Funchoza Salad (Glass Noodle Salad with Vegetables)

Cold appetizers made with boiled pasta or rice noodles are popular all over the world. In China and Southeast Asia, glass noodle salad (funchoza) is the local take on this kind of dish. It is extremely simple to make: you just toss raw shredded vegetables with glass noodles that have been boiled until done and then cooled.

Dried funchoza, often called glass noodles or glass vermicelli, is sold in stores. It is made from mung beans. Much more rarely it is made from rice flour, other legumes or potatoes, and the cheap version uses corn starch. Good-quality noodles are matte white, and turn transparent once boiled.

Funchoza is easy to recognize: dry, it looks like thin, very stiff threads, as thin as a hair, wound into skeins. Someone once said it looks like birds’ nests. Often it is enough to simply soak these noodles in water to cook them. So that the cooked noodles don’t stick together, they are usually rinsed before going into a dish. By the way, once boiled they absorb the taste and aroma of sauces beautifully. A good example is funchoza with chicken.

Such salads are usually served cold. They use fresh vegetables: sweet and hot peppers, carrots, various kinds of radish, onion and garlic. Mushrooms, most often shiitake, are quite common among the ingredients. Salads may also include various kinds of boiled or fried meat. As a rule, the dressings for these appetizers are very simple: usually a mix of vegetable oil and vinegar with a little soy sauce added.

We tried to avoid rare and exotic vegetables. We stuck to those you can buy in any store, even out of season: sweet and hot peppers, green onion, carrot and cucumber. To boost the flavor of the salad, we used fresh lime juice.

To keep the funchoza salad from turning into mush or a tangled ball, use only good-quality noodles, preferably from a well-known brand. After boiling, the noodle threads often turn white instead of transparent. Fakes made of corn starch with “whiteners” are also common. It is important that all the ingredients of the salad, including the noodles themselves, are mixed and distributed evenly in the finished dish.