keto noodles

I made the Keto Asian Flavours noodles with the magic of molecular gastronomy, and while my noodles look more or less like the ones in the video, I must say I'm disappointed by the taste and texture. They certainly look like spaghetti, though, don't they?

Up to a point, making the noodle solution (batter...?) was easy, but getting it into a squeeze bottle and then squeezing it into a water bath of dissolved calcium lactate wasn't as easy as it looked in the video. The first problem was that the yellow noodle solution, when I began blending it, thickened instantly. I also don't have a low setting on my Kenwood blender: the choices are high speed, higher speed, and pulse, which is the highest speed of them all. You're supposed to start off blending on low speed. So within seconds, the mix of powders and water turned into a yellow goop that unfortunately reminded me of banana pudding, which made me hungry. In the video, this solution was easy to pour. What I made—and I followed Ann's procedure—was nearly unpourable. 

You're supposed to mix the solution until it thickens, then stick it in a bowl and put it in the fridge for thirty minutes to allow any bubbles to rise to the surface. You then skim the bubbles off and pour the mixture from your bowl into a squeeze bottle. But as I said, my solution was too thick and goopy. No bubbles rose to the surface. I initially tried dumping the goop straight from the bowl into a funnel (after the mandated thirty minutes' rest) that I'd placed over the squeeze bottle, but the goop simply wouldn't go down the funnel. So I removed the solution from the funnel and placed it in a Ziploc bag. That became my piping bag, but it was too awkward to pipe the goop directly into the water bath, so I piped the solution into the squeeze bottle. I then began swirling the water bath, per the video's instructions, and started squeezing noodles into the water. And it worked! For about thirty seconds. It became very hard for me both to squeeze the solution into the water and stir the water at the same time (watch the video to see what I mean by this motion). The difficulty was again related to my solution's viscosity. With a lot of bottle-shaking and shifting of my hand's position, I was able to squeeze out most of the solution into the water, but I still wasted plenty of it.

Not that it mattered. I experimentally ate one of the noodles, and it tasted like... nothing. A regular noodle made with regular pasta also has a mild, almost neutral flavor, but semolina flour doesn't taste like nothing. And the keto noodles' texture was weird. I don't know what I was expecting, but chewing that noodle was like chewing on a pliable styrofoam pool noodle the size and shape of an earthworm. Not gross, necessarily, but also not a good mouth-feel.

So I immediately rejected the notion of using the noodles as spaghetti, which meant scuttling my plans to make an Alfredo cream sauce with sausage and pesto mixed in. I'm going to take my 377 grams of noodles to the office, where I plan to use the noodles in a quick-and-dirty version of budae-jjigae, which will involve a package of budae meat and a ramyeon soup-base packet. (I won't be able to eat the regular ramyeon noodles, so those will have to go to my boss or my coworker.)

More than anything, I just want to get this experiment over with. I'd had such high hopes for these awesome-looking noodles, but given how everything has turned out thus far, I doubt I'll be making these ever again. So the quest for decent keto pasta goes on. (Chris Cooking Nashville has a recipe for "carnivore" ramen.) Meanwhile, below are some pics for what was essentially more of a lab experiment than a cooking session.

You can see how differing amounts of force produced different thicknesses of noodle.

The turmeric in the recipe gives the pasta its yellow color.

up close and personal

ingestion

about to be stored

calcium lactate water bath added for storage purposes

The instructions say you can safely store the noodles in the calcium-lactate solution in which the noodles were made. Okay, then.

an unsuccessful attempt at a lasagna sheet

I'm actually glad the lasagna sheet didn't work out. My distinct impression is that these keto noodles are, in truth, no good at all for anything Italian. They're way too spongy and insubstantial, and with the slight turmeric taste, there'd be a clash with certain Italian sauces. Ramyeon flavor packets, though, ought to be fine.

Expect more photos and commentary later when I eat a bunch of the noods. I wonder how they'd be with jjajang sauce.