Voice-Tribune review by Robin Garr
Celebrate The Noble Noodle at Thai Noodles
Life as a hunter-gatherer was hard, no question about that. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, this life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." But at least paleolithic humans didn't have to make many decisions at supper time. Knock over an animal, whack off a chunk and chow down. Cooking it was optional, once people learned to tame fire.
It was only when humans settled down in agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago that culinary life got complicated.
You don't need technology to pick a low-hanging apple from a tree and eat it. You don't even have to peel the thing. But once we started growing grains like wheat and barley in organized farm rows, we had to figure out what to do with them. Nibbling a row of raw grains from a stalk of wheat simply doesn't satisfy.
No, it took creative thinking to come up with the idea of grinding wheat grains into flour, mixing them with water, pounding the dough flat and cooking it over fire or hot rocks to make flatbread. When humans finally discovered the art of fermentation, opening the way to both fluffy loaves and adult beverages, we must have thought we'd come about as far as we could go.
Before long (in archaeological terms) bread and beer had spread across the Western world, from the fertile crescent into Europe, Africa and even Northern India.
In Asia, however early humans, with plenty of rice on hand, went down an entirely different path with wheat: mill flour, mix it with water, pat it flat, and then ... cut it into long, narrow strips. Behold, pasta was born!
Sure, Marco Polo (or, more likely, some nameless earlier trader) brought the noble noodle back to Italy, which made pasta famous in the West. But the noodle's native home is East Asia, and you'll find these tasty treats in every Asian cuisine.
To celebrate the hegemony of the Asian noodle, we made our way out to Thai Noodle on Preston Highway. ...
Read my full review on LouisvilleHotBytes.com:
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/celeb ... ai-noodles
and in the Voice-Tribune:
http://www.voice-tribune.com/life-style ... i-noodles/
Thai Noodles Restaurant
5800 Preston Hwy.
961-9018
http://facebook.com/ThaiNoodles
Robin Garr's rating: 84 points
