You only need to soak packet dry rice noodles in warm/hot water to
rehyrdrate them & draining them before cooking. The fresh version (comes
oiled in plastic bag) you just heat your wok to as hot as possible & fry to
get the best results. If your wok is not hot enough, you spend more time
cooking & stirring it which will result in softer & broken bits. Stir frying
is always done on very high heat & tossing, not much stirring so the bite
size bits of food gets seared & cooked quickly. If you soaked them in water
& have an average gas stove & not a wok burner... i'm afraid it'll be soggy
& in pieces.

Also make sure the rice noodles/ho-fun/kwayteow that you have is indeed the
right ones for frying. There's another fresh version that is known as
chee-cheong-fun that is meant for steaming & eaten as a breakfast dish.
People often get them mixed up in the Chinese supermarkets.

Refrigerating them will make them stiff/tougher and you'll need to crank up
your wok burner to sear/cook them. Most of the places i've eaten in have
them fresh sitting in the kitchen at room temp. That way they cook faster,
but if you've not got a wok burner of substantial heat, it's almost
impossible to reproduce the ones you've eaten in restaurants.


DC.


Judy Cosler > wrote in message
...
> well last night i made kwayteow with the 2nd half of the noodles. I
> ran boiling water over them in a large bowl & gently stirred them with
> long chopstix (per the suggestion in one recipe). worked better.
> they break badly when i try to just separate them.
>
> On 21 Oct 2003 11:32:49 -0700, (Tippi) wrote:
>
> >Judy Cosler > wrote
> >> Here's the question: HOW do you separate these without ending up with
> >> little shareds of noodles. YES, they were oiled. YES, i was running
> >> them under warm tap water.
> >
> >running them under tap water may be the problem, it makes them too
> >soggy and they will break easily. Are you planning to stir fry them or
> >put them in soup? in both cases they should separate once you agitate
> >them in the wok or soup.
>
>
> ((.)) '))
> ((((((((
> ))(/)((