheating nonstick coatings is the bigger issue, and because water can't get hotter than 212F/100C, there's not much risk of overheating there.

Rice noodles keep indefinitely, are not fried, and cook in less than 5 minutes in hot (not quite boiling) water. But, more importantly, if you get the thinner kinds (usually branded as rice vermicelli), you don't need to bring them to a boil at all. You can make your broth, and pour it over the dry noodles in a bowl, and in about 90 seconds they'll be softened and heated through, ready to eat.

[yvannairie]

Both frozen and dried udon (wheat noodles) preserves well. You can even make udon yourself, the prep takes a while bt after that you can freeze it in batches to use when you wanna. Also seconded on rice vermicelli, it's a good carb source and can be thrown into almost any broth.

[ilzolende]

I ended up picking up some brown rice vermicelli thanks to your suggestion, though I have yet to try them.

I had one incident with someone else in the kitchen heating a nonstick pot without anything in it besides some pasta bits a few months ago. (They were making mac and cheese and wanted to keep the pot warm after draining the pasta before adding milk, but had some delays.) When things smelled a bit weird I turned off the burner, started filling the pot with cold water to cool it down, turned the fan on, and opened the windows. We didn't feel horrible at the time and I hope there won't be long-term adverse effects.

The coating seems worse now but we've still been using the pot.

[flamingsword]

Seconding the warning on using damaged nonstick cookware. It does leach into the things you cook.

Also, rice vermicelli keep for years when dry, but if you leave them in water you will rapidly have congee or possibly glue. They dont ever really *stop* softening in the water.