I’m making noodles from every continent. Hey, welcome to Mythical Kitchen. Today, we are taking a trip around the world, and no, I did not get you a Spirit Airlines gift card. We’re taking a trip around the world in the form of noodles. We have made noodles from every single continent here because noodles are one of the most common foods eaten across the world. It is maybe the cheapest source of calories across every single continent, and it’s been eaten for literally thousands of years. Now for a lot of people, the term noodles only refers to Asian cuisine. I’m talking to people from the UK, you weirdos with your lollies and what else do they call, what else do they call stuff? We have lor, lollies and lorries and prams. We’re using the vague definition of noodle of long thin strand of dough and right here, we have wheat noodles from every single continent. I have this general theory that every single culture across the world roughly wants the same things out of life and they roughly want the same things out of food So we’re gonna try and see what sort of commonalities and differences we can draw across every single continent via their noodle dishes. Y’all ready to get to it? I’m so hungry. I’m literally about to pass out. I was gonna eat a pretzel that I found outside, but then I was like, you got noodles waiting for you. Can I eat yet? The first stop, we’re taking on our Spirit Airlines tour of the world. Oh god, imagine flying all the way to China on Spirit Airlines. I chose Cha Chang Mian. Cha Chang Mian is from China. Originated likely in Shandong, uh, but this is Beijing style. There’s also a super spicy Sichuan style, but the reason I wanted to start with this is because noodles likely originated in China. Now there’s the myth that Marco Polo traveled to Kublai Khan’s court and found noodles and brought them back to Italy and that’s how Italy got pasta. That’s not true at all and you can tell that’s not true because in the travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo Eats a noodle dish and literally goes hey, that’s like lasagna. We have that so mian is mandarin for noodle when you go to Cantonese it turns into main as in chow mein and lo mein when you go to Japan that turns into men as in ramen or ten ten men and then when you go to Korea you end up with mian, but they all come from the same root, the main difference between a Chinese wheat noodle and say, an Italian wheat pasta, Italian wheat pasta is made with semolina or durum wheat, but the Chinese noodles tend to be made with a softer wheat, and then you add a sodium bicarbonate solution to it, which actually gives it a sort of spring. So in Italy you have the term al dente, which describes the perfect texture of pasta, means to the tooth, but there’s actually a Taiwanese term QQ that describes the perfect bounciness of a Chinese style noodle. Here’s how I made it. I heated a wok over medium heat and added my oil, scallion whites, ginger, and star anise. I added small pork belly cubes and fried until golden. I deglazed with Shaoxing wine and then mixed in the yellow bean paste and sweet bean paste. Then I added the water and let simmer for about an hour until that pork gets nice and tender. I cooked my noodles according to the package instructions. Normally this would be made with fresh hand pulled noodles, but I’m not skilled enough to do that. And then I plated my noodles with the finished Chaozhong fried sauce. Topped it with the fresh veggies. I’m using cucumber, watermelon radish, and bean sprouts. Let’s dig into this, man. I’ve been looking forward to this all day. A lot of people might be familiar with the Korean jjajangmyeon, which is very, very similar. It’s a Korean Chinese dish, and sometimes this is made with ground pork, but if you finely chop pork belly, uh, I’ve seen a lot of recipes using that. I mean, it really does, like, it coats the noodles as if it were, like, a bolognese, which I understand. That’s from my own, like, very Euro Amero- centric perspective. Um, God, this smells so good. The fermentation of bean curd, too, almost ends up with a similar chemical structure and taste structure to parmesan, too. You’re getting those glutamates, that fermentation. Wow. Mmm. Give me a second here. One of the things I love about a lot of East Asian noodle dishes, I mean, you’ll even see this in Vietnam, Cambodia, a lot of Korean dishes as well, is you have this element of like fresh crunchy things. There’s so much fat from the pork belly that is emulsified into the bean curd there. And then to get that little crunch of like radish or bean sprout or cucumber. This is truly one of the best noodle dishes in the world. I love the Sichuan version as well too. It’s a little bit spicier, but the Beijing version is. Like known as one of the 10 great noodles of China. This is just, what a treat look at that fettuccine! Tony Soprano would love it You guys still here? So China is the noodle epicenter of the eastern world, we are going to the noodle epicenter of the western world over here. We’re going to Italy, where else are you gonna go for fresh noodles? And this is a dish called Trenete alla Pesto. This is from Genoa, which is the capital of Liguria. And that is the origin of pesto. You might be used to eating pesto paninis from the Panera bread before they started killing people with the lemonade. Uh, but in Italy, there is literally a governing board called the, check this out. Consorziazioni