Should You Salt The Water When Cooking Rice Noodles? We Asked An Expert

Rice noodles are an essential ingredient in many Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian recipes — from pad Thai to pad see ew, and from Vietnamese pho to Chinese mei fun and the southern Indian breakfast dish, idiyappam. But, for as many ways as there are to use rice noodles, there is a specific type of rice noodle for you to use, too. Varieties like rice vermicelli are thin, while other varieties, such as the báhn pho common to your pho noodle soup, are thick. Knowing this, each style of rice noodle goes best with a particular dish, requiring a different amount of time to cook depending on its size. But, no matter what type a dish calls for, Derek Chan, the R&D manager of the Chinese-American restaurant Mamahuhu, says not to salt the water you cook them in. 

While fresh rice noodles typically come pre-cooked, the dried rice noodles you find in stores in the U.S. have to be rehydrated and soaked in water before you can add them to your dishes. This will take anywhere from five to 15 minutes for thin noodles and up two hours for thick noodles. But, while there might be as many rice noodles as there are types of pasta noodles in the word, they're not prepared the same, no matter the size. Aside from opting for room temperature water as opposed to boiled, Chan told Tasting Table that he doesn't personally salt it. "I find that more common in European cooking," he said. "I tend to add savoriness through seasoning the food directly."

One of the reasons many people struggle to cook rice noodles properly is because they try to treat them like Italian pasta noodles. But rice noodles tend to cook a lot more quickly than the wheat-based ones you boil in water for minutes on end — and much more delicately, too. Doing so will, undoubtedly, lead you to a much stickier and gummier consistency than you might expect. Instead, rice noodles are simply left submerged in warm water until they're just barely cooked — without any salt — and they're then finished cooking in a skillet with rice bran oil to prevent sticking. But it's the second step of cooking where the rice noodles are seasoned, absorbing all of the flavors you mixed them with.

Knowing this, it makes sense why Derek Chan doesn't find it necessary to salt the water before adding the noodles into his recipes — because many of them already call for enough savory flavors. With common ingredients ranging from umami-bursting fish and soy sauce or gluten-free tamari (like this one by Roland Foods on Amazon), and sesame oil to chili garlic sauce, salting the water for your rice noodles could potentially send your dish into savory overload, overpowering all the other flavors that make it unique. Skipping the salt in the water, and adding in a combination of salty and umami ingredients — think fish and soy sauce — along with brighter, more sour flavors — be that chili paste or lime juice — you'll achieve a balance that's much more aligned.