Glowblue noodles

Glowblue noodles, minus the chav, when cooked in reality and with professional food photography

A meal tailored to the finest appetites, and the most sensible pocketbooks.

— Gormaanda, the in-universe creator of this dish

Glowblue noodles are a blue Star Wars food that started as a fictional recipe, became a real recipe, and then showed up in live-action. The dish originated on the now-defunct Legends website HoloNet News in the article "Gormaanda's Culinary Corner: Glowblue Noodles & Chav", which was written by Pablo Hidalgo and illustrated by Joe Corroney.

Glowblue noodles returned in New Canon, first with a minor role in a novel and then as an actual recipe combined with an in-universe anecdote in a cookbook that blends IRL with IU. In 2022's Andor television series, glowblue noodles made it to the screen and were eaten from a takeout container.

Glowblue Noodles & Chav

Heat the oil in a flat pan over a fairly high heat and toss in the shadun and the dabaroo. Be aware that the natural phosphors in the dabaroo skin will cause the meal to glow blue during preparation and heating — hence the name! Fry for four to five minutes, stirring animatedly, until the blue has burned off from an intense cobalt shade to a more refined royal hue.

— Gormaanda definitely knows about stirring animatedly

Gormaanda with a plate of glowblue noodles, but what about the chav? She has two more hands!

The HoloNet News (HNN) website was published in the lead-up to Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones, which premiered in 2002, and set before the events of that movie. HNN was presented as an in-universe newsfeed, including faux advertisements for IU businesses and attributing its contents to characters. "Gormaanda's Culinary Corner: Glowblue Noodles & Chav" was framed as an installment of the award-winning chef Gormaanda's column Gormaanda's Culinary Corner in HNN's Volume 531, number 50, CoCo District Edition. Like a real-life recipe, it lists ingredients followed by the preparation and cooking steps, except they're fictional. The ingredients are a mix of Easter eggs from prior SW work, new things that remained unique to the article (or at least don't have further listed appearances/sources on wiki articles), and others that later returned within Legends.

Having both this wiki article and the "recipe" open for reference may help when reading this breakdown, which is ordered according to the cooking steps instead of the list of ingredients or prep work:

• Teltiar noodles: cooked in ionized water, with Gormaanda noting, "Most prefer a softened consistency while those with more robust jaws insist on a crunchy texture." These noodles returned in Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) as Teltier Noodles [sic]. The description text was: "A vegetable and noodle dish served lukewarm. The noodles are usually mushy and only slightly cooked." The shared in-game model had a soft shade of blue, unlike what's described in HNN of teltiar noodles after adding dabaroo. A "Friday Feature" on the SWG website started off, "Have you tasted the Teltier Noodles? I know a little place outside of Coronet that serves them with Corellian Ale and it really hits the spot..." The feature also provided some item stats for the in-game entree.
• Groundnut oil (one-off) is used to fry the following:
  • Shadun: cloves that are "peeled, de-thorned, crushed, and finely chopped" (one-off)
  • Dabaroo: quote above describes how dabaroo is the source of the dish's glowblue-ing, and The Complete SW Encyclopedia seemingly extrapolates a definition based upon it: "A heavy vegetable used in many gourmet dishes, its skin exuded natural phosphors during preparation, making any meal that contained dabaroo glow an unusual blue color."
  • Coneweres: peeled, sliced into "very fine dianogal [sic] slices" and the rock-nubs discarded (one-offs)
  • Celto: sliced "diagonally into thick chunks". The Holiday Special Gormaanda segment called for a sprig of Celto, then celto returned here as "1 bunch slim spring celto, trimmed", suggesting non-slim, non-spring varieties. Celto was in SWG as a Foraged Rare Component on Yavin IV with the description: "A small leafy green that is very flavorful. Used to enhance flavors in any dish."
  • Firebud: one is seeded and added (one-off)
  • Milkened tuber: peeled and seeded, with an instruction to quarter it crossways and needing to quarter it again "when you get to the seed-husk". The Complete SW Encyclopedia confirms it's a root vegetable and again extrapolates without adding anything new.
• Chav: the recipe gives no context for it, just that it's "steam-distilled" and apparently a liquid (going by that and the use of ml). "A mug of hot chav" was something Darial Anglethorn and Luke Skywalker had on a cold desert night in the original SW comic series. (Also: not that kind of chav.)
• Calarantrum seeds: sprinkled before serving, and that's it. Prior to this recipe, Gormaanda used "a small piece of Calaranthum root for a touch of piquancy" in her Bantha Surprise on The Holiday Special. Released several IRL years after this article, the IU Dex's Diner menu included a garto egg omelet with calarantrum root as an optional ingredient.

