Photo: Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0
Yam Wun Sen (Cold Glass Noodle Salad)
A Thai salad of boiled and cooled glass noodles dressed with lime and fish sauce. Mung bean starch is over thirty per cent amylose, roughly double rice, and amylose recrystallises as it cools, which is what hardens a rice cake. Here that is the point: the noodle firms up as it cools instead of going soft.
Ingredients
- Noodles and the rest (serves 2)
- mung bean glass noodles · dried; Thai wun sen100 g
- prawns · peeled and cleaned150 g
- minced pork100 g
- shallots · sliced thin3
- celery · or Chinese celery, on the diagonal1 stick
- cherry tomatoes · halved6
- wood ear mushroom · optional; soaked and shredded10 g
- peanuts · roasted, roughly crushed2 tbsp
- coriander1 handful
- spring onions2
- The dressing (nam yam)
- lime juice4 tbsp
- fish sauce3 tbsp
- palm sugar · or caster sugar1 tbsp
- garlic · chopped2 cloves
- bird's eye chillies · chopped, to taste3
Steps
- ⏲ 5 min
Make the dressing first. Stir the lime juice, fish sauce, palm sugar, garlic and chillies together until the sugar has dissolved. Cook the noodles first instead and they dry out and stick while you do this.
- ⏲ 10 min
Soak the glass noodles in warm water for 10 minutes. Do not put them dry into boiling water: the outside cooks and the core stays hard.
- ⏲ 1 min 30 sec
Boil the soaked noodles for 90 seconds only, until translucent and springy, then straight into iced water until completely cold.
- ⏲ 5 min
Drain them properly. Shake them in a sieve and press with a dry cloth. Water left on them dilutes the dressing.
- ⏲ 4 min
In the same boiling water, blanch the minced pork, breaking it up, until no pink remains (about 1 minute), the prawns 2 minutes and the wood ear 30 seconds, lifting each out to cool.
- ⏲ 3 min
In a large bowl put the cold noodles, pork, prawns, shallots, celery, tomatoes and wood ear, pour the dressing over and toss by lifting with your hands rather than stirring. Chopsticks cut the strands.
- ⏲ 3 min
Taste it. Taste it cold — as with naengmyeon, salt and sugar read much more faintly at low temperature (serving temperature). All four of sour, salty, sweet and hot have to be present.
- ⏲ 2 min
Add the coriander and spring onions, lift once more, scatter the peanuts over and serve at once.
Variations
- Yam wun sen boran: "ancient style", the plainer version with prawns and minced pork and no tomato or celery.
- Seafood: squid, mussels, crab meat. Only the blanching times change.
- Other Thai salads: som tam is built by pounding in a mortar, and laap uses toasted ground rice to hold its juices. All three dress with no oil at all.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- Vegetarian: drop the meat and prawns for tofu, wood ear and shiitake. Replacing the fish sauce with soy and extra lime moves the flavour axis, so the quantities need re-balancing.
- Which glass noodle: mung bean is the standard. The sweet-potato starch noodles of Korean japchae are thicker and chewier and drink far more of the same dressing. They work, but make more dressing.
Tips
- Toss with your hands. Stirring with chopsticks or a spoon cuts the strands into short pieces. Lift from underneath and fold.
- Taste it cold. Cold dulls the seasoning, as with naengmyeon (serving temperature), so "slightly too much?" is about right.
- Do not let it stand once dressed. Glass noodles go on taking up liquid, so ten minutes is enough for the dressing to disappear and leave the noodles merely salty.
More detail and the reasons why (4)
- Why the glass noodle firms up as it cools: amylose. Starch is a mixture of straight-chain amylose and heavily branched amylopectin, and amylose is the molecule that recrystallises as things cool. Glutinous rice is effectively zero amylose, which is why the mochi of daifuku is still soft the next day; mung bean starch is over thirty per cent, close to double ordinary rice. So boiled and cooled it does not go soft — it sets firm, springy and non-sticky. The property that ruins a rice cake is the product here.
- Wheat noodles work cold too, for a different reason. Bibim-guksu and kongguksu serve somen cold, rinsed in cold water, and their chew comes from gluten, not from starch that sets as it cools. Wheat in this dressing stays softer and holds the dressing less cleanly than a glass noodle.
- Ninety seconds, and no more. They have already been soaked, so boiling is only about getting heat to the core, and glass noodles go irreversibly soft past that point. The iced water is not optional either: the setting is part of the dish, so faster is better.
- How well you drain them decides the seasoning. A glass noodle has nothing on its surface to hold sauce, so a diluted dressing is simply a bland dish. A sieve is not enough; press them.
The basics behind this dish
- Blanching: Keeping Vegetables GreenBlanched vegetables go dull because of acid and heat. Why the pot should be large, why the lid stays off, and what the ice bath is really for.
- Balancing Flavour: Salt, Acid, Sweet, Fat, HeatWhen something tastes like it is missing something, it is usually salt or acid. Five dials, the order to turn them, and how to taste properly.
- Reviving Leftovers: Reheating by Texture, Not by DefaultThe microwave is not the right tool for everything. What you do depends on what degraded — moisture, crispness, or starch — and the three want opposite treatments.
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