Umi Noodles with Miso Sesame Sauce Recipes
This is a very literal, pared down riff on hiyashi chuka, the Japanese summertime classic of cold ramen noodles in a sesame dressing. We’ve made the dressing for you! All you need is a bit of leftover chicken (or panfried tofu or mushrooms!), a cucumber, a handful of tomatoes, green onion, and if you’re anything like me, chili oil. I dare you to take more then 3 minutes to boil and assemble this whole thing! It’s instantaneous and wonderful. A mid-summer classic.
Cooking has been brutal with the temperature inside my home at 95 degrees. One thing that is helping me enormously is the ease of our Noodles with Miso Sesame Sauce, and cold noodle salads generally. I put water on to boil, rinse and prep a few veggies (or in this case, just open a jar of Choi’s kimchi!), walk away, sit in front of our box fan, come back once the water is sputtering, boil the noodles for 2 minutes, toss with sauce, top with toppings, and that’s it! It’s as low maintenance as a sandwich and infinitely more texturally interesting and fun to eat.
Local author, recipe developer, editor, gardener, creatinve genius and all around cooking inspiration Heather Arndt Anderson shares how to turn our Noodles with Miso Sesame Sauce and 1/2 pound of lamb stew meat into a sumptuous meal reminiscent of the rugged Xinjiang Province. Cumin and lamb are hallmarks of Uyghur cooking, and Umi’s chewy, bouncy noodles make a fine stand-in for traditional hand-pulled biangbiangmian.
We are a working family that loves a quick, delicious meal that incorporates some healthy vegetables with little effort. So happy to have Umi noodles and sauce to make dinner so easy. This was just cut vegetables - some raw some sauteed - added to the delicious sauce at the maker’s choosing!
This recipe is inspired by the farmer market in spring, when the first radishes and raabs hit. It’s always amazing to see raabs—bouquets of greens that have overwintered and are sending up flowers to become seeds for the next season. Broccoli raab is the most famous of the raab, but we are also crazy for arugula, cabbage, collard, and kale raabs. And the best way we’ve found to cook them is to blanch them in boiling water, which happens to be exactly how you cook noodles! So we cook them together for a really easy dinner hack.
This is less of a recipe than a template you can adapt. This bowl has one roasted item (beautiful romanesco, which is in the cauliflower and broccoli family), one quick pickle (red radishes), a simple protein (fried tofu), and a sautéed item (chanterelle mushrooms). That may seem like a lot of steps for one dinner but think of it as a pallet you can choose a few colors from.
Our Noodles with Miso Sesame Sauce kit is inspired by the Japanese dish Hiyashi Chuka, a cold ramen salad that highlights the chewiness of our ramen noodles and features seasonal vegetables like tomato, green beans, and cucumber. It’s super easy to make and a great template for a refreshing meal.
Here we invert the standard ratio of vegetable to grain, using 7 cups of thinly sliced cabbage with one package of Umi Noodles with Miso Sesame Sauce or Yakisoba. The key is to sauté the cabbage quickly over high heat in two batches, unless you have a giant skillet and can do it in one. The entire dish is cooked over high heat, so everything gets golden and irrisistible.
This one is super summery, light but satisfying! It features lettuce, crunchy vegetables, and my favorite trick, quick pickled radishes, which become a beautiful shade of Barbie pink. This takes almost no time to make, but the radishes are most beautiful if you let them sit at least an hour after making them. I make too many at once and eat them over a few days.