Blowfish for vegetarians

Recently in the New York Times, Harold McGee had a fascinating article about baking baking soda. It turns out that when you expose baking soda to heat, it changes its chemical composition (from sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate).

After I baked the baking soda, I used it in two ways suggested by the article. First, pretzels, and second, alkaline noodles. The pretzels were okay -- I didn't think they were much different from my usual recipe which uses plain old baking soda. But the noodles! They were very exciting and I really want to make them again soon.

I didn't have any semolina on hand, so used plain, all purpose, white flour with some added vital wheat gluten. The noodles worked out so well -- they were bouncy and slippery (I'm not sure why the word 'bouncy' describes them so much better than 'chewy', but there you go). I had never really thought about what makes the family of yellow Asian noodles (I know them as Hokkien noodles or yellow mee, but they have lots of names) distinctive, but it turns out that they are all alkaline noodles.

R was very skeptical about my experiments with sodium carbonate. If you touch the stuff it could irritate your skin, so in his eyes I was dealing with a dangerous ingredient, like blowfish.