Hand Pulled Noodles (La Mian)
This humble bowl of broth and noodles took me only two days to prepare! It was good.
“It was good,” isn’t a particularly convincing phrase to encourage you to spend several days making a bowl of soup, I’m sure. This isn’t slow simmering time either, it was labor-intensive, hard on the back from standing for so long, time-consuming work that I could’ve spent doing many other things. I’m definitely not trying to convince you to make this. If anything, I’m trying to deter you, while simultaneously coaxing sympathy for myself. Basically, I just spent two days trying to practice hand pulling noodles and never even got the dough to the right consistency. It is but a small consolation that the entire English population of the Internet also seems confused by this matter.
After all that research and work, here’s what I know. La mian dough definitely consists of at least two ingredients: water and flour. That’s basically all I know for sure. The flour may or may not be pastry, cake, all purpose or bread flour or a blend of these. The recipe may also contain some or none of the following: salt, eggs, oil, baking soda, and an ingredient that may or may not translate to alum or lye; neither of which I really want to add to my food. The dough should either be sticky or smooth and should maybe be kneaded a lot to develop the gluten from the low or high protein flour and then allowed to rest a lot to relax the gluten. Probably a combination of these things several times.
Here’s what I did: combined 1 cup of warm water with enough all purpose flour to make a dough that didn’t stick to my hands and kneaded it for 20 minutes before getting fed up. Let it rest for an hour and then kneaded it for another 20 minutes. Then I decided to leave it overnight to see if it’d improve. It had risen slightly, had a different smell and was a bit smoother and easier to work with, but still pulled apart very easily.
So, I pulled out my pasta machine, not because I was going to use it to make the noodles — at first, anyway — but because I thought folding the dough over and over in the pasta machine would help develop the gluten and give it the right consistency. This was actually significantly more successful and might’ve expedited the whole kneading process and eventually arrived at a dough I would’ve been able to practice the hand pulling technique with, were it not for the already 40 minutes I’d wasted kneading and didn’t want to repeat. I ended up incorporating an additional cup of flour in the process because the dough was far too sticky for the pasta machine. I don’t know to what extent that affected the consistency of the dough either.
I decided, after trying to pull the noodles all of once and having them tear, that I had, in fact, accomplished at least something, and proceeded to roll out the dough in the machine. I ended up with roughly a pound of ramen-like noodles about 10 feet long. I cooked up a few ounces and savored a few bites in a homemade chicken stock, and gave the rest to my neighbors because I knew I’d never eat it all before they went bad. The noodles had a bit of a chewiness to them which was nice, but at this point nothing could really redeem the time invested.
So I still have no idea what is supposed to be in the dough and why I couldn’t get it to a state where it wouldn’t easily tear and am saddened that I did not get to practice the hand pulling technique. If you feel so inclined, watch this video to see how cool I wanted to be and failed miserably at.
Well I say Kudos for trying. Sometimes even us above average cooks (!!) trying something that becomes a frustrating stump. We feel failure, but I say good for you for trying. You can say you gave it your best shot and I think that is amazing.
Perhaps is you wore a medical mask like in the video it would help?
Wow, great job! Was it tiring?
Definitely. Even the most supple dough puts up enough resistance to make a half hour of kneading a bit tedious :)