Can You Dye Ramen Noodles?

In this exciting edition of Peter Plays with His Food, Peter is curious to find out if it is possible to dye ramen noodles and perhaps make something cool out of them.

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Dried ramen is of course notoriously brittle. Much like a punky piece of wood, ramen has many cavities within that should be filled in with stabilizing resin. This special resin called Cactus Juice, will hopefully give the noodle more structural integrity. In addition to added strength, Peter wanted to also infuse dye into the material to give it some interesting character. Instead of the typical pork, chicken or shrimp ramen, he went with the pink, green and blue varieties.

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After submerging the blocks of noodle into their respective containers, they were carefully lowered into the vacuum chamber. Peter then subjected the noodles to many hours of negative pressure in the chamber. This removed all of the air from the ramen and upon release of the vacuum, it was replaced by colored stabilizing resin.

The next step in the stabilizing process was to wrap the ramen bricks in foil and bake them in an over for almost an hour at two hundred something degrees.

Mmmm. Delicious.

It was at this point that Peter decided to test his knife scale skills and use the resin ramen to fashion a carbohydrate infused handle. This involved pouring Total Boat epoxy resin around the ramen in a mold of some kind, which in this case was just a mixing container.

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After the resin fully cured, it had to be sliced up into pieces for each side of the handle. The pieces then were temporarily taped to the metal knife tang. Doing this let Peter simultaneously shape each side in the exact same way.

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Then the two sides were permanently affixed to the metal using, you guessed it, more resin! Finally, the finishing touches could begin! This involved cleaning up the knife with various grinding/sanding power tools and of course many levels of sandpaper to obtain the final shape and shine!