della pesto genovese! Bravo, ragazzi! A funny thing about this dish, you see the potatoes and the green beans. That’s something I’ve never had in America, but the Genovese Pesto Consortium says that you should do that. It reminds me a lot of a niçoise salad, which makes sense. If you look at where Genoa is in Italy, it’s super, super close to France, where they also grow a lot of basil. In France, they’re likely to call a pesto a pistou. There are a deceptive amount of Italian pasta dishes that are actually really, really new. Like, one of my favorite facts to blow Italian people’s minds, is that carbonara is likely newer to the world than chicken parmigiano or spaghetti and meatballs, which are considered very much American bastardizations. However, pesto dates back at least 500 years, but even before then, you go to ancient Rome, they were making something called moretum, where they were grinding herbs with garlic, salt, cheese, and nuts, which that’s exactly what pesto is, so this is a very ancient pasta. Everyone knows that Italians get really mad when you mess up their food online and I used to think it was very silly but lately I’ve come to have a lot more respect for the amount of rules that the Italians put on their food. I think it’s really cool that you have a dish like this that you can trace its origins back thousands of years and there is actually someone protecting traditional food ways. I think when you live in a sort of cultural food vacuum that certain things can happen where you open yourselves up to commerce and your whole society just eats fried chicken, cheeseburgers, and pizza for every meal. So I think this dish is really cool and I support you consorzio del pesto genovese, bravo. Here’s how I made it: I took my fresh garlic cloves and ground them with some salt in the mortar, I then added the toasted pine nuts and ground it into a paste, then I added my fresh basil and ground in a circular motion. Sometimes I stomped it. That’s totally fine. I gradually added parmesan cheese and some fresh pecorino. Lastly, I drizzled in some good quality olive oil to complete the pesto, and I kept sort of reworking the ratios until I found what I was happy with. I mixed my pesto with some warm pasta water and tossed it with a cooked trenette pasta, green beans and potatoes. I have been smelling this freaking pesto the whole time trying not to drool. Man, this looks so good. It’s so aromatic. So I think one of the reasons that potatoes are in there. is because you don’t cook this pasta, you don’t finish it in the sauce, because then you’re going to lose all the brightness in the basil, so the potato starch actually helps bind it, which I think is really cool. Also, we gotta say, I did not follow all of the consortium’s rules. They don’t advocate for you to cut the basil, but the basil we get here is bigger and tougher than proper Genovese basil. We tried our best. If the consorzio del Pesto Genovese, brava ragazzi, wants to send their special squad to haul me off to pesto jail, where I only eat canned Trader Joe’s pesto for the rest of my life, please come do it. But, for now, man, I’m digging in. The difference between good tomato sauce and bad tomato sauce is much smaller than the difference between good pesto and bad pesto. Bad pesto, it’s oxidized, the flavors aren’t there, the basil’s bruised, doesn’t taste fresh, but good pesto, when you just pound that basil and you are literally mixing all of the chlorophyll and all of the aromas into that oil where it sort of gets trapped, when it just perfectly balances like the freshness from the herbs, the bitterness from the olive oil, the saltiness from the cheese, that little earthy sweetness from the nuts, like this is truly an incredible dish. And again, this is something that’s been around for like thousands of years, uh, you know, give or take a couple hundred here and there. This is really tough to beat. Needs some gabagool, but it’s pretty damn good. Listen, I’m talking about eastern noodle epicenters, western noodle epicenters, that don’t matter because we here in America are the cultural epicenter of the entire world. No other country exists, every American knows that. And we invented chicken fettuccine alfredo, not fettuccine. Feddachinny. F E D D A C H I N N Y. Fettuccine Alfredo. Fettuccine Alfredo was actually invented in Rome in 1908 by chef Alfredo di Lelio. He claims he made it first for his pregnant wife to entice her into eating, because I guess she wasn’t eating. But then in 1928, silent movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks went to his restaurant in Rome on their honeymoon, and they had Pasta Alfredo, and they brought it back to America. They actually went to a restaurant called Musso Frank, one of my favorite spots in LA that is still around today. Their martinis will mess you up! And they told the chef, I had this incredible pasta dish in Italy, and to this day, the original Alfredo recipe stands on Musso Frank’s menu. I got it. It’s, it’s perfectly fine. The OG Pasta Alfredo recipe, it’s not actually a sauce. It is literally built on the plate. What they do, they mound butter on a plate, Then they take hot, wet pasta and they just put it on the mounded butter on the plate. They walk it to the table. They top it with cheese. They toss it and then they serve it right to you. When this got to America, all of the jarred pasta sauce brands were like, we can capitalize