Yesterday, I followed this recipe for Chicken Yakisoba noodles.

I cooked my noodles on a medium high heat for 6 minutes as the packet said. I put them in the pan with the chicken and veg, then adding the sauce and thoroughly tossing it to cover with sauce.

The resulting meal was... Bland as fuck. It felt like the noodles didnt hang on to the sauce at all somehow?

I have a yakisoba pot noodle, and that comes out with such a strong a punchy flavor! I'm using fine egg noodles.

This is why I rarely try noodle recipes, I seem to fuck them all up! I sometimes pull it off, which gives me hope, but I can never figure out where I go right!

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[–] 2 points 19 hours ago*

If your food is bland: season it. That's it, that's the solution.

Most recipes either write "season to taste" or leave even that out completely, because it's just such an automatic part for every experienced cook.

I don't know if there's a good guide to seasoning out there, probably.

But apart from that, it's not too hard to build your own knowledge. Just go to the grocery store spice section, and buy a bunch of the generic grocery store brand spices (those will be the spices most used in your region) and just start putting them on your food.

My personal suggestion:

Salt, salt, saaaaalt (/Soy sauce). Put some salt in the water that you cook your noodles with. Put some salt in your sauce. Put some salt over the final mix. Do all this slowly, only a bit of salt at a time, and mix and taste each time. Repeat until it tastes good. It's almost always salt missing if it's too bland. It matters, too, at which point you add the salt, if you put salt into the noodle water, the noodles will already absorb some of it. That's different than putting it on top of the noodles later.

Pepper(/chili). Almost all dishes want some of this, even if you don't like spicy food. Even if you only put a bit on it where the result doesn't register as "spicy", it still makes a lot of difference.

With all the other spices you'll just have to experiment with, see what you like.

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