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You know what else is money?
The color blue found in nature.
Things that are liquids, but also solids, but also liquids.
And of course blue noodles.
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- Look alive, he's on his way up.
- Is he even allowed to approve overtime?
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- [Host] Hey, what's up guys?
Welcome back to Binging with Babish.
For this week, we're taking a look
at the blue noodles from Endor, I mean, Andor,
in an admittedly very, very fast appearance,
but it's one of several canonical blue foods in Star Wars,
probably because blue is found so rarely in nature.
So blue foods take on a space-like quality.
Here's one of the rare examples used in food coloring,
Blue Butterfly Pea flowers
which the official Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge Cookbook
calls for to make Gormaanda's Glowblue noodles.
The recipe is as follows, four cups of water,
brought to a summer with a sachet
of blue butterfly pea flowers.
Now these have varied, mild floral grassy quality to them
so hopefully they won't interfere with other flavors.
Next up, the recipe calls for eight ounces
of rice noodles, added to the now very, very blue water.
We're gonna allow those to cook to a state of completion.
In the meantime, in a small sauce pan,
we're adding half a cup each heavy cream
and unsalted butter and one crushed clove of garlic.
This mixture we're gonna bring to a simmer.
Then once simmering, we take it off the heat
and add one and a half cups of grated Parmesan cheese,
tiny whisking as we go.
Once the noodles are cooked and the sauce is mixed,
prepared, whatever the stuff is,
we're just gonna pour it right over the blue noodles
in a big old bowl.
And since it's just boiled cream and butter,
with some cheese mixed in, it's pretty loose and splashy.
I think they were going
for like a quickie Alfredo vibe here.
And then to up the alien look, it calls to garnish
with quartered tricolored cherry tomatoes
and mini mozzarella pearls.
And there you have it Gormaanda's Glowblue Noodles
from the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge Cookbook,
which, while it might look like
it's from a galaxy far, far away,
I'm not super confident is gonna taste awesome.
So let's twirl some up and see what we're dealing with here.
And as I suspected,
it's pretty much just a cheater's Alfredo,
albeit a much looser one, with bits of raw garlic
thrown in there for good measure.
It's certainly not inedible or even horribly bad,
it's just not great.
Once it cools and the sauce thickens up,
it saves it a little bit.
But this is of course, just an easy way
for families and kids to enjoy some space noodles.
For our version, I'm thinking the most viable noodle
to emblue is gonna be a potato starch glass noodle.
So I'm gonna start by steeping
some of these blue butterfly pea flowers in some hot water.
Set that aside.
And then in a large bowl, much larger than this,
we're gonna start assembling our noodles.
Now, normally the way this is done
is to make a slurry out of some potato starch and water
and then to that slurry, you add some boiling water.
In this case, our blue butterfly pea water,
which needs to be freshly boiling
because you want the water to gelatinize the starches
in the starch so that now as you add
more potato starch to adjust into a dough,
hopefully this doesn't happen
and you end up with non-newtonian fluid.
Which, while it makes a super fun science project
that you can pour like a liquid and then slap like a solid,
it doesn't so much make for great noodles.
Because without those gelatinized starches
the noodles have nothing to hold them together.
So when it comes time to pipe them into boiling water,
instead of forming delicious edible worms
it just kind of disappears.
I don't know why you're still going, Andy,
this clearly isn't working.
You're still gonna keep going, huh?
All right, that's your choice.
While you're doing that,
I'm gonna try a more reliable recipe
from YouTuber East Meets Kitchen.
Combining at first, 50 grams each cool water
and potato starch, mix that into a slurry.
And then add 200 to 250 grams
of freshly boiling blue butterfly pea flower tea,
which when whisked, should form a thick,
gloopy, key word gelatinous, mixture.
This indicates that our starches have been gelatinized
and we can add the remaining
400 to 500 grams of potato starch.
I say 400 to 500 because you're gonna need
to adjust as necessary to get the mixture
into an extremely thick, but pipeable consistency.
Adding more water or corn starch as necessary
to get the right texture.
This can be a little labor intensive,
but no more than any other pasta dough, I'd say.
Once you get it about as thick
as you can get it so that it's still pourable,
we're placing it in a piping bag, sniping the tip,
and piping it directly into some barely boiling water,
where hopefully it won't immediately disappear.
and instead form long, spooky blue noodles
that are done as soon as they float, about 30 seconds.
They don't stick to each other at all,
which is awesome, so you don't have to worry
about overlapping.
And after their super quick cook time,
they're getting scooped out
and placed into a cool water bath.
And that's all there is to it.
The dough might be a little tricky to get together,
but this is every bit as fun as it looks.
And not only does it yield a robust blue noodle
it's a pretty awesome noodle.
It tastes good, barely any butterfly pea flower taste,
and all that whipping and whisking
works in tiny little air bubbles
that glitter like a toy from the 90's.
And they're just about as slurpable
as it is possible for a noodle to be.
Now, the best recipe I can think of for glass noodles
that also won't ruin their color
is a sort of Japchae.
In a small bowl, I'm combining one tablespoon soy sauce,
two tablespoons miren, a teaspoon of white sugar,
a tablespoon sesame oil, and two cloves of minced garlic.
We're gonna add half the sauce during cooking
and save the other half for plating.
Now over on the stove top in stages,
in a carbon steel pan, we're gonna heat
small amounts of vegetable oil
and use it to saute half a small sliced onion
until lightly caramelized and soft, about 3 to 5 minutes.
Followed by four ounces of sliced shiitake mushrooms
cooked to a golden brown crisp.
We're adding both the onions and mushrooms
to a large tossing bowl.
Then finally, over on the stove top,
we're gonna saute our blue noodles
in a little bit of oil over high heat,
just enough to heat them through
and maybe darken them a tiny, tiny bit.
Then we're adding half our sauce
and letting it just get kissed by the flame.
Don't want all that garlic and sugar to burn.
So after about 20 seconds, it's going straight
into the bowl, where it's gonna get tossed together
with the rest of the sauce, the cooked vegetables
and a tablespoon of toasted sesame seeds.
Give this guy a spirited tossing,
plate up and get ready to slurp.
As you can see, the blue noodles
have not been too negatively affected
by the cooking process.
They might not look as fantastical as the other noodles,
but I have a feeling they're gonna taste
a whole lot better, especially when garnished
with thinly sliced chives and sesame seeds.
So let's give it a try, and it's really, really good.
It's Japchae, but it's also blue, which is awesome.
The only problem I'm running into
is that the noodles are way too long,
so maybe give those a snip if you wanna try this yourself.
Thanks again to Cash App.
That's money, that's Cash App.
Download Cash app from the App Store
or Google Play Store today
to add your cash tag to the 80 million and counting.
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