If you’re a lover of Hong Kong cinema, you might have seen the action-comedy Mr. Nice Guy, starring Jackie Chan. In the film’s opening sequence, Jackie is on live television, sitting on a table covered in flour, stretching, twisting, and tearing a piece of dough to create fine noodles. This is a technique that the show host can refer to as alchemy. “When I first saw [that movie],” recalls Luke Rymarz, a software engineer and hand-pulled noodle fanatic located in San Jose, “I thought, “Oh, that’s cool, I love the special effects. This is cool. But then I realized hand-pulled noodles are something that was actually. Then I thought, “All right, now to find out how to accomplish this.”
Luke spent the following year testing and recording his experiments while tinkering unquestioningly with ways to devise a decent dish for the lamina. Lamian is a Chinese word meaning “pulled noodles,” specifically, it refers to the thin type popular in China. “At this time, which was a long time ago, 12-13 years ago, there was not much available on the internet in English or even any information on the subject. My experience is based on the small bits of information I could find from Google translate. It’s like making dough every time for many hours.”
Like Luke, I’ve also spent the last few years learning to make lamina. I first encountered noodles in a tiny hole-in-the-wall eatery in Montreal. A cook with a rail-thin body was throwing at, twisting, pulling, and generally squeezing the dough in a heap that ran the entire length of his physique. Within a few seconds, he created hundreds of strands of noodles after a few swift flicks and a lot of flair. He dumped the noodles into the boiling water in a cauldron and then reached for another piece of dough and repeated this pattern for the duration of my meal with no delays, pauses, or even a tiny glass of water. This is a true dough-slinger.
Of course, the guy pulled off that look of noodles quickly and naturally. There’s no way to make it look like that. Indeed, I will bet that anyone who has ever attempted making thin pulled lapin in the kitchen without prior knowledge will inform you that it’s complicated. Videos and recipes are on the internet, but there’s a lot of contradicting information, much of which leads to an unforgiving black hole brimming with Reddit neckbeards, angry YouTube users, and prettier-than-thou thou Chowhound geeks.
The art of pulling noodles is one I’ve never thought of doing. The method seemed inaccessible or even accessible to masters of an age-old and mysterious craft, certainly not suitable for cooks at home. However, as fate was on my side while working on my final test kitchen with Sasha many years back, I was tasked with researching pulling noodles of their varieties. After eating every pulled noodle Boston offered, I started developing recipes. Lamian was right up there with them. However, after more than 50 trials, I didn’t have an efficient recipe. Based on other people’s work, like Luke, My method was inconsistent, full of contradictions, and difficult to duplicate. The recipe was never to see the light of day.
How Hand-Pulled Noodles Are Typically Made
The most renowned Mecca of noodles pulled is Lanzhou, the capital city in the Chinese province of Gansu Province. It is also the home for Lanzhou noodles made of beef, an iconic dish that has inspired the creation of more than 35,000 noodles shops in China. You could even attend one of the few noodles-pulling classes, with courses lasting from a few weeks to several years. In these schools, students are taught the fundamentals of making lamina by hand, from mixing dough and kneading to pushing and pulling. To be certified, they must pass a final test, which takes about 20 minutes, to create nine kinds of noodles in different shapes and sizes.
The process is easy. The ingredients are water, wheat flour, salt, and occasionally an additive are mixed and then kneaded until a soft dough is formed. The kneading process can take between 15 and more than an hour, based on the formula used and the individual who performs it. This dough will be stretched out, duplicated, twisted, stretched, and doubled again. The procedure is repeated until the dough is extended to an arm’s length. After that, the dough gets wrapped in oil or flour before being pulled into strands of acceptable strings. The secret to success is repeatable extensibility – the ability to stretch dough repeatedly without breaking or tearing. As we’ll discover, this does not conform to many commonly known gluten rules.
Some additives, such as fat or alkalis, as well as other ingredients, are included in the dough to enhance its texture and aid in flexibility. The most well-known and popular additive is a flimsy powder referred to as penghui that comes from a desert plant known as penghuicao (halogeton). The plant is then roasted, processed using potassium carbonate, and packaged into a commercial powder. Small amounts of penguins are combined with flour, resulting in a pastry with perfect flexibility and chew. A source suggests that adding penguin changes the dough into a putty consistency and allows the cook to expand the dough without limit.
The issue? If you or someone you know is from China, Penghui can be challenging to find. Since I wasn’t at ease with asking people to import an unreliable white powder from across the world, I had to discover other methods to build that essential extendibility that can be repeated.
Gluten’s Role in Dough: Beyond the Basics
To fully comprehend my journey through noodles, I need to understand some basics about dough, particularly gluten. If you’ve ever worked with dough at any point in your lifetime, then you’re probably aware of gluten. Gluten is the protein matrix (basically a molecular web) formed after wheat flour has been combined with water. Gluten is the ingredient that makes wheat flour dough. Has its shape and properties str: etch, texture sna,p, sticky, and flow.
If you’ve looked a bit further, you’ll know that gluten comprises two proteins: glutenin and gliadin. Glutenin’s larger molecules are responsible for the toughness and elasticity of dough. If you look at them carefully enough, you’ll find they’re linear, kinked, and chain-like. They also contain numerous sites to bond with the other glutenin proteins.
Less gliadin molecules, in contrast, are believed to be a factor in the extensibility of dough. They are round (or “globular”), have less surface area, and cannot bond with other molecules.
The two proteins make dough viscoelastic, which means it can simultaneously).
Before we go any further, let’s define extensibility and elasticity. Both are essential to understanding noodle pulling.
