Lanzhou Hand Pulled Noodles (拉面)
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- Authentic Lanzhou Lamian, alkaline hand pulled noodles: The Mount Everest of Chinese cooking.
Teaching you how to make Lanzhou-style Lamian is a bit awkward. See… it’s less of a recipe, and more of a skill. It’d be like teaching you a language - I can introduce the stuff you need to know, but you won’t be fluent after your first class. And that’s ok.
As such, there’s been a relative dearth of good information out there in Chinese on this noodle, let alone in English. So we felt like this would be a good video to clear the air a bit.
Written recipe is over here on /r/cooking - apologies for the delay, there was some... feature creep:
/ a_definitiveish_guide_...
-250g Pizza flour
-120g Ice Water mixed with ½ tsp salt
-Any dense oil for rubbing. Olive would work great. We used about ~3 tbsp through the whole process
-10g water mixed with 2g Penghui
Homemade Penghui: 100g salt, 90g sodium carbonate, 8g sodium triphosphate, 2.5g (3/4tsp) sodium metabisulfite.
Remember the fundamental kneading technique - the ‘making the abacus string’: Press everything flat by first punching it down with all your force, then twisting and doing the ‘hand cross’ flattening motion. Then curl up the dough about an inch or so, move down the dough, and repeat that once or twice (depending on the size of your dough) to get a long string. The fold that in half, and optionally fold again if it’s still a little too long. Repeat.
Besides that, Lamian is simply a matter of:
- Do the cat claw to incorporate the flour. Quick knead
- Optional but recommended rest
- Make your abacus string. This will likely take 30-40 minutes and suck
- Add the Penghui. Do either the 3fold2box technique or the abacus string, up to you
- Comb your gluten. Do the twist if you want to look cool and impress your friends. Do the folding if you want to follow us. 5-6 folds is good to pull
- Pull the noodles. Five times for ‘normal thin’, six for ‘hair thin’
So easy lah
If you’re curious about where to buy some of this stuff…
The Penghui is available through agents, but you need to buy a stupid amount of it: www.chinahao.c...
The sodium triphosphate: www.amazon.com...
The sodium metabisulfite: www.amazon.com...
And if you don’t feel like pounding salt, some powdered sodium chloride: www.amazon.com...
As always, huge thank you to Trevor James a.k.a. the Food Ranger for continuing to allow us to raid his backlog for b-roll haha. Super nice of him, if you'd like to see the full video of him eating noodles in Xi'an (and it's a good one), definitely check it out:
• EXTREME Hand Pulled No...
Also a big thank you to “the Perfect Loaf” for their footage of the stretch and fold technique. Hope to see more content from them :)
• Stretch and Folds Duri...
And the video of the conical screw mixer is over here. Super satisfying thing to watch lol. As an aside, if any budding entrepreneurs out there want to manufacture their own penghui… I think the 5L version of this would get the job done. I think this is precisely the type of thing our homemade Penghui was missing:
• Mixing Dry Powders - C...
And lastly, the slow motion pizza toss is here. I would implore you to check out his other videos, especially the squirrel videos. Some old school RUclips right there:
• Pizza Toss Slow Mo
And check out our Patreon if you'd like to support the project!
/ chinesecookingdemystified
Outro Music: คิดถึงคุณจัง by ธานินทร์ อินทรเทพ
Found via My Analog Journal (great channel): • Live Stream: Favourite...
EDIT: So after some of these comments, I think the best bet would be to use either kosher or pickling salt, first baked in an oven at ~150C for an hour in order to remove any possible moisture (ht @UCUCDDkCcUfwmJjNZRvXr2iw). Once that's cooled down, toss it in a food processor to get into a fine powder (ht NolanSyKinsley), then add in and do the same to grind/mix the other ingredients SANS the sodiium metabisulfite. Then add the Sodium Metabisulfite and mix it gently with a chopstick. While I still think that with this small quantity of sodium metabisulfite here it shouldn''t present any sort problem... there *is* an inhalation risk (especially over long periods of time) so to be extra safe do the next step outside (ht Jeffrey Gulan). Transfer from the food processor to a fine mesh sieve, then sift it again... then toss in the bag with the desiccants.
Hey guys, a few notes:
1. Making alkaline lamian is either (1) a restaurant thing that people apprentice/go to school for or (2) a project for the true obsessives. Before you dive in, know what you’re getting yourself into. For most recipes, if something doesn’t work for you on the first go, you might think to yourself “hmm… this recipe’s meh, let me try a different one”. For these noodles, it’d almost certainly be because your technique is off. DO NOT DREAM ABOUT SUCCESSFULLY MAKING THESE ONE YOUR FIRST GO
2. So for people that’re, like, more normal than us… we’d suggest waiting until next week’s video -the chenmian - to hop in. Hell, even if you’re down for the project, you might want to wait to try the easier non-alkaline version first. I understand that it might’ve made some sense for these two videos to’ve been reversed (easier first, harder later), but we felt we just *couldn’t* share the homestyle chenmian without getting this out of the way at first. Because I mean… all those fancy movements that people see at the lamian shops, *that’s* what people are super curious about, yeah?
