- (laughs) Ah.
(upbeat music)
(bubbles pop)
Hello everybody, this is probably
quite a British video today, hence the very nice couple.
They do make a lovely pair don't they,
of the queen and Mr. Bean, that rhymes.
Yes, this is the very nostalgic Pot Noodle.
Now for me, before I started learning to cook,
I would basically have one of these
maybe one or two times a week.
You basically, it's full of dried noodles,
it's got different flavourings,
chicken and mushroom tended to be the most popular one.
What I would love to do is pour the water up to the filling,
it's got a kind of stock
already built in around the noodles,
then you add soy sauce as well,
I'd let it all sort of ferment,
then dunk buttered bread in it.
It would be the ultimate meal in a pot.
I was kind of addicted to them,
and over the last two months, I've had one,
and then the week later, I was like,
"I've gotta have another one."
I just started to be like, "No, don't do it."
Just as a treat, I was like,
"Oh I'll just roll back the years and have one."
What happened is, the night that I had that Pot Noodle,
I went and played football, and all I remember is,
halfway through, yes I might be unfit,
but also like my breath feeling like
I'd been drinking the sea, with the amount of salt
that I'd suddenly discovered was in this.
And this is Mrs. B before I left for work this morning.
- Oh my goodness, have you seen
what is in these Pot Noodles?
- [Barry] Yeah but they're nice.
- Yeah but they're really, really bad for you.
- Yes I know they're a teeny bit naughty,
but it's a treat, right?
But I'd never really quite realised
how much stuff is in this.
It's kinda like walking into a nightclub
where you don't really know anyone,
then you see one of your friends.
It's like, you've got malodexatrexine, potassium chloride,
glutamate, disodium isonate, and then you got sweet corn.
Hey sweet corn, how's it going?
Other than all these chemical sounding names,
I can see chives, I can see sage, I can see sweet corn,
I can see noodles, I couldn't see chicken.
That's the soy sauce, right?
My whole life has been a lie with these Pot Noodles.
I always thought there was chicken pieces in it.
But no, it's not.
I was having a conversation on Twitter this morning,
I said, "Look, there's no chicken in it,
"but what it is is actually little pieces of soy."
So if we're gonna replicate this,
we're gonna put proper chicken pieces in it.
So this is my food dehydrator thing,
so you can dehydrate loads of stuff.
So whatever we put in here, we could go crazy,
we could do other different meats and things like that,
we could do a jerky Pot Noodle, nice.
But I know some of you won't have this,
and also, when it comes to dehydrating chicken,
you really need to get that internal temperature up,
which the oven is probably better for anyway.
But it does take a bit of time,
so we'll get that going,
and then we can do a few other things,
and there was also something years ago, called a Pot Mash.
We're gonna do one of those as well. (chuckles)
I've preheated my oven to 180C Fan,
200C, gas mark six, 400F.
I'm gonna actually bring out my own
little Barry Lewis ones of these,
'cause I think they're blooming awesome.
Everyone should have one on their fridge.
Are you magnetic?
Okay folks, so what I've got here
are some mini chicken fillets .
So what I'm gonna do,
because it's easier to slice them now,
before they get obviously a bit more dried out,
is just cut them into little bite size pieces,
that basically I always thought
were chicken in the Pot Noodle.
(upbeat music)
'Cause we want it to be in there,
we want the chicken flavour as well,
and of course we could rub this in seasonings as well,
but I wanna keep it just chicken.
It will get smaller as it cooks, as well,
and I'm not gonna turn the camera around,
'cause I got chicken hands,
but the dogs have suddenly lined up behind the camera,
they can see what I'm doing. (laughs)
There we go, so that was from one fillet,
which I think will be plenty for one pot.
I'll do that to a couple of others,
and we'll get it baking.
So I've spread that out as best I can,
there'll be times once it starts to cook
to do that a little bit better.
But this will be going in for two hours.
It won't be alone, but we'll get it
start cooking first of all.
Loving the chicken.
My actual aim today isn't to make the most super healthy
homemade Pot Noodle ever,
because there was lots of other different noodles
we could get, there was wheat noodles,
there was actually a protein, oh my God,
there was like a calorie free one, so many.
I just wanna kinda try and replicate a vessel
where everything is in there sealed,
♪ Ba-yee-ah ♪
Ready to be eaten, with the hot water poured on it.
So by dehydrating the ingredients,
whatever you choose to use,
so we're gonna dehydrate the sweet corn
and the mushrooms as well, it should work.
So, as we know, in the Pot Noodle,
you get this sorta foil lid,
which we can just replicate that with tin foil.
You get your soy sauce, nice little sachet of that.
That's probably half the salt content alone, to be honest.
And then that's the mix, in there.
Now, I can't get these very easily,
but what I can get is these disposable
party cups, like this.
