A quest for the perfect noodle soup.
Meet the innovator who’s exploring the whole spectrum of soup.
When I showed up to make noodle soup with Ken Albala, he had already spent 34 hours on the project. He had dehydrated okra, tomato and corn, grinding them fine like a flour. He had cooked a stock made from marrow bone, chicken back and neck. As he spent another hour and a half making three doughs and layering them into a pattern he had just conceived, he repeatedly reminded me, “I have no idea what I’m doing; I’m making this up as I go.”
Which was technically true: He had never made a gumbo-esque soup with okra, corn and tomato noodles. But on its own, spontaneity couldn’t account for how the man had gone from never having eaten instant ramen 2½ years ago to making more than 250 different kinds of noodle soup from scratch, for fun.
As we talked about everything from getting tips from Ivan Orkin of the famous Ivan Ramen to how the aesthetic of bowls affects the eating experience, I realized that this is not a hobby for Albala: It is an all-consuming relationship, the kind that makes it impossible to focus on anything else. It’s why he revived a noodle recipe from 1549, and smoked and ground his own grains for a smoked noodle served cold in dashi. Albala thrives at the intersection of spontaneity, research and creativity.
It makes sense: Albala is a researcher at heart, a professor of history and the creator of the University of the Pacific’s master’s degree in food studies at its San Francisco campus, not to mention the writer-editor of 24 books on food. As his colleague and fellow editor-writer Andrew Smith explained, he’s also one of the few scholarly food writers who actually cooks.
“He’s not just talking about what people in the early Renaissance ate, he’s cooking it,” Smith said. “There is nobody else like that in the world. None of us can compete with the diversity of skills and knowledge that he has.”
And Albala does this with no prior kitchen experience: “I didn’t cook much until college, but I did experiments growing up, crazy (stuff ) like make kvass, a weak beer, using my family’s sour cherry tree.”
In fact, his entire life has been sprinkled with obsessions and the experiments that grew from them. There were the five years in grad school that he made pancakes daily from around the world; the five years he spent engrossed in fermentation, meat curing and cheese making (he still runs a Facebook group dedicated to it); and the year he ate beans every single day. Most experiments were turned into books, including his latest, “Beyond Ramen: The Surprising World of Homemade Noodle Soup,” set to publish in late 2017 or early 2018. But authoring books was never his goal. He simply wanted to scratch this inquisitive itch he had.
One of Albala’s greatest traits is his enthusiasm for all things edible. After Smith restored the oldest cookbook in western civilization, attributed to Marcus Apicius, Albala showed up to the completion party dressed as Apicius — in toga and a bay leaf crown — and gave a speech. In 2015, after Albala found a tiny pot in Hong Kong, he was inspired to make the world’s smallest bowl of noodle soup, using pottery bowls the size of his fingertip (hand-thrown by him, natch), and filled with homemade mini noodles, broth and a garnish of green onions.
Back in Albala’s kitchen, he added a dark roux to the stock. Once simmering, the noodles went in, occasionally tossed with large medical tweezers. “Ooh, the slime has come out of the okra noodles during cooking! I didn’t know that would happen,” he said.
He had never made these noodles before, but he had created the method. Early on, he realized that noodles would taste more intense if he dehydrated the main flavor (vegetables, fruits, even ham), ground it and substituted it for 50 percent of the flour in the recipe. It’s how he created bowls like Thai green banana noodles in vanilla and cardamom-scented coconut milk with pineapple and starfruit; or fermented purple carrot noodles with celery-root noodles, shredded duck confit, duck broth, sage and
“I’m trying to convince people that pasta is ... the cheapest food you can find. And it’s just a lot of fun to make with your hands.” Ken Albala, noodle innovator
potato pancakes. His willingness to think outside the box led to a technique of making rice and sweet potato noodles in the microwave: He piped batter onto a Silpat and zapped it for 15 seconds, which produced ultra-thin noodles ready to boil.
Albala also reimagines classic dishes into noodle soup, be it tongue-on-rye noodle soup (cured, braised beef tongue, 100 percent rye noodles, mixed bone broth, caraway and mustard powder), or historical flavors like his blanc-manger soup (almond milk, rice noodles, shredded chicken, rosewater and cinnamon). He’s tackled traditional noodle soups from around the world, like ohn no khao swe from Burma, and Uyghur-style, laghman noodles with lamb soup.
He even makes desserts and cocktails with noodles, like matcha noodles in tamarind, palm sugar and cardamom broth; and a milk-washed bloody Mary with pickled lemon noodles.
His soup bases are just as inventive. Who else would salt, smoke and dry his own tuna for katsuobushi to make his dashi more flavorful? From homemade nut milk and Icelandic stout beer to coconut milk with fried aromatics and pickled radish brine, his broths are both thoughtful and inspired.
As impressive as his noodle soup portfolio is, the goal of his upcoming book is to show how easy they are to make. “I’m trying to convince people that pasta is ... the cheapest food you can find,” he said. “And it’s just a lot of fun to make with your hands.”
He suggests putting aside time where you would normally watch TV to start a noodle dough or stock. Both can be made in advance and stored until the craving hits: “When you have a lot of time, enjoy the meditative process of making pasta.” And it doesn’t always have to be from scratch. If you keep dry pasta and soup or stock on hand, you need only to add fresh vegetables and protein to make an excellent bowl: “Think of time spent in the kitchen as fun, not a chore.”
Our bowl of soup was finished with large wild shrimp, quickly cooked in the broth and served in Albala’s own hand-thrown pottery bowls with chopsticks and a Chinese soup spoon. As we slurped the colorful noodles and rich broth, we analyzed the results.
“The noodles are a little thicker than I like, and I’d leave out the tomato and corn. I think it just gets lost,” Albala said. We agreed the broth was the best part, but overpowered the shrimp’s delicate flavor (andouille sausage would work better). In the end, with some tweaks, it was good enough for the book.
I’m not sure what Albala’s next food obsession will be, but I can promise one thing: It will be epic.