Noodles and Rice

With Italian pasta, you know that you have the wide strips of tagliatelle and you have the thin, rounded spaghetti style of pasta. However, in China they also make noodles from rice flour, not just wheat flour, so the rice flour noodles, often referred to as glass noodles, are very fine and not dissimilar to Italian vermicelli. The rice noodles are particularly good in soups and hotpots, but for the trencherman, the big, flat, wheat noodles will appease the most hungry appetite. In my view, for making fried noodle dishes you should use the thin egg and wheat noodles. The thick noodles work terribly well in sumptuous bowls of noodle soup, while the thin ones, crisply fried, are more refined and gastronomically elegant.