American’s Love Complex For Asian Noodle (2/3)

Rice and wheat haven't always been the medium of choice for making noodles. Not only have soba and mung bean noodles been around for centuries, but the oldest noodles ever found actually were made from millet. Archaeologists in western China recently found an overturned bowl of millet noodles they believe to be 4,000 years old. They apparently were preserved when an earthquake flipped the bowl over and a flood that seems to have resulted from the earthquake sealed the bowl in mud and silt until it was uncovered earlier this year. The noodles soon turned to dust after their discovery, but not before they were photographed and documented. It was likely many, many years later before people started making noodles from squid. In Chapel Hill, N.C., chef Andrea Reusing of Lantern restaurant scores butterflied squid bodies in a cross-hatch and then slices them very finely into long, thin strips — she says that not all of her back-of-the-house staff have the knife skills to do it. She blanches the squid strips in salted water, chills them and marinates them in lime juice, palm sugar, coconut milk, fish sauce, shallots, chilies, kaffir lime leaf, galangal and lemon grass. She serves them topped with a chiffonade of basil and mint. By scoring them in two directions, they curl into noodle-like shapes instead of lying flat. Reusing says she made the dish in response to customers who wanted cold noodles, as well as items without carbohydrates. She says the salad also is a good way to get people to try eating squid in a form other than fried calamari. In New York at Seppi's, Chef Claude Solliard imports seaweed noodles from China. "They cook the seaweed for a long time and it releases its natural gelatin. Then they just shape it like a noodle," he says. "Anything you can do with regular pasta, you can do with it." He says the noodles are high in calcium and vitamins, and are free of carbohydrates, eggs and gluten. So guests who are allergic to wheat or eggs or are avoiding carbs can eat the pasta, which he generally serves with traditional sauces such as a puttanesca. He also puts it in salad with tofu, tomato, cucumber and avocado. "Before you season it, it almost tastes like nothing. Whatever flavor you put in, that's what it tastes like," Solliard says. Unlike starchy pasta, the seaweed noodles take on the flavors without absorbing or muting them, so more mild sauces are in order. Health was the reason that Chris Gatto, corporate chef of Chicago-based Uno Chicago Grill, added a new kind of pasta to the chain restaurant's menu. "We wanted to introduce more healthful items," he says. Although Uno calls the new pasta multigrain, the pasta includes more than grains, but also chickpeas, flax seeds and other items to give it higher protein content. Because pasta is a meal in the United States, unlike in Italy, where it is a side dish, the supplier wanted to create pasta that, from a nutritional perspective, could be a meal by itself. Gatto has put it on his fall menu in the form of chicken portobello penne with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes and portobello mushrooms. Introduced in half of Uno's units in September and the rest in early October, it's now the chain's top-selling pasta dish. The pasta also is offered with roasted vegetables, sun-dried tomato and olive oil sauce. Gatto says that although the menu description calls the pasta "multigrain," it is not marked with any other verbiage or symbol to imply that it's healthful. Nor is it offered as a substitute for its regular pasta. "We felt that the dishes that we designed with the multigrain were great with that pasta," he says, noting that those dishes were designed specifically to go with that pasta's flavor.