🍜 Noodles

Noodles are long, thin strips of dough that are boiled in water or broth, fried or simply soaked in hot water. The dough is made from wheat, rice or buckwheat flour, or from pure starch, as in clear glass noodles. The oldest known bowl of noodles is about 4,000 years old. ¹⁴

The oldest noodles. Archaeologists found them in a sealed earthenware bowl at the Late Neolithic site of Lajia in north-western China. Starch grains and husk phytoliths showed that they were made from millet: some 4,000 years ago people there already stretched millet dough again and again into long, thin strands and boiled them. The authors add that it is still debated whether the Chinese, the Italians or the Arabs invented noodles first. ¹

What they are made of. The Codex standard for instant noodles names wheat, rice or other flours or starches plus water as the base and allows alkaline agents. Japanese rules for fresh noodles give each family its recipe: udon is wheat flour kneaded with water, soba needs at least 30 % buckwheat flour and at most 70 % wheat flour, rice-flour noodles at least 30 % rice flour, and chūka men, Chinese noodles, are wheat flour with kansui. ²⁴

Kansui and Chinese noodles. Kansui is an alkaline agent, and the Codex additive list for instant noodles includes sodium carbonate (INS 500) and potassium carbonate (INS 501). In Japan only noodles made with kansui may be labelled chūka men, and ramen, yakisoba, champon and Okinawa soba are all allowed names within this group. The same code lets a maker write «hand-made» only when every step except kneading is done by hand. ²⁴

Thickness decides the name. Japan's Food Labelling Standard names dried wheat noodles by diameter: 1.7 mm or more is udon, 1.3 to 1.7 mm hiyamugi, under 1.3 mm somen, and flat ribbons at least 4.5 mm wide and under 2 mm thick are hiramen or kishimen; rods of 1.2 mm or more made as pasta are spaghetti. The voluntary JAS standard for dried soba asks for at least 40 % buckwheat flour in the standard grade and 50 % in the upper grade, with no additives at all. ³⁸

Glass and rice noodles. Starch noodles are almost pure carbohydrate: dried mung bean cellophane noodles have 86 g of carbohydrate and only 0.16 g of protein per 100 g. The best known is Longkou Fen Si from Shandong, a protected geographical indication in the EU since 2010: threads under 0.7 mm made from mung bean or pea starch, over 75 % starch and under 15 % water, which must survive 45 minutes of boiling with under 10 % broken. Cooked rice noodles have 108 kcal and 1.8 g of protein per 100 g. ^9101214

Instant noodles. Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin, put Chicken Ramen on sale in Japan on 25 August 1958, and Cup Noodles followed on 18 September 1971; later Space Ram, made with the Japanese space agency JAXA, flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery with astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Under the Codex definition the noodles are pre-gelatinised and then dried by frying or another method: a fried block may hold no more than 10 % moisture, a non-fried one 14 %, and the oil in fried noodles must have an acid value of 2 mg KOH/g or less. ⁴⁶

A world food. According to the World Instant Noodles Association, set up in Tokyo in 1997 with Ando as its first chairman, the world eats more than 120 billion servings of instant noodles a year, most of them in China with Hong Kong, Indonesia and India. By its 50th anniversary in 2021 Cup Noodles alone had sold over 50 billion servings in 100 countries. Rules keep noodles apart from pasta: the Codex standard for instant noodles explicitly does not apply to pasta. ⁴⁵⁶

Why it matters to you. Read the label: soba is usually mixed with wheat, so it is not automatically gluten-free; Japan lists both buckwheat and wheat among its nine mandatory allergens, while the EU list covers wheat but not buckwheat. Dry instant ramen has 1,860 mg of sodium per 100 g, about 4.7 g of salt, and 17.6 g of fat, while cooked soba has 60 mg of sodium and 99 kcal. The WHO advises adults to eat less than 5 g of salt a day. More on Buckwheat noodles, Starch noodles, Asian egg noodles and Pasta. ^78111315