Some like their noodles with
bite, the quality that Italians refer to as "al dente". But good luck
trying to buy such noodles in the market.
When you dine out, you can choose freshly made Hong Kong noodles,
yellow noodles or rice vermicelli, but "fresh" noodles from the
supermarket get stale quickly and the dried variety that you have to
rehydrate are never good enough.
Enter the Philips Noodle Maker. It is the stuff of a lazy cook's
dreams and resembles none of the pasta or noodle makers found in the
shops.
No kneading. No folding. No need to sprinkle flour over a flat table
top. No need for the expert skills of tossing and pulling the dough
into skinny strands. And no need to crank up a machine to slice up
dough sheets into strands.
Just add flour, eggs, water and flavouring into the noodle machine and press a button.
By flavouring, I mean ingredients such as fresh spinach, tomato or
carrot juice, or black pepper and chilli flakes for noodles with a
kick. In less than 10 minutes, everything comes together to form the
dough.
This set comes with four extruder moulds that you fix to the mouth
of the machine. The dough is then forced out to create the likes of
angel hair pasta or penne.
A simple change in the ingredients is all it takes to make mee kia
using the same mould that produced angel hair pasta; or yellow noodles,
via the spaghetti mould.
Bundled with the machine is a recipe book that teaches you how to
make noodles to local tastes. The machine can also be tweaked to
produce noodles that are more - or less - chewy or bouncy.
Each serving delivers about 500g of dough, so you can experiment with recipes of your own without worrying about wastage.
The same machine was launched in Japan but with a different set of noodle moulds, for udon, soba, ramen and pasta.
Those moulds are not available here but there is a chance that
Philips Japan will sell replacement moulds for that market, which can
be used on local machines.