3. When you’re practicing these, you might get to a place where you just can’t pull them. Maybe you can only get ~3 pulls or something. It’s ok, you can still eat dinner. Flatten the dough, pass it through a pasta maker once or twice. Then cut it into noodles using the pasta maker. The noodles will still be firm and delicious! You just have to be a bit more careful when cooking, as they can break easily in the cooking process.
4. So to get things out of the way, I’m sure some of you might be curious if we’ve seen the recent SeriousEats article by Tim Chin on the subject. In short… yes. See, this video’s been simmering on the backburner for a while (we started learning/testing about two years ago, and testing started in earnest last October)… so when the SE article came out it hit us like a ton of bricks. And Tim actually touched on some of the stuff I was thinking about touching on in the video (extensibility! dough conditioners! disulfite bonds!), so it really threw trying to get this out there into overdrive.
5. Tim’s recipe, however, brings up what we consider to be a fundamental misunderstanding in the anglosphere about the *purpose* of the alkaline in these noodles. See, Tim’s noodles are non-alkaline. There’s this idea out there that somehow alkaline solutions might *help* the dough pull, when the reality is the exact opposite. Making your dough alkaline makes noodles much harder to pull, which’s why the lamian shops have all those… fancy movements. In a lot of ways, making a Lanzhou Beef Noodle soup with non-alkaline noodles would sort of be like making Japanese ramen with spaghetti: blasphemous, but probably still delicious.
6. This being the internet and all though, I feel the need to contextualize the previous note. We do definitely hold very strong opinions on this subject, but I want to say that even if we're correct (which I believe we are haha), simply researching this topic can be very challenging - even delving into Chinese language sources. This took a lot of research. Years worth. So when I'm giving a critique, it's not a value judgement. Tim is an incredibly smart dude. His noodles are probably very tasty. It's simply a reflection of what we've learned.
7. At it’s core, the home-style non-alkaline pulled noodles are pretty easy. Use the same sort of pizza flour, make some abacus string, do a couple long rests, cut them into noodles, pull individually. Works swimmingly - not exactly ‘quick and easy’ but it’s very realistic in a home setting. Less impressive looking though, for sure. And again, we’ll cover that next week.
8. Speaking of flour though, there *is* one difference between the pizza flour and the lamian flour: the former is soft wheat, the latter is hard wheat. Not 100% the difference that makes in the end, but there were some subtle differences when working with the dough. First, pizza flour is actually easier to knead - it seems to soften faster. But then after applying the penghui, pizza flour has this sort of tendency to ‘sag’. It works, for sure. I’d call it a direct sub. But something tells me that if you gave some pizza flour to a chef that’s worked for years in a lamian shop, they’d probably complain about it the whole time lol
9. For those of you out there that’re a bit hesitant to toss some random white powders in your food… feel free to do your own research too! Both Sodium Triphosphate and Sodium Metabisulfite are common (GRAS) food additives. Hell, the former’s often pumped into meat at the supermarket in order to allow it to retain moisture better/look plumper. Interestingly, the old Lanzhou university’s Penghui mix isn’t the only name in the game… and while some contain the reducer (i.e. the Sodium Metabisulfite) basically *all* of them have some sort of emulsifier. Why? No clue.
10. Speaking of emulsifiers - oil. REMEMBER TO KEEP THINGS OILED AT ALL TIME. Some of it will go into the dough, and that’s good! We ended up measuring how much oil we used during this whole process, and the total about is a shade under ~3 tbsp.
11. Oh, and btw… we tried to make solutions out of the sodium metabisulfite/sodium triphosphate. I felt like it might make sense to just have a bottle of sulfite-phosphate-water in the fridge… then when you need it, mix it with saline + (pure sodium carbonate) Kan Sui. Maybe you’d have better luck, but after three different tries of that/slight variations of that theme… that didn’t work for us.
12. So one thing you can do is, if you have some older dough or some failed noodles... you can add some more penghui and bring it back to life. We actually filmed that process, but I didn't have time to get to it in the video. Basically, you just apply touch of the Penghui using the abacus string method, then test the gluten & see if it's good to pull.
