Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 7: Failure!!!

It had to happen sometime. And actually, as failures go, this was fairly unsuccessful, in that it wasn't all that bad. For one thing, I made the failed noodles the same day that I pulled a 16-hour kitchen marathon, so that I was too tired to care whether they tasted good or not, I was just happy to stop making food. And for another reason, they didn't qualify as a kitchen disaster. Disasters, like my attempts to make dosas and injera, have to make a horrible mess that takes hours to clean up, or at least ruins some piece of kitchen equipment. Or at a minimum, they have to use up ingredients too costly to replace. All that happened here was, I made the noodles, and they didn't taste good. Moving on!

The noodle in question was the Hand-Rolled Rice Noodle, and I actually really enjoyed making them. I kneaded together the dough of rice flour, salt and water, before starting the cake layers for my mother's fancy birthday cake. The blob of dough sat resting while I worked my pastry wiles, then I did the shaping and cooking all in the time that the egg whites and sugar syrup for the buttercream were being combined and cooled in the stand mixer. So, another quick and easy recipe.

They were fun to shape, too. With slightly oiled hands, I pinched off pieces of dough, rolled them between my hands into a ball, and then into a tapered cylinder, fat at the centre in the space between my palms and thinner, pointed at the edges. This technique also felt pleasantly intuitive, except that despite repeatedly re-oiling my hands, the dough kept unpleasantly sticking, and didn't seem to be of the right texture. Sure enough, when it came to the boil, I just couldn't cook them to a pleasant texture. It's possible I missed the crucial window, but I think they segued gracelessly from undercooked to overcooked and mushy, with nothing of the spring and bite you'd expect from a rice noodle.

I had made a quick salsa to go with them, Market Stall Fresh Tomato Salsa also from Beyond the Great Wall, which was flavoured with sesame oil and chives and was really delicious. So I mixed my mushy sad little blobs of noodle with the salsa in a bowl and tried to eat them. The flavour wasn't bad, but I had this unpleasant insecurity about whether or not I was eating raw rice somehow, so I eventually gave up. After sampling syrup, curd, ganache, cake batter, buttercream, and meringues all day, it's not like there was much room left for real food anyway.

I have two theories about the failure. One is that right from the get-go I knew the dough was too wet. The instructions explain that it will be stiff and hard to work and mine wasn't - maybe I put too much water in, and if I'd kneaded in more flour as I thought of doing initially, it might all have been ok. The other problem is that I was using schmancy organic brown rice flour from the US rather than standard white rice flour. The former was probably long or medium grain instead of a stickier shorter grain Asian rice, so maybe it was just not great for the recipe. I've now acquired some plain rice flour and I'll be sure to try again...