Hot and Sour Egg-Drop Soup with Hand-Cut Smoked Paprika Noodles

Delicately smokey egg noodles, earthy shiitake mushrooms and malty Shanxi vinegar add delectable layers of complexity to this comfort food favorite. 

Hot and Sour Egg-Drop Soup with Hand-Cut Smoked Paprika Noodles

Makes 4 servings

Hot and sour soup is my ultimate comfort food. I’ve been testing versions of this recipe for years, so needless to say it feels symbolic to start my food blog with one of my earliest ongoing experiments, as if coming full-circle. My chosen ingredients and cooking techniques may have grown in sophistication over the years, but the end result is always the same: just me and the wife enjoying a simple bowl of noodle soup. 

Starting on day 0 of COVID-19 quarantine, I began transforming kitchen transformed into a fully equipped science lab. In addition to pickling, preserving and by all means stretching ingredients to their limits, I’ve baked and boiled at least a dozen different kinds of breads and pastas, pairing them with all sorts of improvised and non-improvised meals, almost always entirely made from scratch. Just today I imagined how would it taste to pair smoked paprika egg noodle pasta with my hot and sour soup—and viola—this blog was born. 

Ingredients for the noodles:

• 4 eggs
• 1 tablespoon smoked paprika powder
• 2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour

Ingredients for the soup:

• 1 quart vegetable stock
• 2 dehydrated shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• 1 piece kombu cut into 3x3 inch square
• 3 dried Szechuan peppercorns (optional)
• 2 tablespoon white or red miso paste
• 1-2 tablespoon doubanjiang (Chinese spicy fermented broad bean paste)
• 4 tablespoon Shanxi vinegar (AKA Chinese black vinegar)
• 2 tablespoon soy sauce or tamari
• 1 teaspoon ginger paste (optional)
• 2 eggs
• Scallions or chives, for garnish

As a vegan alternative, replace the eggs in the pasta dough recipe with 3/4 cup of carrot juice and simply omit the egg drop component of the soup.

You will need: a sharp knife, one tall pot for boiling pasta, a colander, and another separate pot for soup. A stand mixer makes the first two minutes of dough mixing easier, but it can also be done by hand. If you do not have a pasta roller, just use a good old fashioned rolling pin to get the pasta dough as absolutely thin as you can.

Nothing gets your appetite going like streaming hot broth over your freshly made noodles.

I've been learning how to make pasta from a nifty, colorful pasta making book called Pasta Pretty Please by Linda Miller Nicholson. This book is pretty damn fun and is great for anyone interested in learning how to make pretty, and tasty, pasta and pasta sauces of all kinds. Frankly, I’m just not motivated enough to try the more intricate projects the book has to offer (and there are so many; see Stars and Stripes Pappardelle, or Emoji Ravioli), but perhaps you are. And besides, she is kind enough to give you twenty something different colored pasta dough recipes with which you can do all sorts of projects—fettuccine, lasagna, whatever. By the way, I’ve never gotten around to buying or using “00” pasta flour—that is the very-fine-but-expensive type of flour she calls for in her dough recipes. I’ve always used cost-effective all-purpose flour. Here’s why: firstly, it tastes great. Secondly, if you’re a novice pasta maker, like me, then you don’t want to be fucking up your very-fine-but-expensive pasta dough on account of your lack of pasta handling expertise. Failure is inevitable; which in turn will help lead you to make better pasta—so why not take some of the sting of that failure out? You want to practice with the mid-grade stuff, the cheaper (but not the cheapest!) stuff, and once you really got the hang of that, once you can do it in your sleep and it comes out tasting terrific, then sure, go for that “00” flour. In the meantime, think about spending that money you’ve saved on other high quality ingredients, such as Parmigiano-Reggiano. A couple shavings ought to take your all-purpose flour fettuccine to the moon.

All of the soup ingredients can be found at your local asian grocery store. If you don’t already have ingredients like duobanjiang (pronounced Doh-ban-jyang), kombu and Shanxi vinegar, I insist you buy them! Here’s my case: These are highly versatile ingredients to have around your pantry; kombu, or dried kelp sheets, is scientifically proven to help in the cooking of dried beans by removing harmful polysaccharides and making them more digestible. I first learned about this from reading Joe Yonan's excellent new cookbook, Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking With the World's Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein. I like adding a tablespoon of doubanjiang to asian salad dressings and peanut curry stews; basically, it’s like sriracha, but for grown-ups. If you’re still not convinced, think about it as a way of paying respect to the cultural roots of that dish; your food will taste better, your culinary knowledge will increase, and you might just learn that much more about other people’s approaches to building flavor and making delicious food. Okay? Okay. Let’s move on. 

Just so you know: this pasta recipe will make more than enough noodles for this amount of broth. Boil as much as you plan to eat and freeze the left-overs. You’ll never regret having homemade noodles at the ready. Cut and dried pasta is made easy to save by freezing. Simply roll bundles of the remaining leather-hard pasta from the palm around the back of your hand to make “nests.” Place the nests in a Ziplock bag and freeze until you’re ready to use them. You don’t even have to cook them any different from frozen; just drop nests straight from the freezer into boiling salted water and cook for 1 minute max, just as you would with fresh pasta. Easy. 

