Category: American Noodles

  • Driven By Dough

    My morning starts at around 3:15 am. From then on, I have my head down and am running non-stop for about 12 hours. I have my eyes on the path in front of me and block out the rest of the world as I strive to create. The other day a regular customer asked Aki if we were closing. He overheard a conversation in Wawa that made him think that this was a possibility. She told him it was a baseless rumor and not true. What is true is that we have a small, tight, hard-working staff that makes magic on a daily basis. It’s hard. It’s really hard. And when people ask me how it’s going, I don’t bother to sugarcoat it. My blunt answers when sharing the hardships of creating on a daily basis and the insane unpredictability of our business flow have probably led to the rumors of imminent shutdown. When we have too many doughnuts left over, we are crushed. When we run out of doughnuts early, customers are disappointed and we are too, because we want everyone to get what they came looking for. Finding a balance between sales and leftovers when it comes to a perishable product is a delicate balancing act. We need to sell out every day in order to make money, but we are also here to make people happy.

    Two years into our current location, we are creating more different items than I ever imagined. Besides doughnuts, we have tapped into our dough-driven creativity and incorporated a focused selection of naturally leavened breads (sourdough, focaccia, and bagels) and pastries. We continue to evolve and refine our croissants and their derivatives. Cinnamon rolls on the weekends are developing their own following. We (finally) brought back American Noodles in the form of take-home noodle kits for two, designed to make dinner simple and delicious. It’s a constant evolution at the shop.

    With that in mind, here is our current lineup:

    **The Doughnuts:**
    – Crullers
    – Angel Pillows
    – Chocolate Yeasted
    – Vanilla Yeasted
    – Cloud
    – Hot-Cake
    – Condensed Milk
    – Not Quite Vegan
    – Lemon Cake
    – Apple Cider
    – Super Cake
    – Dark Knight
    – Chocolate Babka
    – Brown Sugar Babka
    – Savory Zeppoli
    – Meltaway Bars

    **Naturally Leavened Breads:**
    – Sourdough
    – Focaccia
    – Cinnamon Rolls
    – Bagels, with rotating fixings like brown butter cream cheese, egg salad, and more.

    **Croissants and Croissant Hand Pies**

    **Pasta Kits:**
    – Fresh pasta and sauce for two

    If any of that piques your interest, come see us at the shop!

    800 Edison Furlong Rd., Furlong, PA 18925

  • Lime Pickle Mafaldine

    Well, here goes. Let’s see if the spaghetti sticks. As many of you know, we were at the forefront of utilizing pasta extruders in the kitchen 15 years ago. We have continued to quietly work, develop, and share our work. As we dive headfirst back into the world of noodles, I am looking to share our recipes and creations. First up is our Lime Pickle Mafaldine. We paired this noodle with brown butter chicken bolognese and a Calabrian cucumber condiment in our second American Noodles Pasta Kit.
    So here goes, rough and ready to be explored:

    Lime Pickle Semolina Pasta Dough

    – 600 grams water
    – 125 grams Indian Lime Pickle Condiment
    – 2000 grams semolina flour
    – 600 grams lime pickle water (30% water plus potentially a little more)

    Put the lime pickles and water in a blender. Puree them together until the mixture appears smooth. Strain the lime mixture through a fine-meshed sieve. Reserve for making noodles.

    Put the semolina into the pasta machine and mix to distribute in the hopper. With the machine running, drizzle the lime pickle water into the machine. Mix the dough for 6-7 minutes. Check the consistency of the dough after four minutes. It should begin to resemble coarse streusel. Squeeze the dough together in your hand. Break the dough apart. If it breaks cleanly, the dough has enough water. If it crumbles, add additional water in 20-gram increments. Once the dough is the right consistency, let it knead in the machine for a few minutes. If you are in a hurry, you could begin extruding immediately, but it’s better to let it rest in the machine for 10 minutes for ideal hydration.

  • Nothing is Original

    I love this quote. I am thankful to have come across it years ago. I believe I have posted it before, but as I am just getting my fingers warmed up and my brain functioning again, it is a wonderful happy place to begin.

  • New-Don Revisited

    “We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.”
    —T.S. Eliot

    So I went back to our New-don Noodles, where we were chasing the chew. The success of an idea is measured on whether it can be brought to life. I remade the recipe as it was written. The recipe worked. I had achieved the success I was looking for years ago, but it took trying again to realize the greatness of the work we had already put in.

  • Tinkering Troubles

    I spent the afternoon revisiting an idea for noodles made with a glutinous rice flour starch paste. The difficulty with ideas that have been kicking around for a while is the amount of hope for success I have. My plan was to create a thick noodle, in the style of udon, that could be kneaded relatively easily and could also cook quickly while producing a thick noodle chew. This was my third-ish attempt at this version of the noodle, and I was anticipating a win. Despite all my hopes, and the visual cues of the dough kneading well and rolling how I wanted, the end result was a gummy mess. I have some ideas on how to improve the noodles. The first is to use a harder wheat in the dough in conjunction with the rice flour.

  • Smoked Ricotta Cavatelli

    Sometimes, oftentimes, all the time the good ideas are sitting in plain sight. The great ideas are usually right around the corner.

  • Sourdough Pappardelle v#

    Find an idea. Picture it in your head. Start tinkering. Evaluate the results. Make adjustments. Try again.

  • Building Blocks

    I go to the grocery store a lot. I travel the aisles of ingredients. I leave empty-handed because the ingredients don’t look that great, and I am not really inspired by anything. Have all the great ingredients disappeared? Do restaurants get the great stuff? I am looking to spend the next couple of months, hopefully, shaping an idea. I am looking to put one of our side projects into production. The difficulty is my expectations of available ingredients and the accessibility of those ingredients to other people. This may influence how I approach the project; it may not. In the past, I have allowed the availability of ingredients and their accessibility to dictate my creative directions. I call this Alex’s cookbook writer’s syndrome.

  • Peanut Butterscotch

    Looking at these butterscotch peanut butter cups sparked the idea of peanut butterscotch. Time to start tinkering.

    Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work
    Maximum Flavor: Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook
    Gluten Free Flour Power: Bringing Your Favorite Foods Back to the Table

  • Orecchiette

    Making something by hand reminds me of the needs for practice and patience.

    Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work
    Maximum Flavor: Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook
    Gluten Free Flour Power: Bringing Your Favorite Foods Back to the Table