We should not leave some of pasta’s close relatives unmentioned, even though they are relatively unimportant when it comes to North American menu items.
The overwhelming variety of strange-named Asian noodles intimidates most Western cooks who, until now, entirely disregarded them. But Asian noodles are “in” and we can no longer ignore them.
Even mainline supermarkets carry some of them, and one, ramen noodles became household name. Ramen soup packages are highly popular, inexpensive and most convenient, almost instant, reasonably flavorful soups that appear on many people’s pantry shelf.
Most Asian noodles are no different from our pasta products. They are usually long products made with wheat flour and there is absolutely no reason why you could not substitute similar-shaped pasta for them.
Oriental egg noodles are similar to Italian angel hair pasta, vermicelli or spaghettini (these are all long but increasingly thicker pasta) but the Oriental version includes a small amount of egg. For example, you can use vermicelli or angel hair pasta
when the recipe calls for thin Chinese noodles or ramen noodles.
The Japanese make similar noodles from buckwheat flour, giving a heavy, dark-hued pasta. Some Oriental cuisines even make noodles from mung bean flour. There is no substitute for these types in the Italian pasta repertoire.
Rice flour is the ingredient for rice noodles. They have different texture, color, appearance and mouthfeel than wheat flour noodles of the same shape but if you are stuck in a recipe, go ahead, substitute with vermicelli weight by weight.
You can also use a more commonly available Asian noodles for some odd-named variety a recipe calls for, just like you can substitute one Italian pasta for another in most recipes. The result may not be authentic but the dish will taste the same.
Spätzle is a somewhat more distant cousin, mostly in German and Eastern European cooking (it is called galuska in Hungary and kluski in Poland). Spätzle is really a fresh, homemade irregular-shaped egg pasta, the size of cherries, that look like tiny dumplings. Its blessings is in its quick preparation yet it also tastes good with a slightly chewy consistency of al dente macaroni. Spätzle is so rough and irregular in shape, that it holds sauces very effectively like many tiny little spoons.
With a little experience you can put spätzle on the table in less than 10 minutes. Put the pot of water on to heat and mix the flour, water and egg into a medium-stiff dough, something like a soft yeast bread dough. Form it into small chunks and drop into the boiling water. It is ready three minutes later. Drain and serve.
Experienced cooks can make spätzle with nothing but a small board and a spoon with which they scrape little pieces of dough into the boiling water. But if you are making more than 6 or 8 servings, a spätzle-maker is handy. I came across two kinds.
One is a flat, rectangular shaped metal tool with large holes that looks like a flat grater. It has hooks to hold it firmly on top of a pot. You place some of the dough on top of it while it sits over the boiling water, and scrape it back and forth with a spoon until you press the dough through the holes, then continue with the rest of the dough.
The second type is a food-mill-like tool with a handle that rotates a paddle on the bottom. The paddle presses the dough through holes into the boiling water. This also has hooks to firmly set it over a pot of boiling water. Both are efficient, easy to use.
Italian gnocchi is similar to spätzle but you make it with semolina instead of standard household flour. Italians, who like variations on a theme, add other ingredients besides the flour to cook cornmeal gnocchi, potato gnocchi, ricotta gnocchi to name a few.