Alright, let’s get on with the recipe.

The unsung heroes--a medley of sliced dried mushroom and kombu are crucial for developing a rich and hearty umami flavor in your soup.

Slice the dried shiitake mushrooms thinly and cut a 3x3 inch square from a sheet of kombu, then stir them both into a pot of room temperature vegetable stock to rehydrate. The dried ingredients will infuse the stock with nutritious, delicious umami flavor so leave as such for as long as it takes to make the pasta, or longer, up to 12 hours.

To make the pasta:

Combine 4 eggs and 1 tablespoon of smoked paprika powder in a blender and blend until well incorporated. Add the flour and the egg mixture to a stand mixer and mix with the paddle tool on the lowest setting for 2 minutes. If the flour appears dehydrated and doesn’t come together to form a dough within the first minute, add 1 teaspoon of water and wait again. The dough should be one sticky clump, like play-dough, only tackier. Lightly flour a work surface as well as the dough and begin to kneed by hand for about 5 minutes, adding an additional dusting of flour only as necessary. After 5 minutes, the dough should be stiff. Form the dough into a ball, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and let rest for 30 minutes. You can also leave the wrapped ball in the fridge for up to 24 hours. 

Give that dough a rest! Your pasta will thank you.

After the dough is finished resting, it is time to start sheeting. The dough should be very supple and relaxed. Remove the dough from the plastic and place it on a lightly floured work surface. At this point, depending on your experience, you could work with one half or one quarter of the dough at a time. You may also sheet the entire ball at once if you feel comfortable. Whatever you decide, wrap any remaining parts of the dough in plastic so it doesn’t develop a skin. Flatten the dough slightly with a rolling pin in order to thin it out to about 1/2 in. thickness, then run it through your pasta attachment, starting with the widest setting, working your way to the thinnest. You might want to rub a little flour onto both sides of the pasta sheet about half way through to keep the dough from being too sticky.

If you don’t want to hand cut your pasta (booooo), simply pass it now through your fettuccine attachment and allow it to dry to leather-hard for thirty minutes. But rolling and cutting by hand gives you more control over your noodle width, assuming you can hold a knife somewhat steadily. Plus, it’s more badass. So for you badasses who are here to cut your pasta by hand, please read on.

Fold up the pasta segments and slice across the width with the help of a sharp knife.

Once your pasta has gone through the thinnest setting, cut the long sheet into 12-inch segments and rub both sides with flour. Flip the segments after 5 minutes to expose the other side to the air. You want the segments to harden slightly, making them easier to cut. Repeat with the remainder of your dough ball until all of the pasta is thinned and cut into 12-inch segments.

Fill your tallest stock pot with water so that it is 3/4 of the way full. The pasta needs that space to cook evenly. Let it come up to a boil and then salt the water enough to the point where you think, damn, that’s pretty salty. Linda Miller Nicholson says it ought to taste as if you’re sucking on a mermaid’s tit. You’re welcome.

Remove the kombu from your stock (you could also eat it if you want but remove it nonetheless) and turn the heat to medium-high. Let it gradually warm up as you finish the pasta.

Now you are ready to start rolling and cutting. Align one 12-inch segment vertically on a flour dusted cutting board and dust both sides of the pasta sheet with flour, using your fingers to gently rub the flour into the sheet. Starting from the bottom, roll up the sheet like you would a poster until you get to the top. Take your knife and cut the pasta across the width to your preferred length. I like to cut the pasta into slices 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch thick. Next, pick up the rolled up dough slivers and toss them around in your hands between your fingers and agitating the pile to unfurl your hand-crafted noodles This should take 15 seconds at most if you floured your sheet well enough before rolling. If your rolls are being stubborn by only half unfurling, just take that pasta noodle by the unrolled part and whip the roll into the air in front of you. It really should unfurl by that point. Toss your beautiful new noodles together on the cutting board for a few seconds, then spread them them across a parchment paper- lined tray in to dry further. You may choose to let the noodles dry in curly bunches or, for those whose OCD is screaming, lay each noodle out totally straight and unfurled. Repeat with the remaining pasta segments until you have a whole tray of beautiful pasta.

A look at pasta drying. Dry it straight or in a curly mass.

Add all of the seasonings to the soup and bring it to a boil. Scatter a third of your pasta into the salted boiling water and allow to cook for one minute, max. Seriously. Count that minute in your head or use a timer. By the 59th second you should be draining the whole pot into a colander in your sink. Immediately shock the pasta with cold water to stop it from overcooking. Set aside while you finish the soup. 

Once the soup is at a full boil, whisk two eggs in a separate bowl. With one hand, stir the soup with a pair of chopsticks or a spoon in a circle around the soup pot at a moderate, steady speed.  Slowly stream in one-third of the whisked egg using your other hand. Stir constantly for about 10 seconds and then stop, allowing the soup to return to a boil. Repeat this step two more times with the remaining whisked egg.

Add your freshly made pasta to your favorite noodle soup bowl. Stream hot broth on top of it. Garnish with chives or scallions. Enjoy!