And you can see, there's quite a lot of seasoning in there,
way more than I thought.
To be fair, I normally just put hot water in it,
I don't smell it.
That does smell quite chemically.
Despite that, I would still eat it. (laughs)
So, almost like a freshly-baked cake,
I've just worked my way around the edge there.
There you go.
So the noodles are kinda like slabbed together like that.
I'm gonna weigh that a minute.
So there's about 50 grammes there,
plus a little bit there, I'm gonna go about 60 grammes.
And the rest is just sort of seasoning.
I can't even see the bits
that I used to think were chicken,
and there's hardly any sweet corn in there, at all.
Kettle's just starting to boil.
I don't know if this is gonna work,
but we're gonna put hot boiling water in here,
'cause I want to show you,
and I've never seen it myself,
what happens behind those normally white plastic walls.
It should hold it.
Okay so hopefully, it might steam it up, but.
I'm gonna fill it just to cover it, there we go.
Prod it a little bit.
And you can see all the seasoning down in the bottom.
I'm not gonna worry about that just yet.
I'm gonna replicate a lid with some foil.
Oh my gosh, I just squished it down.
It's gone really weak, did you see that?
Like a really tipsy pint of beer.
Oh, dear.
Well, I think as it cools slightly, it will be all right,
but that's quite weak now. (laughs)
You can see Pot Noodle etiquette, though,
how you really wanna mix that all together.
But right now, the noodles are cooking.
Okay, so as per the official instructions,
two minutes, and the actual noodles do look, yeah.
They're quite softened already, look at that.
So gonna give this a good old stir.
Get rid of all that lumps down the bottom.
And I've gotta be honest, in the past,
I've probably not done that. (laughs)
Okay, and then we add in the soy sauce, and mix it through.
(bright music)
And now, I wouldn't always do this,
'cause I'd be just so excited to eat it.
Ugh, and just while I'm waiting for that,
I've got a bowl with a sieve here,
and obviously, sweet corn does have
a little bit of water in, you can see it coming out there.
I wanna get this as dry as I can.
And to one side, also, these are the mushrooms I've got.
They're just some chestnut mushrooms that I've washed,
and I've sliced thinly.
I was gonna use porcini, which I think would produce
an extremely strong stock.
I thought, oh that's amazing,
you have to hydrate those anyway,
but I thought it might be a bit overkill.
(mellow music)
Now obviously, there's a bit of moisture content
in mushrooms anyway, so when you bake them,
they will reduce down even more.
But happy with that.
Okay, here it is, oh.
Seriously, I know I'm showing a healthier version,
but once a year as a treat, slice of bread into strips,
with butter on it, dunk that in now,
in that soup, oh, oh.
But maybe ours will do exactly the same.
We don't know.
It's quite mesmerising, isn't it? (laughs)
I've never seen it like that before.
But you can still see the heat coming off of it.
Nostalgia.
But I think, although it's gonna get really, really cold,
and maybe Mrs. Barry will drink it later by accident,
which would be hilarious,
I think we'll show it for reference at the end of the video,
to see if we get anything close to that.
So the chicken's already at about half an hour
in here on its own, oh yeah.
I need to break it up with a fork
and get those other bits in.
(laughs) There we go.
This has actually cooked a lot quicker
than I thought it would,
so I'm glad we're taking it out now.
It's gone nice and brown, so you have that extra flavour
and crunch in there, but you can see, in the middle still,
you got those nice white bits of chicken that you're after.
So when it goes in with our hot stock
and the hot fluid going in there,
it's gonna loosen it up, it's gonna rehydrate it,
and it should work a charm.
Here we are.
So (laughs) it's a little bit like a traffic light.
Sweet corn's in the middle, it won't turn into popcorn.
I'm not gonna leave it in there that long,
it's not gonna get that hot, but that would be hilarious,
and the mushrooms here.
Just make sure that you flatten them all out,
so they're all on one nice edge.
If you want, halfway through, you can whip them 'round,
but we just gotta cover this.
All right, there we go,
I'm gonna leave that for another hour.
And that should dry out perfectly.
Whilst that is in the oven then,
let's just have a little bit of fun
and see if we can replicate how they made the Pot Mash.
They haven't made them for blooming years,
I even Tweeted them once saying,
"You've gotta bring this back."
But hey, let's see if we can do it.
So the main body of it, rather than being noodles,
is actually potatoes.
This is instant mashed potato.
Four tablespoons of that, I'm going for.
This is proper nostalgia, right here.
Instant mashed potato, just add water.
Not the tastiest, but it gets you by.
Well it did in the '90s, anyway, for me.
Now here are some croutons.
You might say, "Hey Barry,
"I've never seen croutons that small before."
That's because, a minute ago, they were big, and I did this.
