DIY Chinese-style HAND PULLED NOODLES -- failures included

[Music] greetings my beautiful lovelies it's emmy welcome back today i'm going to be attempting to make something that i have been thinking about for a long long time and his hand pulled noodles now i've been thinking about this since i was a kid really and my mother's father my grandfather used to make noodles but he would use this stuff and this is called consue and this is an alkaline water and i always wondered what this was for is this interesting what what what is he doing my mom said well he's using that for making his noodles they give it a particular texture and a particular flavor and i remember always just being fascinated by that whole process now that recipe has since been lost i asked my mother i asked my aunt for the recipe for my grandfather's noodles and we have not been able to find them so ever since then i've been really inspired to make hand-pulled noodles now i've looked and looked and looked at different recipes and all of them seemed to be a little bit different they seem to be more or less complicated some say to use more water some say use less water some say you have to use this particular type of flower some use consue some do not some use some other alkaline waters and so i never found a recipe that i could stand by but recently i just found a recipe by a channel called my name is andong and he has a recipe that he claims is foolproof now i believe he spent some time in china and he's researched this meticulously and that's why i am convinced to do his recipe because he breaks down the science of it which i love very much in the elton brown kind of vein of researching what exactly is happening food science-wise that allows us to take this noodle and to pull it at these beautiful stretchy lengths if you've never seen a hand-pulled noodle video it's absolutely mesmerizing and incredible they take this dough and stretch it and work it for quite a while they twist it and pull it and stretch it and then they're able to do this wonderful kind of double math thing where they take the single rope double it into two double into four double and it's just really mesmerizing by the end they have these beautiful strands of noodles kind of similar to my dragon spirit video if you haven't seen that i was very pleased with that video because it actually worked and that doubling process i did in that video i did that into the many thousands and uh that was really satisfying but this time we're not going to go that far we're just going to get ourselves just so we get some nice beautiful strands so when you see the masters actually making the dough they can do it in a relative short time they mix the water they mix salt they mix a little bit of consue and the flour together and they meet it really really methodically but there's a very very specific technique then they start twisting and pulling twisting and pulling and they can get a batch done in about 15 to 20 minutes that's a master with master technique the technique i'm going to be using today actually uses time to develop those strands of gluten rather than kneading so gluten is the protein that is found inside of flour and different flours have different gluten contents so cake flour for example has about five percent gluten and we want less gluten because we want a nice tender cake bread flour on the other hand has a higher gluten content more closer to about 12 or 13 percent we want more gluten because we like a nice chewy bread all purpose flour has 11.7 percent which is a little bit less than the bread flour so it has a little less gluten so a little less chew but it's all purpose so we can use it for cakes and for making breads of course these percentages are based on us flowers so wherever you live what you need to do is look at the protein content of your flour and figure out what the percentage is and that is the best way to figure out kind of an equivalent because for example this flour which i've been holding onto for quite a while i bought in the chinese market and this is high gluten flour so high gluten flour makes me think oh this must be in the range of bread flour here in the us that would be about 12 or 13 but in actuality this contains 11 grams per 100 grams of protein so that is more like all-purpose flour so very interesting and this is another chinese flour and this is low gluten wheat flour and if you look at the percentage of here and this has 8 grams per kilogram so this is about eight percent so this is still actually higher than cake flour but definitely lower than say ap flour but that's the best way to figure out what kind of gluten content just look at the protein content rather than the name of the flower because that can be misleading because different flowers different countries right okay for different countries different flowers so i decided to make two different batches since i had the chinese wheat flour i made a batch with that 500 grams of flour to 5 grams of salt and 250 grams of water so then i just mix this all up until it formed a shaggy dough and just make sure you get all the dry pieces combined into a ball and then place it into a bowl and cover it well with some plastic wrap and just let it sit so this process of allowing the dough to rest for a long period of time is called auto lice or auto lease i've heard both pronunciations and i'm not sure which one's correct so i'll probably use them interchangeably so what happens is all the water is being absorbed into