Swimming in the Noodle Soup — Where Variety and Flavors Make Your Head Spin…in a Good Way.

I grew up watching cartoons and Anime. They had breathtaking landscapes, beautiful clothes and enviable food. Series like Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Naruto, Fairy Tail, Dragon Ball, and Card Captor Sakura were my favorites as a kid. I was not ashamed to say that they were the reason why I started to eat instant noodles with chopsticks. There was just something “cool” about eating noodle soups with chopsticks. That was before I set foot in Asia where the noodle soups were endless, diverse and completely overwhelming for the mouth. An explosion of flavors like no other. Why on Earth did I like the flavorless instant noodles in the West?

Since I didn’t eat seafood or fish, people in the West used to tell me how I would starve in the East, but if anything I gained weight (and my gallbladder also got its fair share of stones). Beef, chicken and pork noodle soups were my go-to food in any new restaurant. If the broth was good, you couldn’t go wrong with noodle soups.

Morning, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, or evening bite, there was no hour that was not convenient for noodle soups in my husband’s hometown in China. Good thing that shops opened at 5 a.m. and closed at 10 p.m.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite imitate the taste of their broth in my own culinary experiments (I am a baker, not a cook), but the secret to the consistency of the noodles resided in the fact that they were made by hand. They were not the industrial sticky noodles that we boiled in the West to make Spaghetti or Chinese dishes imitations.

The traditional process of making noodles is as followed — just like the way you cut fries, slice your way through the flour and dough, stretch wide, rotate the texture until desired consistency and let rest.

One chef in Lvsi Harbor, in the East part of China, let me in on the secret of his delicious soup. ‘One needs to get up early in the morning and go to bed late to prepare the ingredients’. Since some noodles require to dry before they are cooked and consumed, they must be prepared a day or two beforehand. Some chefs go to sleep at two o’clock at night. I must say that I admire their resilience.

As I travel, I am on a culinary quest. My goal is to find the best noodle soups China has to offer.

What is your favorite noodle soup?