13. Last thing - one nuts and bolts filming-related thing that I'm not sure if anyone cares about/picked up on. You might have noticed that the lamian in the intro were a bit uneven. Here's the story. At our new apartment, every time we film we need to finish by ~1am, else the light gets too harsh outside. Ok. Now, Lamian usually get tossed straight into the pot right after pulling... so after pulling the noodles in the video, the shotclock was ticking. We needed to sort the thumbnail, then go to the balcony and get the intro done. But Steph thought we were doing the shot from note #12 right after the thumbnail, so I immediately reacted in horror when she brought the noodles back to the table, started kneading them back together and sprinkling on some Penghui. It wouldn't be the end of the world (though we were *very* happy with the six-pulls batch that was on camera) because we *could* do the process in note #12... except it was like 12:55 and we were then racing against the clock. It wasn't enough time to do a good job with it, so it ended up being a question of (1) do we want slightly uneven noodles in the intro (2) do we want to film the intro either inside or (3) do we want to film again the next day? We chose option #1. You can check out some of the stills else in the video... I promise we aren't lying to you :)
I’m sure we’ll add some more notes here later!
Amazing! One of my favorites!! Thank you!
Recommend Gan Qie Niu Rou Recipe
oltec31 Yeah re the water I saw that too. Wasn't sure how much time reaction would take though, because we do mix the penghui in with water. If the mixing time would potentially be a variable, what do you think the best way to mix in the sodium metabisulfite would be?
Would boiling the water a few times to remove dissolved oxygen limit that factor?
Also, what about the technique for ramenizing spaghetti by cooking in baking soda water? What if you cooked non-alkaline handpulled noodles in water with sodium carbonate to get some of that qq but with less difficulty stretching? Or does incorporating it into the dough make a big difference?
oltec31 could it be possible that this is mixture is to make a buffered solution at a certain ph. Just enough to make the gluten stretchy but not denature it? Sorry it’s been a while since I did chemistry
Chinese Cooking Remystified.
best comment i've seen this year. exactly how I feel whenever I watch this channel lol
Hahahahaha !!! That’s so hilarious…so true
Can I get a round of applause for Steph and Chris (mostly Steph) for all the research and elbow grease that went into this video? That Nike Sloth t-shirt alone deserves a friggin' award. (Steph again.)
Just kidding, Chris. We love you both, obviously.
lol nah you're right on the money... Steph is 100% the star of the show here.
I (Chris) had one job in this video - make the homemade penghui - and I couldn't quite get the job done :)
I love the fact that you do everything you can to make all of your recipes accessible to those of us in the west. The effort is much appreciated!
“Aggressively unavailable”- the perfect words😂 I’m gonna use that
Wine industry professional here. Sodium metabisulfite is used primarily for cleaning in the wine industry. If it is used. Potassium metabisulfite (KMBS) is what is more commonly used. This is because it helps stabilize the main acid present in wine, in addition to providing anti-microbial activity and helping keep the oxidation/reduction sliding scale more centered.
In wine tartaric acid is present in two forms, the majority of which is as it's salt potassium bitartrate (Cream of tartar) which is less soluble in wine than its pure acid. Using KMBS helps stabilize the Cream of tartar in solution and chelate the insoluble salts to drop out of solution. During Cold stabilization an excess of cream of tartar is added to white wines and it is chilled to below freezing so that the acid doesn't drop out of solution after bottling and leave undesirable tartrates in bottle.
To the best of my knowledge NaMBS is used more as a cleaning agent, both in brewing and in wine making, mostly because it's cheaper, than it's potassium friend. =D
Seems like I could have used this video when I tried and failed miserably at hand pulled noodle literally today
Still looking at this recipe after making it every time❤
I'm relieved that someone else has to go through hell of finding out everything about the chemistry of noodles.
I passed by a Lanzhou noodle shop while watching this video on my way to the Chinese grocery store. It's like they were reading my mind and saying, "Just eat here instead..." 😂
Not too many comments yet so I thought I’d drop one since you guys might see it! Thanks a million for the research into this archaic topic; I feel like the art of lamien is a closely guarded secret! Truly demystified!
Also I always wonder: do more calories go into making lamien than the flour provides? It’s just a high effort noodle!!
Once again... thanks for the years of research!
It definitely absorbs some oil during kneading, so I guess I'll say it is higher in calories, but not so much.
How different is lamian flour from dumpling flour? They look to have a similar protein content, but is the fineness of the milling different? Also, what's the brand for the lamian flour you show? Does it retail internationally?
Thanks for taking on this challenge! I lived in NW China for a while (mostly Xining/Yinchuan) and I've been telling people for years that 牛肉拉面 (learned that you shouldn't call 'em Lanzhou Lamian in front of people in Xining unless you want to have an argument!) are not only the best soup noodle, but the OG soup noodle!
That brand of flour doesn't retail internationally unfortunately. It is a touch more satisfying to work with than pizza flour, but they're close enough that I'd call them direct subs. If you're still China-based, the name's 塞北雪 and I can definitely shoot Taobao link. It's also used for dumplings as well. Would have to double-check re the fineness of that bog standard supermarket dumpling flour... it's been a while since I've worked with it :) That said, if you lived in Xining, hell, you might've used this one!