the flower which activates enzymes which then activate the proteins to start forming gluten so rather than spending a lot of time needing to develop the gluten the gluten strands well the protein is kind of like into gluten strands we're allowing time to do that so we don't have to be a master in terms of combining the water and flour and salt together with a special kneading process we're just using thyme so i did this last night and it has been sitting here for about 11 hours this is the chinese dough and this one right here is the all-purpose american dough so i'm going to hopefully be able to knead both of these and then taste them to see if there's any kind of difference i suspect there won't be too much of a difference because the protein content was pretty similar although when i did mix the dough i did find that the chinese dough was stiffer and a little bit drier even though i used the same exact amount of water so let's go ahead and start pulling this dough i'm so excited so here's the dough that was made with the chinese flour and because i have the consue and because it reminds me of my grandfather i'm going to go ahead and add it to the dough although andong says it's not necessary andong also found this really great paper that was written up about the reason why we add salt and alkalized water to our noodle recipe and it was found that the salt helped with the elasticity of the dough and that the consue or the alkaline actually firmed up the gluten strand so it was more about texture which totally coincides with what my mother my grandfather said about the use of this this was to create a firmer kind of crunchier noodle and also gave it a particular kind of flavor 3.5 grams of consue and i'm just putting it on my dough and we're just gonna work that in and we're not supposed to add that beforehand it doesn't feel very stretchy at this point at all it's not really being very stretchy it's kind of tearing so this process we're supposed to be aligning the glute and kind of stretching it and lining it up into a noodley shape very stiff dough grip granted in and long's video he used all-purpose flour and in germany that was about 11 which is the same almost as the u.s which is 11.7 according to the chinese package this is just 11 2 so this should be the same oops alrighty so i'm going to give this dough a little rest it seems to not want to be stretchy right at the moment and i want to check out the ap version the 3.5 grams of consue and just work that in there as well consue definitely has a smell to it almost like a sulfurous smell i also used it in my moon cake recipe which if you haven't seen should definitely check out because i was very very happy with the results of that video all right i'm going to use the whole amount and see if i can get this to stretch [Music] they sure make it easy looking in the videos yes this one is much red it wants to tear too but it wants to stretch a little bit more readily than the other dough so stretch it fold it in half and with each pull it seems to be getting more elastic then it breaks okay my lovelies i am back and it has been about an hour that i've been working both of these bowls of dough trying to get my dough to the pulling consistency but it still wants to go back i put five grams of salt i wonder if kosher salt was not the salt i should have used should i use sea salt there's different kind of salt i don't know but i'm definitely not getting the elasticity so i'm going to put these doughs aside and i'm going to try another recipe by peter loy now his recipe uses cake flour and i really really want hampled noodles i'm feeling a little under the weather i'm just want some noodles and noodle soup so let's try his recipe i almost forgot to say that i'll put links down below to all the videos that i mentioned in this video 250 grams of cake flour one teaspoon of salt next we're going to add water and peter does not specify how much water exactly he uses he uses alkaline water and i'm using one gram of consue to about 150 milliliters of water that's an estimation because like i said he doesn't say exactly how much water to add he says just until it makes a dough so let's just try this shall we here we go i'm just adding a little at a time and he does make a point to say not to add too much water because we can't of course take the water out okay so this is shaggy and shreddy but i think it is forming a dough so i'm gonna stop on the water there and i'm gonna head and put this in the mixer and peter needs this for a very long time in the mixer he says for two hours which seems insane but let's go ahead and try it alrighty my lovelies i am back it has been two hours i've let the dough mix for a full two hours and it did take the entire amount i was hoping it would take less time because i was using a relatively small piece of dough but no two hours it was so after i took it out of the mixer i also added a half teaspoon of additional salt because in andong's piece he said that salt was very important for elasticity and i use kosher salt and kosher salt tends to be less salty than regular table salt and since peter didn't specify what type of salt he used also in andong's recipe he didn't specify what type of salt he used but i was hoping because i was weighing it out it would be more accurate but perhaps not and i also added additional water to this dough as well in peter's recipe his dough was very sticky and when he was kneading it i noticed that kind of stick to the surface of the