Recipe of the Month: Peanut Black Bean Noodles

Last month, I tried a vegan version of Pasta a la Caprese with two modifications: replacing the mozzarella with cubed tofu and replacing the noodles with some black soybean noodles we picked up at Ocean State Job Lot. The first of these changes worked well; the second did not. The nutty flavor of the noodles didn't harmonize well with the tomato-basil-garlic stylings of the sauce. 

However, we thought the pasta was pretty good on its own, and we decided to pick up some more and try it with a non-tomato-based sauce. So, on our last trip to Ocean State Job Lot, we bought three boxes of these noodles — all the store had left in stock. (We'd discovered in the interim that the $4-a-pound price tag, though much higher than most kinds of noodles, was actually a bargain for this variety; the best price we could find for them online was around $8.35 a pound.) 

Brian then started hunting through our recipe collection looking for a suitable peanut sauce to try them with. Most of the recipes he found called for coconut milk, which we'd just run out of (making this delicious vegan chocolate ice cream I'll tell you about some other time), but eventually we remembered that there was a coconut-free one in our Vegetariana cookbook. He whipped up a half-batch of that and combined it with half a box (four ounces) of the black bean noodles, a grated carrot, two scallions, and a quarter-pound of tofu. (Probably we didn't need the tofu since the noodles are already made from soy, but we had to use it up anyway.)

This sauce worked better with the black bean noodles than the Caprese sauce, but it still wasn't a complete success. For one thing, the dish seemed a bit soupy, with too much sauce for the noodles. Part of the problem was that these noodles seem to have a less porous surface than most kinds of pasta, so sauce doesn't cling to them very well. But also, the sauce itself seemed a bit thin. Even though it had a quarter-cup of peanut butter in it, it also contained two tablespoons of soy sauce and a tablespoons of vinegar, and the liquid seemed to drown out the solid matter. (The recipe calls for an additional quarter-cup of water on top of that, but fortunately Brian didn't add it, or the sauce would have been even runnier.) 

Another problem: despite the high peanut butter content, this peanut sauce didn't taste all that peanutty. The predominant flavors were the soy sauce and the teaspoon of grated ginger in the mix. If we try this particular peanut sauce again, we'll probably bump up the peanut butter content by another tablespoon or two. Or we could just get another can of coconut milk and try one of the coconut-based peanut sauces instead. 

We still think the black bean noodles are a tasty pasta alternative, and with 25 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber per serving, they're certainly a healthy one. We just haven't hit on the perfect sauce for them yet. But we still have two and a half boxes left to experiment with. 

Of course, if we do find a sauce that works really well with them, we'll then have to hope we can find more of them. The selection at Ocean State Job Lot is (as the name would suggest) a bit hit-and-miss, so there's no guarantee they'll be available next time we go there. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.