on this popularity. And so they just started adding heavy cream and flours and thickeners and all this stuff to it. So now the American version of Alfredo. It doesn’t really have that much of a similarity to the legit Italian version invented in Rome. Also, adding chicken to pasta, especially just big ol sliced chicken breast, that is completely non grata in Italia. It is really unheard of, it is one of the things that Italian people get most mad about. Spaghetti and meatballs is the other dish that we were going to choose, which is also an affront generally to Italian cultural heritage. Um, but to me, this is so uniquely American, especially because we turned it into the Chicken fettuccine Domino’s Pasta Bread Bowl. That’s culture for ya. I salted my pasta water and added my fettuccine and cooked until al dente. Then I gently pounded out a chicken breast just until it was even. I took it out, seasoned it up with some salt and pepper. I added some olive oil to a pan and gently pan seared that chicken on both sides until it was cooked all the way through. In a large skillet, I melted the butter and added my garlic. I cooked all that until it softened, then I added heavy cream and simmered for about five minutes. I grated fresh parmesan, not the shaky bottle, into the sauce and whisked it until smooth. I took the noodles directly from the water and added them to the sauce, that way some of that pasta water gets in there and can get it to thicken up nicely. Threw that hunk of chicken on there, a little bit of parsley, and some more parm, and man this sure is chicken alfredo. This is not my favorite to this day, but it is a very, very nostalgic thing. I mean, it has all the elements of mac and cheese and you might ask like, why do Italians hate chicken on pasta so much? It’s somewhat for the same reasons of meatballs on pasta as well. It’s like, why would you take a dish that is already standalone and then just sort of chuck meat on there? And that has to do with the fact that meat was so abundant in America, especially for Italian American communities in ways that it’s not in Italy. If you look at all the legit, authentic Italian pastas, the way meat is used is for flavor. You use pancetta or guanciale, or you might use prosciutto, you might turn a little bit of meat into a ragu with a bunch of vegetables and stuff, and then America said, Nah, we’re gonna put 50 grams of protein invents a sport called American football and crown the Super Bowl winner of the world champions, despite the fact that nobody else plays it. This is, this is how you get big and strong. Look at how big and strong those noodles are. Garlic! Cream! You have no idea how much salt we added to the cream and butter. There’s so much fat, it just eats the salt like a dying dwarf star absorbing the light around it. Chicken! Meaty has nothing to do with the pasta. Some people toss the chicken into the pasta. It just this makes no sense whatsoever, but it is again, so nostalgic and as far as like uniquely American pasta dishes go. I mean, this is like the French mother sauce for Cajun chicken fettuccine alfredo. This is basically the same recipe as creamy Tuscan chicken, which what the hell does that actually mean? To me, this is uniquely American no matter which way you spin it like it’s delicious, it’s butter cream garlic cheese and meat. Man, God bless America. We’re going, I don’t want to do it. Down Under! Yeah, I do want to do it. We’re going down under. We’re going over to Australia. This is a dish that is simply known as Spag Bowl. You could say, Josh, that’s likely short for Spaghetti Bolognese, which you’re technically right, but no, this is Spag Bowl, and it is a unique beast. With Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo, we saw what is a legitimate ish recipe created in Italy turned very American. This is somewhat the same scenario with a dish in Italy, Ragu Bolognese, turned very Australian in its own unique way. There’s some people that would argue that the term Bolognese didn’t actually exist in Italy until well into the 20th century, and they might actually be right, because if you’re from Bologna, you don’t really call it Bolognese. Like, if you’re from Buffalo, you don’t call them Buffalo wings, you just call them wings. And so, they were making ragu, which typically goes with tagliatelle, which is a very Bolognese pasta that is just made with egg. The first spag bol recipe was published in 1952 in Australia in Australian Women’s Weekly. It was called Party Suppers in an Adelaide magazine. And the dish that was initially published was like a weird baked spaghetti casserole with cheese on top, but since then, this version of spag bol has become super, super common as like an Australian pub food. And there is a large wave of Italian immigration that we see to Australia after World War II. That’s why coffee culture, espresso culture is so big in Italy. The flat white was invented there because there’s a lot of Italians. So this is an incredible Australiafication of an Italian dish. Gosh, this looks brown. I added my partially frozen chuck to a food processor and pulsed it until a nice mince consistency. I sautéed the onions in olive oil, added the mince and seasoned with salt. I made sure that was cooked through, then I added tomato paste and really cooked that down till it was caramelized. I deglazed it with red wine, added a little bit of salt and pepper and some dried