How To Make Fresh Noodles Without Any Flour

While flour doesn’t seem quite as hard to come by as it was earlier in the spring, I’ve still seen home cooks coming up with all sorts of inventive ways to make do without it. Last month, Daniel wrote this piece for Heated about Japanese egg crêpe noodles, and I was instantly reminded of how wonderful (and relatively unknown) they are.

I learned how to make them at this Japanese restaurant in D.C., and then, aside from putting the recipe in one of my books, of course forgot about them. They’re crêpes (basically just a super-thin omelet) made only out of eggs, with a splash of soy sauce added if you want. Once they’re cooked, you roll them up and cut them into strips, which end up looking surprisingly like fresh egg pasta. (Yes, they obviously taste a little different, eggier for sure, but they have that wonderful al dente texture that you want from a noodle, and they’re even good at room temperature, which is a bonus now that it’s almost summer.)

As you might imagine, they’re a little delicate, so if you’re gong to toss them with sauce, just be gentle. (Alternatively, it’s common to use these egg strips as a garnish for stir-fries). In the photo that accompanies the recipe, they’re served as a side dish with some ginger-scallion sauce (a combination of minced ginger, sliced scallions, soy sauce, vinegar, and a little vegetable oil). But as Daniel mentions, if you don’t beat in the soy sauce along with the eggs, there’s no reason the noodles couldn’t be tossed with tomato sauce or pesto, these updated takes on Primavera sauce that I wrote about last month, or an even heartier sauce of chopped shrimp with garlic and herbs (like this one from Daniel).

Even if you have a year’s worth of flour stashed in your basement, these are simple, fast, useful, different, and totally worth trying.

—Mark