What Is Sodium Carbonate and What’s It Got to Do With Ramen?

Oct 12, 2023

By Antara Sinha

Store-bought noodles are nonnegotiable in our pantries, but homemade noodles? They are something else—earthy, chewy, and ridiculously fun. So grab an apron and let us show you how to Make Your Own Noodles. We’ve got glorious recipes, expert tips, handy guides, and so much more.

What sets ramen apart from other noodles? Lots: tight, springy coils; unbeatable chew; and its trademark yellow-ish hue. All that happens thanks to kansui, an ingredient that's used in the industrial production of ramen.

But if you’re an overachiever who wants to make ramen noodles at home, kansui can be tricky to source outside of a few Asian markets and online purveyors. Often it's a cocktail of chemicals like sodium carbonate, potassium carbonate, and phosphate salts. Or, in other words, not what most cooks have in their pantries.

This is where baking soda comes in. Enterprising cooks like cookbook author and teacher Sonoko Sakai regularly rely on this pantry staple to replicate the alchemy of kansui—in recipes like her ramen noodles. It’ll save you a trip to the store, and it’ll help your ramen achieve that elastic, snappy texture that we all love.

Now this is the fun part: Before adding the baking soda to your dough, you'll need to bake it first. That's right—baked baking soda, most commonly called sodium carbonate (but also referred to as soda ash, or washing soda). Today we’ll learn how to do it and why it's such a powerhouse ingredient in homemade noodles. Onward.

You’re likely familiar with gluten, the protein matrix that develops when you knead flour and water. It's what's responsible for the chew of bread, the tenderness of cakes, and, yes, the stretch of noodles. By changing the pH of the dough with the addition of an alkaline solution like kansui—or, in our case, sodium carbonate—you can manipulate that matrix to achieve different textures.

If you’ve ever braided hair, you know that loosely twisting strands leads to a floppy, bendy plait, while tightly weaving them makes for a Pippi Longstocking-esque tail that's inflexible and tense. Adding sodium carbonate to your noodle dough is the culinary equivalent of pulling gluten strands extraordinarily tight.

Salt in noodle dough similarly tightens gluten structure, but to a lesser degree. Sodium carbonate pulls the proteins so tightly that instead of a stretch, you get noodles with a whippy snap. They won't turn to mush after a stint in hot broth, and will hold their own next to large pieces of meat and whole jammy eggs.

The addition of sodium carbonate means your ramen is ready for anything: lamb and yogurt-dolloped noodles inspired by mazemen, with a punchy vinegar dressing. Or slurpable, veggie-brothy ramen bowls with hunks of puffy tofu. Whatever direction you take your homemade ramen, sodium carbonate is key.

Preheat the oven to 250°. Evenly spread 1 cup baking soda on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for 1 hour.

Let it cool to room temperature, and then transfer to a jar with a tight-fitting lid. It’ll keep for up to a year if stored in a cool, dark place away from moisture. Our homemade ramen noodles recipe only uses 2 tsp. sodium carbonate, so you’re set for a good while, for whenever the noodle-making whim strikes.

An important sciencey note: It will look exactly the same after you’ve baked it, still a fine white powder. You just have to trust that the chemistry worked. If you’re an inherently mistrustful person (I get it), use a scale to weigh your baking soda before and after baking. The weight of the resulting sodium carbonate should be roughly ⅔ of the starting weight, meaning that those extra carbons, oxygens, and hydrogens were successfully expelled as water and CO2.

But that's enough chemistry class for today. Let's make—and eat—some ramen.