herbs. Then I brought that sauce to a simmer and cooked it for about an hour with a little bit of water to thin out as needed. Then I simply tossed a spaghetti with some butter, added the bol on top of the spag, a little bit of basil and cheese, and we are here. Not every Australian spag bowl recipe looks like the one that we made. We took inspiration from the original Women’s Weekly 1952 edition. Probably my favorite year for Women’s Weekly in Australia. A lot of it, it really is just like a beefy tomato based sauce with a ton of red wine in it. Now, like a typical Ragu Bolognese would, I think, one, be made with wild boar, even though a lot of different meats are used today. But there’s a lot more aromatics in it. In Australia, you had a lot of cattle ranching. You had super abundant beef. They were probably trying to move that beef. And boy, this is beef pasta, dude. This looks more like skyline chili than it does an actual Ragu Bolognese. It reeks of wine. Yeah, that rips. That rips so hard. This tastes more similar to Cha Jiang Man than it does like an Italian pasta because there’s so much meaty flavor. This is deglazed in red wine. This is deglazed in Shaoxing wine. Parmesan cheese, fermented, has a lot of like, monosodium glutamate in it, so does the bean curd. These dishes are weirdly similar, and neither taste remotely Italian. My first Australian spaghetti bowl, I want to drink beer out of a shoe, I want to do a shooey, a bowl sauce, I want to go watch some footy, I want to go, watch that like, Adelaide 38ers or whatever the name of their basketball team is, while just ripping meat pies, sausage rolls, get a dim sim. Man. I’m in on the Australian way of life, dude. Australia, you win. You win the World Noodle Tournament. Next, we’re going to the country that every American seems to forget about until we have to play them in the World Cup, and then we go, oh my god, Uruguay sure is good at stuff, and they really are. Shoutout Luis Suárez and Diego Forlán. This is pasta con Salsa Caruso. This was invented in the 1950s by Chef Remundo Monte at restaurante Mario i Alberto in Monte Vere. The coolest thing about this pasta is the use of an ingredient simply called meat extract, AKA beef bouillon, but it actually has its roots in a company that’s almost 200 years old. This is a wild story. It’s called Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company, who started by a German chemist, who tried to feed the world, uh, healthy meat based nutrients by denaturing beef and reducing it to a paste. He eventually started a factory in 1864 in Uruguay. I always kind of wondered why you see so many different bouillon products in, say, like, Peruvian salsas or in Brazilian food, and this dish. is a mixture of cream, ham, mushrooms, and beef extract. Uruguay actually has one of the highest Italian populations in the world. 44 percent of all Uruguayan citizens are of Italian descent. Very similarly, you look at Argentina, and they clock in at around 47%. So a lot of the foods that you see in Argentina and Uruguay share a lot of similarities with Italian food. Also, the type of ham used in this dish is called fiambre from Uruguay. Uruguay raises a heck of a lot of meat, and they use a lot of meat products. In fact, maybe the most famous sandwich is called the Chivito, which has like seven different kinds of meat on it. It was actually Anthony Bourdain’s favorite sandwich in the world. He said in the Uruguayan episode, I’m really excited to taste this. But first, here’s how I made it. I used an Uruguayan brand of pasta called Adria, and I boiled that in a pot of salted boiling water and pulled it when it was al dente. Then I sauteed my onions in olive oil until nice and fragrant. I added the mushrooms and cooked them until golden brown. Then I added the ham and set that aside for a sec. In another skillet, I melted my butter and whisked in flour to make a roux. I cooked that until golden, then slowly added my cream and whisked it till it was all incorporated. I added those lovely brown nuggets of beef bouillon and then folded in my cheeses. I topped that silky brown sauce on top of some pasta, added some perejil on top, and man, it smells like a boiling pot of beef stew. Which is awesome, because it’s got all that Liebig’s meat extract in it. Actually, we didn’t use that brand. I don’t really know if it still exists, but there is a heck of a lot of bouillon in here. You know, it’s not always served on a thick spaghetti like this. Typically, it’s served on a pasta called capelletti, which means like little hat, which are very similar to agnolotti or ravioli. Uh, but it is often served this way, and I wanted to keep the like, long strandy noodliness alive. Thickums. I have never, I have never experienced any food like that. In my life. You look at this, it’s a little brown tinged, but it’s not like you’re eating a dark brown gravy packet or anything, but it tastes like that because the sheer density of beef in those little cubes, and it’s really good. Mushrooms give you that earthiness. Little bit of cheese in there. This is like truly an umami bomb like ham is an umami bomb as well because it’s like a cured pork product like that This is unreal, not a pasta I would eat every single day of my life, but what an absolute treat this is right now. God, I don’t know. It’s so heavy. I don’t know if I can. Mhmm. That bite had a lot of ham. Me gusta jamon. Finally, we are going to