Noodles Made From Chicken: A Japanese Surimi Technique
- lyukum
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Real Chicken. Fake Noodles.
I first saw this recipe on chef Ivan Shishkin's Telegram channel — fish noodles, made from tilapia surimi, posted not long after he came back from a trip to Japan. I wanted to know more. Which source, exactly, and could the technique work with chicken instead of fish?
It could. Everyone chasing plant-based meat is trying to make something fake taste and feel like an animal. This goes the other way. Real chicken is shaped into something that looks and chews like wheat noodles, but isn't — no flour anywhere near it, just chicken protein and starch. Gluten-free by construction, and close enough to ramen in the bite that nobody at my table could tell by looking. Getting there, though, meant fighting a protein that resists this technique in a way fish never does.
Noodles Made From Chicken, Not Flour
Shishkin never mentioned where his recipe came from beyond "translated from Japanese with Google Translate." So I went looking, and found two separate sources, neither one obviously his — which says how widespread this idea turns out to be.
The first is industrial: 魚麺 (uomen), a frozen noodle made from pollock surimi, sold by Nissui (日本水産), one of Japan's largest seafood companies. It's described as turning pollock surimi into noodles with a smooth texture, using the company's own proprietary method. Pollock muscle is rich in fast-twitch muscle protein. Our body uses it for supporting quick movement, a better basal metabolism, and core muscle tone, making it well suited to athletes building fast-twitch strength and to older adults whose everyday muscles have started to weaken. Compared to regular udon, it's marketed as a healthier noodle with 25% less carbohydrate.
The second is a named chef's recipe White Fish Somen with Pomodoro Sauce, from Nobu Matsuhisa's book Nobu Now. White fish is processed with egg white, dashi, and potato starch into a paste, piped through a small hole into water kept just below boiling — and served not in broth, but under tomato sauce, a deliberate Japanese-Italian fusion piece. The temperature range Nobu specifies, kept just under boiling.
The idea shows up twice, independently, for two completely different reasons: one company selling a health-food noodle, one chef building a fusion dish — and what I did was a third, unplanned branch of the same idea, with chicken standing in for fish.
Surimi Is the Real Story
Once you see both of these as surimi products, the noodle shape stops being the interesting part. The interesting part is the process underneath it. That process has a long résumé. Look at these products — kamaboko, narutomaki, chikuwa, fish balls across China and Southeast Asia. Thailand's sen pla (เส้นปลา) are fish noodles made the same way, just rolled and cut rather than piped.
All of them follow the same logic. Cold fish and salt get processed into a myofibrillar protein emulsion — myosin starts to bind into a network. Starch gets folded in (tapioca or rice flour in some versions, potato starch in Nobu's) and the mixture gets shaped, then cooked at a moderate temperature gently enough that the protein sets into a tight, springy gel. The noodle is just one more shape this emulsion happens to take.
This is also why fish is the default protein for this family of techniques, and chicken almost never shows up. Fish muscle has very little connective tissue. Chicken has plenty of it, even after trimming, and that turned out to be the entire plot of what happened in my kitchen.
Where Chicken Refuses to Cooperate
I swapped fish for boneless, skinless chicken thigh and ran the same logic. Cold meat, salt, ice water worked in gradually, egg white and oil streamed in, starch folded in last, an overnight rest in the fridge for everything to hydrate and equilibrate.
Mixing the starch by hand almost killed me. A stand mixer with the paddle attachment turned out to be the obvious fix I somehow needed two batches to find.
The mixture looked smooth. But wasn't. Tiny threads of connective tissue had survived the processor. They were invisible until I tried to force the paste through something narrow. The first victim was my KitchenAid extruder attachment. The holes clogged, and I didn't even register it. I just assumed the paste was too dense (or loose) for the attachment. Then through a piping bag, where the problem stopped being deniable.
What followed was, by any reasonable definition, a small kitchen battle. A fine sieve let nothing through at all. A coarser one let the paste through reluctantly, slowly. The fix, when it finally arrived, was a potato ricer — every stray fiber stayed behind in the press. After that, the noodles piped through a 1mm tip into the hot water without a single clog.
Fish never has this problem. So it didn't occur to me that chicken would. The texture looked right, so I assumed it should work, but the actual piping disagreed.
Ashi or Koshi or What?
Japanese texture vocabulary has two words that sound like they're describing the same thing, and they're not.
Koshi (腰, "lower back") is the word for wheat noodles. It's the combination of springiness and chew — smooth going in, pushing back against the teeth as you bite. The mechanism is gluten. Glutenin and gliadin, two wheat proteins, link up when the dough is worked with water and salt, forming a network that stretches in every direction without tearing.
Ashi (足, "leg") is the word for surimi gels. It's a word covering firmness, how cleanly it shears under the teeth, and a kind of chewy pull. It comes from salt, not gluten. Myofibrillar proteins in fish paste dissolve into the salt, and when the paste is heated, those proteins reform into a network of their own. Different protein, different mechanism, same general idea — a network that resists the bite.
Which one is my noodles made from chicken? Visually, nobody could tell it apart from wheat noodles — that part isn't subtle. On the bite, it's close, but not identical. So not koshi, because there's no gluten in the noodle at all. Not quite ashi either, because the protein doing the binding isn't dissolving the way fish protein does. It needed starch and egg white to get there. Whatever this texture actually is, it's a third thing, built out of borrowed pieces of both.
Why Bother
Underneath the novelty, this is a noodle built from chicken. Of the four ingredients doing the actual structural work — chicken, egg white, rice flour, tapioca starch — chicken and egg white make up about 75% of the weight, starch the rest, a roughly 3:1 ratio of protein-bearing ingredients to starch. That puts it in the same lane as Nissui's actual sales pitch — high protein, gluten-free by construction, since the binder is rice flour and tapioca starch rather than wheat gluten.
I won't pretend this is a weeknight noodle. It takes a processor, an overnight rest, a stand mixer, a potato ricer, and the patience to pipe a dense paste through a 1mm tip — closer to a project than a recipe. Anyone making this at home is doing it out of curiosity, not convenience. But for that kind of cook, or for a high-protein, wheat-free diet where ordinary noodles aren't an option, this is a genuinely useful thing to have worked out.
Hot, Cold, and the Day After
A noodle is only as good as its worst serving, so I ran this one through both ends.
First, hot. Straight into tori paitan, chicken broth meeting chicken noodles, the same animal twice over in one bowl — its own small oddity, and a beautiful one. The bowl barely needed anything beyond seasoning to balance, though I added a slice of smoked chicken breast anyway, just to have a small study of chicken in three different forms and textures side by side.
The next day, cold. I served the leftover noodles with a homemade dipping sauce, tsukemen-style. No texture loss, no mushiness, nothing that gave away a night in the fridge. If anything, the bite held up even better cold — more resistance, more of that borrowed ashi-koshi hybrid coming through. It was, without exaggeration, divine.
Same noodle, two completely different bowls, and it didn't flinch either time.
Nutrition Facts (approximate, because life is not a lab)
Serving Size: 100 g cooked chicken noodles Calories ~190, Total Fat 8 g (10% DV), Total Carb. 18 g (6% DV), Dietary Fiber 0.3 g (1% DV), Total Sugars 0 g, Protein 12 g, Sodium 600 mg (26% DV)* depends on water vs dashi and added salt
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