So I'm gonna add those in.
And these are some cooked onions, in little strips,
you get these for salads, as bites of stuff,
and I think sometimes you get them
at the salad bar in Pizza Hut.
And it did have a curry vibe, so I've got a tablespoon
of mild curry powder here.
(bright music)
From my memory, that was the main textures and body to this.
I'm sure there was probably other things
in the one that they made, but that's what I'm gonna go for,
and we'll see at the end if that's worked.
So I'll put it in my no-expense-spared Pot Noodle dispenser.
(exuberant music)
When it was 1999, with the whole millennium thing,
and people built bunkers in their gardens,
they woulda loved this.
Let's start to bring this together.
These are the medium egg noodles I got.
They did thick ones, they did thin ones as well,
but I tried to do it from memory
of what I thought they were like.
In fact, they are a teeny bit thicker, damn.
No mind, you can get thick noodles, if you want.
My point is, I just weighed one sheet,
'cause they came as five in a pack.
And it is actually the same weight, it's 60 grammes.
Obviously not with the powder and other ingredients in it,
but we're close, and that is all that matters.
Remember that hack that I showed you recently,
with Mrs. B, where we rolled up the sage,
and we just chop it really fine?
Try not to get the chives involved.
(plucky music)
There we go, nice and fine.
Remember, this is fresh herbs,
so both of these, chives as well.
If you're doing this, and you're gonna store it longer term,
I would suggest using the dried variety that you get
and you keep in your spice rack.
There we go, look at that.
That'll be plenty.
You might remember last year,
I did my own homemade stock from scratch,
and I was gonna use it for this video,
but two reasons why I'm not.
One, we used the last of it last night in a risotto,
(smacks lips) stonking,
and two, I did put quite a lot of salt in that to make that.
And to be honest, we're not gonna massively
get around the salt issue entirely here,
but we can reduced salt alternatives.
So what I've got is a low-sodium chicken stock cube.
This is just a quarter of one.
There was also onion powder on the ingredients list,
that stood out too, so I'm gonna add some of that in.
These are actual onion granules.
See, they're a little bit thicker, don't worry.
That's why it's in this baby.
I went to one of those health stores,
and I've got some really low-sodium salt,
really healthy bullion powder,
which actually looks almost identical in colour
to the ones that we saw earlier.
You see?
So what I'm gonna do is grind,
particularly the onion granules, back together.
There we go, the pestle and mortar, mortar and pestle,
whatever you wanna call it, nice.
That's our powder, done.
To be honest, whilst it's sat in that nice little container,
we might as well push the other bits in.
So this is the chives and the sage from earlier.
I'm not gonna grind this down, because as we saw,
when we dissected it, they were in nice pieces like that.
But if we just get it to sorta just mingle with that,
it'll disperse as we add, disperse, what a word.
As we add the hot water later.
(laughs) Brilliant.
Oh, smells good.
So let's bring it together.
The noodles, which I'm gonna break down a little bit.
Dehydrated sweet corn.
Dehydrated chicken.
Can you hear that?
It's crunchy, but it'll soften.
Dehydrated mushroom.
Loads of flavour coming from that.
The smell is insane.
And I might knock the microphone, there we go.
Get the seasoning in.
Get it all coated together.
I think they're ready for some water.
All right, I've just boiled my kettle in the background,
so that'll go off in a minute.
Just a little reminder, when you buy the noodles,
I'm gonna have to hold this,
put it in a jug to kinda help me.
When you buy the noodles, make sure they're ones
that cook in three or four minutes.
If you get the ones that are like,
yeah, takes 15 minutes, I mean, most don't,
but just keep an eye out.
When it comes to soy sauce, in a supermarket,
you'll tend to see two or three varieties.
You'll get your regular, then you'll get one called light,
then you'll get one called reduced salt.
Now I spent 10 minutes of my life looking at these
this morning in the supermarket,
and I determined that the reduced salt one
looks the best for us,
and in the actual sort of breakdown
for you gubbins, all right?
I like this angle, 'cause Mr. Bean's
kind of loitering in the background.
It looks like there's more noodles,
and I'm not gonna lie, there possibly could be,
but remember, mine aren't compact.
So let's get that in, up to cover them.
And now the Pot Mash.
We might as well.
You can see the bubbles, I don't know,
this is sorta starting to break down
as it's hitting the powder.
This one is gonna need a stir.
I remember with this one,
that you did have to actually top it out with water though,
if you felt like it needed it.
And this does feel like it needs it.
But we can restir that again, doesn't matter.
(foil crinkles)
Oh my gosh, it nearly did it again.
It bent.
It bends so easy.
Foil lids on top, just to basically
kinda keep that heat in, radiate it.
Tin foil's amazing for that.
Okay, let's leave them for two minutes.