Africa. We’re actually going to the horn of Africa and going to Somalia for basto io, sugo tuna. So basto means pasta in Somali and sugo is actually the same word in Italian. Sugo means sauce in Italian, specifically tomato sauce. I have a very skewed view of world history growing up in America where they just decide not to teach us about the world at all, which is totally fine, but I think a lot of people know about the French colonization of West Africa, but there was actually a big Italian colonization dating back to the 1800s. In fact, from 1936 to 1941, they called that whole region from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, just Italian East Africa until the British stepped in in 1941. So you get a lot of Italian food sort of imported into Somalia and that’s how you get pasto. And one of the things I’m really fascinated by are regions that already have hundreds and hundreds of years. of spice routes and food culture sort of built in. And then you get this new product like spaghetti and you see what you do with it. And so this is a very, very heavily spiced tomato sauce. Also, Somalia has a ton of coastline. So they fish for tuna there. That’s how you end up with tuna in the sauce. Not all Pasto Iosugo is made with tuna, but we wanted to showcase this one because I think this is a really unique, awesome product. I toasted the whole spices for my hawash blend until fragrant, then added them to a spice grinder along with turmeric. I heated the oil in a dutch oven and added my onions and garlic. I then added the tuna and two tablespoons of the hawash blend and broke up the pieces of tuna. I stirred in the tomato sauce, added a little bit of fresh grated nutmeg and cilantro, and seasoned to taste. Simmered it for about 30 minutes. I added the sauce to some spaghetti in a non stick pan, tossed it till it was nice and coated, and now I’m here and my nostrils are being hugged from the inside out by that hawash spice blend. This is incredible. There’s tons of green cardamom in there. There’s fresh cumin, there’s fennel, there’s fenugreek. Like I mentioned earlier about how I love when you take a dish like this and you add a place that is really known for spices. I remember making this dish called chicken paprikash from Hungary and it was really delicious. But then I was like, wait a tick. I think this is like a couple spices away from being like a butter chicken or chicken tikka masala. And then I added. A bunch of spices to it and I was like, oh man, that’s better. Tons of spices don’t always make every dish better, but I don’t know man, I think sometimes they really do and I’m really curious to see how this tastes. Damn, dude, this looks great. Incredible. I’ve never had anything like it. I’ve never had that amount of spices on a straight up noodle dish, which is like really funny because this is so familiar to me in a way, right? This is spaghetti with tomato sauce, I grew up taking a jar of ragu dumping it onto boiled spaghetti and calling that dinner, but adding the tuna in here, adding all of those spices in here, it creates such a unique experience. And that’s one of the things I love about food, is taking something that is familiar to all. Like, if we’ve seen anything from all these dishes around the world, noodles are now something familiar to all. It’s a great canvas to sort of paint your entire culture on in a way. Is it weird for you if I say something profound and then just like slurp like a gremlin out of a trash can? Normal for me. If I had to crown a champion, China. Come on. They invented noodles, that’s like the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Somalia though, this one really surprised me. Because it is so familiar, so unfamiliar at the same time. Incredible use of spices. Tuna, fantastic local protein from there. But like, there’s not a bad bite of food. Noodles, come on man. Cheapest calories on earth. Utterly delicious, infinitely storable, driable, it makes the world go round. But there is one more continent. And once I mistakenly said that it shouldn’t be a continent because it’s only ice, and then someone said, Hey, you know there’s like, land under that ice? And I said, I knew that! I knew it wasn’t just a big ol floating block of ice. It’s called Antarctica. In Antarctica, which is not just a block of ice, it can get to negative 200 degrees Fahrenheit. If you took a bowl of ramen out there, tried to pull up a bite to slurp, it would freeze like this. And we made it. This is made by Vee Austin. This is an incredible arts and crafts piece. Watched her make it yesterday. Frankly V, none of us thought it would work. I don’t know if you thought it would work. And it did. This is really cool. There’s no real joke there. That’s it. Surely someone has eaten noodles in Antarctica. I don’t know how to cook it. Do you want me to take a bite? V, will that make you happy? Yeah. Oh, it’s not even, oh. Eh. Kinda just cold noodles. It’s pretty good. It’s not bad. It’s like a dessert. Well, I hope you learned something today about the history of noodles. I hope you learned something today about how utterly disgusting I am when I eat food. It’s not just pasta, it’s really any food, and so I apologize for that. Tell me what food you want to see me make from every single continent next, and tell me why it’s pizza! See y’all next time. Wrist up your next fire meal with the Mythical Kitchen Utensil Set, available now at mythical.com.