The HNN article mentions how trade disputes and changing borders "wreak havoc" on deliveries and costs of fresh ingredients. Gormaanda boasts that she has "discovered a recipe whose primary complement is entirely modular!", so it can be adapted based on availability and preferences. It makes a vegetarian dish if the cook doesn't add meat, and she mentions "sautéed nerf medallions" and "lean cooked gornt shank" as options. Nerf meat is a galactic dietary staple and is "some of the most delicious and expensive in the known galaxy"; the latter may be because nerfs were native to Alderaan. Gornnt meat "could go for long periods without spoiling, tasted good and had high nutritional value".

Before serving, add the noodles, the chav and sprinkle the seeds. Serve immediately — this quantity provides enough for three famished humanoids, but only you know the size of your dinner guests' tummies!

— Gormaanda concludes the recipe

Return of the Noodles

[...] I got up and shoved Solo into another table. Maybe I shoved a little too hard, because he collapsed the entire table and sent a plate of glowblue noodles and chav flying over a group of Pakiphantos. Do you know the Pakiphantos? Well, it seems that they are not a good species to anger.

— Hondo Ohnaka, spinning a story about an incident involving Han Solo, this food, and angry alien elephants (sorry: Pakiphantos)

In 2019, glowblue noodles and chav returned in the New Canon novel Pirate's Price. The pirate Hondo Ohnaka is telling a story about a time that he, Han Solo, and Chewbacca needed to create a distraction. Hondo put a little too much oomph into his shove and sent Han into a table, which collapsed it, which sent glowblue noodles and chav flying, which landed on some gang members... The rest of the incident has nothing to do with the noodles (or the chav), but they kick things off.

"Gormaanda's Glowblue Noodles" is one of the recipes in The Official Black Spire Outpost Cookbook, also from 2019. The in-world flavor text (in the voice of Strono "Cookie" Tuggs) is by Marc Sumerak and the recipe was created by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, who said it's one of her favorites in this book.

Tuggs was inspired by Chef Gormaanda and her holovids to become a cook himself and her glowblue noodles are his go-to. He writes that "they always taste as great as they look", with the blue hue OOU coming from blue butterfly pea tea bags, and "they're easy to modify for any type of diet" (remember, the original recipe was "entirely modular"). The OOU recipe is gluten-free and vegetarian—rice noodles instead of wheat, no meat but multiple dairy products: unsalted butter, heavy cream, grated parmesan cheese, and mozzarella pearls. It also includes salt, pepper, minced garlic, and cherry tomatoes. Monroe-Cassel posted a correction on her blog: "The recipe calls for a lichen tulle, but it's actually a parmesan crisp, the technique for which can be found in the recipe for Xixor Salad."

Takeout in a galaxy far, far away! Glorious glowblue noodles get unglamorously devoured at work.

The first episode of Andor shows a Pre-Mor Security Inspection officer eating a takeout carton of blue noodles at a workstation. The noodles aren't identified on screen, but two days later, Hidalgo responded to a tweet by linking his HNN article, to which easter egg-spotting fans went: "I knew it! They are glowblue noodles!" (I admit, I was one of them. — Immi Thrax (she/her))

Glowblue noodles may have been spotted by a cast member during filming— did any viewers catch these?

When Denise Gough, who plays Imperial security agent Dedra Meero, first shot on the Ferrix set, she was similarly impressed. "There was what looked like a sushi bar, and I looked in one of the bowls and there were blue noodles," she says. "In the next one, there was a skewer with some sort of strange animals on it. I thought, "Wow, nobody's ever going to see this. This is all done for us.'"

— Describing the level of detail on the sets