All right, two minutes is up.
The smell's great.
In goes the soy sauce, whoosh.
Optional, actually.
Those noodles do need a little longer.
The Pot Noodle ones, they were done after two minutes,
but that does need it.
The mash, which remember, is just a bonus
bit of fun thing for me, really.
I mean, I'm gotta get something outta this.
The powder's mostly gone, actually.
That's pretty good.
Oh, you see the bits in there?
Nice.
All right, (laughs) two more minutes.
Oh.
(laughs) Ah.
Oh my gosh, it's got the stock as well.
Like I said, that little bit of bread in there,
it soaks it up, and then you're just left with noodles,
so it's a good anti-dribble thing, as well.
Just a bit gutted that I got the wrong size noodles,
but lemme get a bit of chicken.
Oh.
I mean here's the other one.
It's a bit cold now.
You can see the difference.
They almost look faded, don't they, those other noodles.
There's a much more richer stock and broth in there
by the looks of it, but that has actually,
(laughs) it's almost solidified.
It's the circle of life for Pot Noodles.
But like, it's got all the specks
of the herbs in it as well, and the mushrooms,
and the chicken, and the sweet corn, oh my gosh.
It's still hot, lush.
Oh my gosh, I just got a bit of chicken.
There's still a teeny, probably needs another couple minutes
just to sit there, just to rehydrate again.
That is phenomenal.
It's not a Pot Noodle. (laughs)
It's not a Pot Noodle by any means,
but I mean it is, in the theory and the context of it.
It's a noodle pot, whatever brand you buy.
But the broth is so thicker,
and the noodles have got a lovely texture to it.
I don't, I'm not missing the salt in there at all.
There's obviously some still in there,
but we've reduced it significantly.
That is actually phenomenal.
It's blowing my mind.
Really good.
Wow, wow. (laughs)
I'm actually speechless.
So the Pot Mash.
Again, look, from there, that's what I was used to seeing.
There's only one person on Twitter
that's just responded to me,
saying, "Yeah, I remember those."
No one else believes me.
They did exist.
So the mash used to always go like that, as well.
It'd have curried specks in it.
No. (laughs)
The texture's right.
Do you know what that actually needs?
This is gonna sound horrendous.
(laughs) It actually needs some salt in there.
It needs a bit of like, mm.
See that's helped it already.
It needs a bit more curry powder, a bit more salt,
but I'm getting the density of the croutons,
it's soft 'cause the moisture of it just gets it there,
got the crunch of the onion as well.
It works.
I could experiment with that some more,
but that was just a little personal fun project.
Bit more seasoning in there.
Bit more strong, I think stronger curry powder.
I used mild, as well.
(laughs) I love the fact that
the point of this whole video,
and now that one, yeah, it needs some salt. (laughs)
But this is truly outta this world.
Mm, mm, mm, mm.
I can't stop eating it, it's phenomenal.
Remember this isn't a sponsored video by Pot Noodle.
I mean, I've said it so many times,
it probably feels like it is.
I don't think they're gonna be sponsoring me any time soon,
but I was trying to stay impartial.
And you know, I might have one every leap year, maybe?
Something like that.
This reminds me, though, taste-wise,
of the slightly more expensive ones
you get next to the Pot Noodle,
or sometimes in the fresh aisle of the supermarket.
The broth is phenomenal, and the noodles as well.
Just that extra bit of quality.
And the fact that you know what you've put in it,
absolutely love it.
So if you do try it, don't forget to tag me on social media,
but any variations you make,
play around with the dehydration side of it, as well.
That can really add so much to it.
Don't forget to follow me on your social media of choice
for behind the scenes bits and bobs.
Consider becoming a patron for exclusive content
and giveaways, and forget, don't forget to subscribe.
Forget to subscribe, meh.
Bye.
♪ Check your level, player ♪
♪ No matter what your style ♪
♪ The kitchen's for me ♪
♪ Sideburns, moustache, goatee ♪
♪ Maybe all three ♪
- Is that the regular Pot Noodle?
- Yeah. - See, look at that.
That looks all right.
- [Barry] Yeah, it's beautiful in colour, isn't it?
- Yeah, that looks nice.
Is this yours?
- [Barry] Yeah.
- Well thanks for saving me some. (laughs)
- [Barry] That's my lunch.
- Mine too.
- [Barry] Is it?
Oh, I coulda made you another one.
- Okay.
- [Barry] I've got enough powder left.
- Ooh, it smells good.
Mm.
That's really nice.
- [Barry] It's stone cold, though,
are you okay with that?
- I don't mind. - Yeah?
You like it. - I'm hungry.
Yeah, it is.
It's good.
- [Barry] Can you taste the little chicken pieces in it?
- I can, and the mushrooms.
- Yeah. - Mm.