I was SURPRISED and DELIGHTED and OVERJOYED when I saw Sea Tangle noodles for sale at an Asian specialty store! I grabbed several bags, since I couldn't order them online from Canada, and instantly went home to make a salad.

Except... the noodles... just tasted like crunchy salt. I was expecting them to be soft and floppy... like clear noodles. And my avocado-cucumber-kelp-lemon salad turned out to be so nasty, I had to throw the whole thing away, because the smell of the noodles made me want to puke. I couldn't even pick out the good stuff.

Any preparation suggestions? =\ I don't want to give up... and I do have these bags that definitely NOBODY else I know will eat.

Thanks!!

*I also rinsed them... and then proceeded to soak them in warm water to soften them, but nothing seemed to change.

I make an herb sauce as follows:

Juice 4 small valencia oranges. Blend with 1/4 cup ground hemp seeds, 1/8 cup ground sundried tomatoes, a handful of cilantro, and perhaps 1/2 red bell pepper.

And then I marinate the noodles in that sauce for 30 minutes or so. This softens up the noodles and they become soft and floppy. Perhaps its the citric acid in my sauce that makes them soft. But I have a feeling that other sauces will also soften up the noodles.

Also, before I put them into my sauce, I will soak them in filtered water for 10 minutes or so to have the preservative dilute some, and then strain out all the soak water.

There was a raw restaurant in San Francisco called Urban Forage that would make a seaweed salad with the Sea Tangle kelp noodles and hijiki and thinly sliced nori sprinkled on top with black sesame seeds. The sauce was almond butter, miso, nama shoyu (and some other ingredients - perhaps some citrus or water), and it came with a slice of lemon.

By the way, were the noodle old? They have an expiration date on the bag.

Are you talking about the kelp noodles?

I am not sure if they are raw or even vegan.

[www.homeygroup.com]

[www.mainelobsterdirect.com]

Here is the product: Sea Tangle Kelp Noodle

Thanks for the recipe!

I tried a slight variant of your sauce, and it DID make the noodles the proper texture I was imagining. The sauce was good. I used flax instead of hemp, though, so it got a little snotty. =\

But there's a weird disconnect in my brain when I eat the noodles, still. Maybe it has to do with the fact I haven't had pasta of any sort in so long, kind of like when I tried my first soyburger, after years of being vegetarian and generally hating hamburgers through childhood: it made me want to puke! My brain still registered "burger" and gave me a weird psychosomatic conflict.

I have one pack left. Perhaps I'll give them a shot with a raw pad thai sauce--they look close to rice noodles!