Technique: How to Quickly Rehydrate Dried Noodles

Like the technique to quickly rehydrate dried mushrooms, Technique: How to Quickly Rehydrate Dried Shiitake Mushrooms (冬菇, Dung¹ Gu¹), the microwave is used to quickly rehydrate dried noodles. Usually dried noodles need to be rehydrated by using boiling water in a pot, which means the pot needs to be cleaned afterwards.

I use boiling water, a microwave safe covered container, and the microwave to speed up the process, and not have to clean a pot afterwards (the covered container gets placed into the dishwasher). Depending upon the type and thickness of the dried noodle and the strength of the microwave, the time required to rehydrate the noodles in the microwave is about 3-4 minutes after boiling the water. Using this method allows just about any dried noodle to be rehydrated using this technique. I have not tried using this method with long thick noodles, like spaghetti, since those noodles don’t fit into normal microwave safe covered containers. However dried noodles that are smaller in length, such as those found in Asian markets, this is a quick and easy method to rehydrate the noodles before making a stir fry noodle dish. These noodles usually come in 3.5 oz (100 g.) packages, so two of these packages are good for two meals (one portion to eat now, one portion to eat later).

Enjoy!

Technique: How To Make Shrimp Crunchy

This is probably my last post for 2017. I want to wish you and your family the best for 2018. I hope you’ve enjoyed (and tried) this year’s recipes. As you might have noticed, there have been very few posts since early November. I took a long vacation to Asia for most of November and into early December, so the queue for new recipes is long (and growing larger). I’ve been wanting to start blogging about my travel, so to that end, I made an initial post about frozen turkey prices in Singapore. I expect to start adding more posts in the coming year, so keep an eye out for those posts. The travel blog can be found here: https://ducksoupeasytravel.blogspot.com.

For my last post this year, I decided to post a technique for making shrimp “crunchy”. This technique is really simple and I would urge you to try it so that your shrimp have the same texture as that found in restaurants.

The prawn or shrimp in restaurant dishes always have a crunchiness to them, while shrimp used at home lack texture. This is true for both fresh (which in the USA were previously frozen unless you happen to live a region that truly has fresh shrimp) and frozen shrimp. I’ve been looking for a way to emulate the texture of shrimp found in restaurants, but the methods that I’ve found on the internet involve more steps, ingredients, and work that make the process cumbersome.

I managed to find a way to reliably and simply produce crunchy shrimp, and it involves the use of baking soda. If you’ve read many of my recipes, baking soda is used to tenderize meats like to that found in restaurant dishes. In the case of shrimp, a baking soda solution can be used to give shrimp the crunchy texture like that found in restaurants.

The technique involves soaking the shrimp overnight in an iced baking soda solution and then, one hour before cooking, marinating the shrimp. If the shrimp is frozen, there’s no need to add ice to the solution. The shrimp may be left in the baking soda solution up to 48 hours, so there’s no need to use the shrimp all at once in a single dish. The shrimp should be left in the baking soda solution until one hour before cooking the dish. The crunchiness will disappear from the shrimp, once the shrimp is removed from the baking soda solution. Washing away the baking soda solution from the shrimp under cold water one hour before cooking (and marinating) gives the best results.

Enjoy!

Technique: How to Quickly Rehydrate Dried Shiitake Mushrooms (冬菇, Dung1 Gu1)

For the last posting of the Lunar New Year, here’s a technique to quickly rehydrate dried Shiitake mushrooms. In my recipes using dried Shiitake mushrooms, the instructions usually call for soaking in water that has been boiled for at least one hour. This is usually not a problem if you’ve been planning to make a dish ahead of time, but is a problem when you decide at the last minute that you need rehydrated Shiitake mushrooms. That’s exactly what happened to me, I needed rehydrated Shiitake mushrooms at the last minute and had to figure out how to quickly do this. So the technique that I came up with is to boil the mushrooms in the microwave after pouring boiling water over them.

I found that it is important to not fill the bowl with the dried mushrooms completely with boiling water. Leave a space of about 1-inch (2.5 cm.) from the top because the water foams once it reboils in the microwave. So the timing (at least for my microwave) is to turn the microwave on high for 1 minute to reboil the liquid in the bowl, and then use 50% power for another 4 minutes to rehydrate the mushrooms. Once removed from the microwave, the bowl is refilled to the top with more water since the mushroom rehydration liquid is usually used later in the recipe needing the mushrooms. So for the time it takes to boil water plus 5 minutes (rather than one hour), the mushrooms are ready for use.

Enjoy!

Technique: Reheating a Chinese Glutinous Rice Tamale (粽, Zung3)

This posting was updated on 07 Feb 2016. The title and opening text were changed.

This is not a recipe, but a technique to reheat a Chinese glutinous rice tamale. I’ve also heard it referred to in English as a dumpling, but it’s too huge to be called a dumpling!

So what is a Chinese glutinous rice tamale? Unlike the tamale you’re probably familiar with consisting of corn husks wrapped around masa with a meat filling, the Cantonese version consists of bamboo leaves wrapped around glutinous (sticky) rice with pork belly meat, Cantonese pork sausage, and a salted duck egg yolk. In addition, you can also find mung beans, peanuts, chestnut, dried shrimp, Shiitake mushrooms, and other goodies in the tamale, depending upon the source (usually homemade). There are many other Chinese regional tamale variations, as well as sweet versions. Whether or not you’re lucky enough to know someone who makes the tamales themselves (homemade always being the best) or if you buy the tamales at an Asian market, you’ll need to reheat them. Here’s a (relatively) fast method to do so.

Enjoy!