table when you wrap it in the plastic wrap it does feel a little bit sticky but as you're working it and stretching it it's not sticky at all and this is the consistency of the dough no one ever shows you close up what the dough consistency looks like but this is what it looks like very stretchy and in baking they sometimes do this kind of window pane test to test to see if you have enough gluten and it's definitely doing that you can see through it look how thin it is so this dough is much more supple and willing to stretch than my other two doughs so i'm hoping i can get a batch of noodles out of this so after i took this out of the mixer i've been stretching it aligning the gluten and doing this taking the dough stretching it out kind of dropping it and whipping it down and then rotating it to get it to kind of spin and what we're doing here and that is theatrical but there is a purpose we are aligning and getting the gluten protein stretched enough so that we can pull this to make noodles so stretch snap it down snap it down you can bang on the table if you want it does make a lot of noise and then rotate one arm forward and one arm back and you'll get that twist i was trying to flick it before and that's really not that effective you just have to turn your arms so and also you want to adjust the dough there will be some thick parts and some thin parts and you kind of want to just squeeze it to kind of make that even so whip it down whip it down whip it down and then pull and then rotate again whipping it down pull pull pull spin this is a 250 gram batch this is a relatively small batch enough for a couple people maybe but much easier to manage than a full kilogram is what peter shows in his video but i think that's what they do in those kind of master noodle maker videos where they're wielding giant pieces of dough and it's strenuous let me tell you just when i was working the 500 gram pieces of dough yeah i think those ones were just also too elastic too okay so i think we're getting close so we've got some more cake flour here and i'm gonna flour the surface now this is supposed to prevent the noodles from sticking so we're going to roll this out into a log as long as that we can manage and he said that your end should be a little bit fatter than the middle and we're gonna do is pull it and then rotate it in and then stretch it pull it and each time we're gonna double the amount of noodles so right now i've got one fat noodle i'm gonna pull it bring it in stretch it now i've got two make sure i have enough flour pull it stretch it over pull it now i've got four pull it pull it in small increments one two one two grab it hold this here pull these loops now i've got eight one two okay this is happening stop talking eight get some more flour oh some of these noodles are fat this is not easy i think i'm at 16 now 32. oh that one broke i'm getting noodles 64. that's enough for me i did it i have ample doodle today i'm so pleased okay so now what we're gonna do is take our noodles plunge these into standing standby water just added a little bit of spinach to that we finally did it i can't believe it now it's going to fish our noodles out now these noodles are not exactly pretty i've got some fatties here and i've got some thin ones but you know what this is my first time ever making hand pulled noodles and i am so excited that i actually got noodles i'm okay with this so we're gonna put this here i'm so happy i actually got noodles i've got some homemade chicken broth here ladle that in here oh my gosh that's exactly what i need oh it smells so good and i like to add white pepper too lots of white pepper a healthy dose of green onions right on top that's it righty let's go ahead and taste our noodles you're so excited it smells so good noodles finally thank you peter thank you andong all right here we go look that looks beautiful here we go eat the lucky ones those are delicious look at that big fat one right there they've got a bit of a bite to them but they're not that chewy and i'm not sure if that has to do with the flour ratio but the cake flour definitely works better for me than the all-purpose flour or the chinese high gluten flour maybe i have to mess with the salt ratio maybe i should try a table salt next time rather than the kosher salt i think i'll do that i like my noodles to be a little bit chewier maybe i should have cooked these a little less oh that broth is so good the amount of salt is delicious it's tasty i have a feeling that kosher salt was not the way to go for this recipe i think next time i'll try using table salt and said and see if that makes a difference and still use the high gluten chinese flour or the all-purpose flour because these are not as chewy although they do have a nice bite and i suspect that has to do with the consue or the alkaline water that alkaline water also gives it a very kind of professional tasting noodle taste alrighty thank you guys so much for watching i hope you guys enjoyed that one i hope you guys learned something please share this video with your friends follow me on social media like this video subscribe and i shall see you in the next one take care bye my stomach's like what is that that's food that's delicious [Music] yummy

Channel: emmymade

Views: 656,089

Keywords: hand pulled, noodles, Chinese, recipe, make, how to, DIY, China, pasta, dough, stretch, pull, emmy, emmymade, emmymadeinjapan, eat, soup

Id: UWer9hR3OSE

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019