How to Pull Off Thin Hand-Pulled Lamian Noodles | Serious Eats

hey guys my name is Tim I'm a professional cook and today we're gonna learn how to make hand-pulled noodles or la mia ramyun is thin pulled noodles they're not the wide flap noodles the bang-bang yen that you can get at a lot of noodle shops these are very thin and they're said to be one of the hardest noodles to make in the world now most recipes I found they suck where they fail is that you can't get this super stretchy extensible dough but I found a way to make them that doesn't suck you can actually use something that you might be able to find your pantry gluten is what forms when you combine water and wheat flour it's a protein matrix which basically means a network that's comprised of two proteins the first is glutenin and the other is glide and if you can imagine gluten in looks like this it's like a chain and it's bonded like that and whenever there's bonds that makes gluten strong and that's what gives gluten its elasticity Glide ins they're these little circles that are floating around and that matrix and they're not bonded to each other generally and they kind of move freely around glide ins contribute mostly to that extensibility that's the ability of a dough to stretch in a noodle dough we need a lot of extensibility repeated extensibility we need to be able to stretch it over and over but we also need just enough elasticity so that it just holds whenever you mix add oh it's gonna be elastic initially it's gonna fight back so you need to get it to relax there's three main ways the first is resting most people use this technique to say stretch out a pizza dough or to shape their bread they'll let it rest maybe two hours or overnight and then that time they can stretch it out that doesn't really work with these noodles because you can stretch it one time but you need to stretch it repeatedly and after that first time it just snaps right back the second method is over kneading you basically take a dough and you put it in the stand mixer and you need the out of it I found recipes where you throw a dough into a stand mixer for something like two hours and believe it or not it works but I'm not willing to put your stand mixer in jeopardy like that the third method is to use a door relaxer so a door relaxer is an ingredient that chemically breaks gluten bombs and you can stretch the dough after you use it the most traditional dough relaxer that's used in China is something called Punk Lee now Punk way is added to the dough and it turns it into silly putty basically and you can stretch it over and over before you go out and google it Poong Way is not available outside of China there are other dough relaxers you can use such as cysteine or sodium metabisulfite but there's no way in hell you'll find them at your local grocery store plus they kind of have some sketchy health effects if you ever unfortunately have the experience of finding a hair in your food I really don't recommend using cysteine because it's made processing hair fortunately I found an ingredient that works you might even have it already in your own pantry and it's nutritional yeast basically nutritional yeast is in active yeast it contains something called glutathione which is a natural dough relaxer you can add it directly to a dough you can get that repeatable extensibility and it works really fast so you don't have to let it rest you don't have to wait you can work right away that was way too much science so let's get to making some noodles let's make this so start with bread flour bread flour is super important for this recipe because it is high in gluten potential I've used cake flour AP flour I just found that bread flour works the best it gives the best chew the best texture and that hint of elasticity that we need for that structure second we've got the Nuge from now and I'm gonna refer to nutritional yeast as Newt so in addition to giving that extensibility the nooch is really great because it has that background umami savory flavor it's a little bit cheesy and it makes their noodles a little bit yellow sort of like ramen alkaline noodles which I thought was pretty cool salt because you need some flavor I'm gonna pulse this just to combine things just to get things going and now I'm gonna let the mixer run I'm gonna pour in water which is essential for forming gluten and a little bit of oil we're gonna let it go for like 30 seconds just until the dough forms and starts running around the blade that's pretty good it looks like dope I mean nothing special about it so I'm gonna start kneading and this kneading process is pretty specific to noodles most of the time when you need it's in a circular motion like this and that's to distribute the gluten network in a random way for bread dough's that's great for pizza that's great because it expands in all directions for us that's not so great we want it to be more or less linear so we can pull it into long noodles so I'm going to show you the kneading process here you basically want to roll it out and it's gonna be tearing a little bit like this initially a lot of that is the elasticity the initial gluten development there's all sorts of techniques you could use you could punch it down like this you can twist it like that where you can roll it whatever it works right now I know that the dough is too elastic because if I put my thumb down here it's gonna spring back a little bit too much I want to know that if I press way down into it it's just gonna stay there so you'll kind of find that this dough is a little stickier and you might be used to but the key to it is just to keep it moving if you let it on the counter it kind of behaves like this weird non-newtonian fluid that's just like sticks to the counter like if I just leave this for like 15 seconds it'll start to stick but if I move it it's no problem so this twisting action is the super traditional way that I've found in videos and in texts basically what you're doing at this point is after you've gotten it to stretch a little bit you want to align the gluten in a linear way so the best way to do that is first let's you stretch and then twist and you're twisting everything back so that when you go to stretch again it sort of matches everything together it's sort of like a coil this whole process probably takes between 10 and 15 minutes so when you have a counter space you generally want to find space enough for the length of your arms so that you have enough room to stretch pretty much like that at this point the dough is feels really nice so it's really really extensible there's no ripping no tearing and I feel pretty much zero resistance when I'm going from any poles which is great now at this point I'm going to show you how you can practice pulling actual noodles without flowering them because when you flower them that's sort of a point of no return alright so to practice start from the log about 15 15 inches about that just pull and then I like to grip it not too too hard on the ends and I just double it back into my left hand loop around my right hand and then pull and I go back again gather the dough in my left hand and then pull again and then you repeat the process pulling looping back until you have noodles you'll notice that the noodles they actually stick together and that's because you're not flowering at all so you're gonna end up with this kind of sticky situation but that's fine you can mash it all together roll it back up and stretch it again and it's totally fun and you can practice as much or as low as you want before you actually go for it with the flour all right so we're done practicing I'm gonna combine all this throw together I actually find that if you leave the dough alone for too long it's like over relaxed so when you work to go a little bit like this it gets it to that perfect balance of stretchiness and elasticity all right so I'm gonna flour the bench get this into an even log I'm gonna roll it in flour just like this so that it doesn't stick to the counter and then I'm gonna divide it in three starting with this log we're gonna roll it out and so it's a little bit thinner 15 inches give or take the focus of this is just to get it even I'm going to take my both ends and just like I was practicing I'm gonna pull double over I'm doing about five foals for love and you want it to look something like that surely even like a little bit thinner than udon a little bit thicker than ramen and these will go straight into water you cook you want to have everything ready to go that means you want your pot of water boiling you want whatever soup you're putting your noodles in to be ready because these have a very short shelf life I made a really simple but flavorful soup that's made from lamb neck bones and some pulled lamb and some spicy sauce yep they're super chewy they soak up that really really aromatic broth really well the land is nice and spicy but I can still taste the noodles and that Newt gives out really really nice like mommy savory backbone which complements the soup really nicely super good [Music]

Channel: Serious Eats

Views: 277,383

Rating: 4.9000349 out of 5

Keywords: Serious Eats, cooking, cooking techniques, food, eating, food science, how to cook, kitchen, lamian, hand-pulled noodles, noodles, homemade noodles, lamian noodles, dough relaxers, nutritional yeast, tim chin, noodle soup

Id: WmwRAnd-mQo

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020