Oodles of noodles: How do I know which is the 'right one' to use?

As a staple food in many Asian countries, noodles are a daily food for billions of people.

Each culture has developed its own style of noodle and noodle dishes, so a visit to the noodle aisle - or, often, aisles - of an Asian supermarket can be confounding: egg, rice, thick, thin, flat, round - what are they all? How should they be used? And how important is it, really, to use the right one?

"Very important," says Muthuvelu Supramaniam. The Malaysia-born chef and his wife, Vanitha, are the original owners of beloved Wellington restaurant Kanama Kopi Kadai, and now of Macha, Jom Tapau, and recently-opened breakfast joint Jom Sarapan.

You shouldn't use glass noodles, for example, in a Malaysian laksa, says Supramaniam. The translucent noodles, typically made from mung bean starch, wouldn't absorb the rich spicy flavour of the soup.

Glass noodles are good for stir-frying, or a soup with a lighter broth.

In a laksa, Supramaniam would always go for a medium-thick yellow egg noodle known as mee.

Unsurprisingly, that's also the correct noodle for the popular Malaysian dish mee goreng.

"The egg noodles give you more flavour and nice texture for stir-frying," says Supramaniam. "The eggless noodle, it'll just absorb the liquid and then become too soggy."

Mee goreng literally translates to "fried noodles". So does another noodle dish you might be familiar with from Malaysian restaurants, char kway teow, though here the language is Cantonese, because this dish came to Malaysia from another great noodle nation: China.

Sam Low's parents are also originally from China, but he was born in Fiji - where they owned a noodle factory.

"So yeah," he says. "I've been exposed to noodles for a long time."

These days Low, who won New Zealand MasterChef in 2022 and published his first book, Modern Chinese, the following year, might accurately be described as a noodle obsessive. The day of our interview, he happens to have seven different varieties in his kitchen.

His "most versatile" is a fresh wheat noodle, which he buys in 500g or 1kg bags, then unravels from the balls they are typically sold in, flattens, re-wraps and stores in the freezer.

"If you keep them in the ball, if you cook it from frozen, the middle will have less water content. So by flattening it, you're promoting even doneness."

Flat rice noodles are the standard for char kway teow, with a thinner version traditional for a Vietnamese pho. Rice noodles are also used in pad Thai, with different regions in Thailand having thin or thick-noodled versions of the dish, Low explains.

Make sure to pre-soak. "Because if you just throw this in boiling water, what tends to happen is that the outside will become stodgier than the inside."

Having spent the first eight years of his life in Fiji, Low is also very familiar with mung bean vermicelli, the traditional noodle for sapa sui, as chop sui is known in the islands.

"This is also used in China for cold dishes," he explains. Wheat noodles, when cold, "lose their stretch or bounce. Other types of grains, like the sweet potato or mung bean, they hold up really well cold".

In Japan, the traditional cold noodle is soba, made from buckwheat, explains Japanese-born Sachie Nomura, who runs the Elemental Cooking School in Auckland.

A classic summertime dish is zaru soba, which features the distinctly nutty-tasting soba served on a bamboo tray and accompanied by a savoury dipping sauce.

Soba is also used in brothy soups, says Nomura, though the more common soup noodle in Japan is udon. The traditional preparation for these wheat noodles is to stand on the dough, rather than kneading with the hands, in order to develop the glutens and create the desired chewy, springy texture.

A thinner version of udon, known as somen, is also popular for soup in Japan and Korea. At around 1mm in diameter "it's only a matter of a minute or two to cook, and you can serve it hot or cold."

Probably Japan's best-known noodle, however, is egg: ramen. There are 47 prefectures in Japan, says Nomura, each with its own shape: "Straight noodles versus wavy noodles versus the thicker version of it or flat version of it."

A miso-based stock, for example, goes best with a wavy noodle, but a soy-based broth will usually have a straight ramen.

Ramen is also eaten in a dish called tsukemen, where cooked and cooled noodles are served alongside a rich dipping broth. "That's getting quite popular nowadays."

Like Supramaniam, Nomura says it's preferable to use the correct noodle for the dish you're preparing, though as a busy mother of two young kids, she will sometimes just use what's to hand, even if her dish might not be "as good as what it should".

She would use dry noodles only as a "backup option", though both Low and Supramaniam are opposed to them.

"I've yet to find a dried noodle that has the same QQ, which is our version of al dente," says Low.

"If you can buy the fresh version in the supermarket that isn't added with preservatives, it's no-brainer that you should go for that, right?

"Try to aim for the ones with as little ingredients as possible. That's one of my main priorities. And then the name itself doesn't mean that much."