Vietnamese Spicy Noodle Soup with Homemade Noodles

Time for French Fridays with Dorie! Our recipe this week is Dorie's Vietnamese Spicy Chicken Noodle Soup. I made a vegetarian version, so switched up a few things about the recipe as I went along.

First, I made some Chinese Egg Noodles with my pasta maker. We eat a lot of Asian noodles and have many varieties in the pantry -- soba, cellophane, Thai rice noodles, Cantonese, etc. but I didn't have any Chinese Egg Noodles and had been wanting to try to make my own for a while. I absolutely love the thick Chinese egg noodles you get at Chinese restaurants, I have purchased many Chinese Egg Noodles at the supermarket and specialty stores, always looking for that Chinese restaurant style thick noodle, with no success. Now I think I've made the closest I'm going to get at home. Yum!

Here is the recipe I used, it is from the website ifood.tv, and is so simple you won't believe it...

Chinese Egg Noodles

ifoodtv.com

3 cups sifted flour -- I used all purpose

4 eggs -- I used large

You can mix this by hand, in a KA mixer, or pasta machine. There are more complete directions at the link above. If you do it by hand you can run it through a hand crank machine for flat Chinese Egg Noodles. I wanted thick and cylindrical, so went with my pasta machine and spaghetti extruder disc.

Dorie's soup recipe calls for 5 ounces of noodles, and since I was leaving out the chicken and happen to love noodley soups, I doubled this amount and measured out 10 ounces of fresh noodles on the kitchen scale.

The above photo is adding the noodles. I decided to just cook the noodles in the soup instead of cooking them separately and then adding them as per the recipe. In the below photo you can see how big and slurp-able the noodles got after cooking in the soup, yum!

The soup came together easily, I made a few substitutions -- using vegetable broth instead of chicken, and a mixture of vegetarian oyster sauce and soy sauce instead of the fish sauce. I also used one head of roasted garlic instead of the three sliced cloves, and let my chilies and star anise (I used two whole stars) simmer in the soup. Another tiny change I made was to use Ground Coriander Seed from my spice rack and just sprinkle a little in the soup, instead of the Coriander Seeds.

I thought this was delicious, it has so many different flavors all coming together beautifully. If I had ordered this in a restaurant I would definitely order it again. How did the family like it? Picky husband would not try this soup, my daughter said it was "great, the best soup I ever had," my oldest son said it was "terrible," and my youngest son said to me, "please don't make this soup again." Tough crowd tonight!

At first I had a little bowl, topped with mung bean sprouts and Thai chili sauce, and the second time I ate this I left off the sprouts and chili sauce and stirred in a little peanut butter, which was wonderful. I think I like the soup without the toppings the best. I hope everyone had as much fun with this recipe as I did :)