And yeah, you're totally correct on the 牛肉面. We chose not to call it that in this video because, well, we didn't make the beef soup haha
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Thanks! No longer in China-- have expatriated to yet another country (I'm an American living in the UK) and am based in Manchester. But we have really high quality, well-stocked Asian grocers here, though, so thought it would be worth asking about.
(Also makes total sense about the 牛肉面 bit. Would still love to see y'all take on the broth though, as I'm sure it'd be a great recipe as well. I'm a huge fan of your vids as they definitely help me get the dishes I loved in China when the cravings ht!)
despite having never eaten noodles this video was great ',)
you said enough strong sulfuric acid where you made homemade penghui powder. you kneaded dough with penghui and stank of a strong egg smell. and how long did it take until the dough started to pull?
Do you have any links to buy lamian noodles that ships worldwide, I don't have any chances at succeeding in making these noodles. But I still atleast want trying cooking with them. It's almost impossible to get correct ingredients where I live (small town in Europe, Poland).
what about nutritional yeast? i've heard that does the job nicely...
Amazing video as always
I think you may need a more accurate scale to get this recipe right, measuring out a specific 2.5 grams on a scale that only does 1/10th gram increments usually leads to inaccuracies. Also you used 1.25% sodium metabisulfite instead of 1%, it should have been 2 grams instead of 2.5 according the the original ratios. I would probably also just use a food processor, it can powder salt very quickly and evenly mix all the ingredients super well super fast.
Yeah, in our tests we found that we had a bit more success *slightly* upping the quantity of reducer. For the sodium metabisulfite specifically I actually double-checked it with volume measurement (which I would also suggest). A food processor is also potentially a good idea... we just don't own one :)
做拉面真的是体力活
腹肌都练出来了...
If you are going to dissolve the penghui anyway, why don’t add those chemicals into water directly with the correct percentage?
Tried that, didn’t work. Sodium Metabisulfite quickly oxidizes with water, which is likely (but not necessarily) the conceit.
Staying glued to this. Great links by the way. I ended up buy some blue bag penghui on ali express, but was told by someone else, when they have tried to order penghui from Ali , it never comes and they have to get the order refunded, etc. Has anyone in the states successfully ordered Penghui and had it arrive in the states? I looked at the China Hao link, but saw many not so great reviews on items never arriving . I am wondering if there are restrictions shipping it to the states. Anyone have any successful experiences acquiring penghui via the internet?
I bought penghui on that site, it never arrived
很久没吃
Dude... oh hell no, it’s too much work. I’ll pay for mine.
PIZZA FLOUR 🍕
🍕 = 🔑
Husband?? Congrats Steph and Chris!!
haha we got engaged back in December. we were gunna do some sort of relaxed dinner/ceremony-ish thing with friends & family... but COVID-19 got in the way. We had to rush the legal bit... so yeah :) It's been a *long* time coming anyhow lol
Congratulations guys on your engagement! I hope you spend a quality time together. 😉
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Congrats!
@@ChineseCookingDemystified I've been following you for forever! Congrats!!
Congrats guys!
Italy 🤝 China --> taking gluten THAT seriously
not mentioning the other things
@@PixelBytesPixelArtist oof
@@PixelBytesPixelArtist oof
@@PixelBytesPixelArtist USA's now number one with "the other things", so no need to hassle about it buddy. USA All the Way!
lol
So many questions answered. I can finally sleep again!! Great job and so much quality research. Thanks guys :)
Cheers man, I think you understand our pain here lol
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Thank you to both of you for trying to bring the art of making hand pulled noodles to RUclips! So very much appreciated!
I was looking for your comment. I'd still like to see your video on hand pulled noodles.
i am CONSISTENTLY impressed by how talented Steph seems to be at literally everything
and she's cute.
I have endless respect for the amount of effort you put into this entire project. I know it's been a long time coming and I greatly appreciate your work.
You’ve convinced me to buy them at my local Chinese grocery!
"Broken thick boy" was my nickname in high school....
😂😂🤣🤨Straight *G* comment
hope you fixed that thick boy, bud
If anyone in the Lower Mainland is looking for Penghui, it’s available at the 柏仁/Big Crazy store in Richmond, BC. It’s at the very back of the store next to the pickles and chilis. It’s of the same brand used in the video
Regarding chemistry: Have you tried a different gluten relaxer? As far as I know, SMS works differently from L-cysteine or glutathione, and from limited tests it seems that the L-cysteine and glutathione approach maintains more gluten strength while still allowing for lots of elongation. I've done a 100,000:17* ratio of flour to glutathione and ended with encouraging results. This may help give more pulls. Glutathione is available online as a supplement.
Definitely will start playing with recreating the blue package though, thanks so much for giving a closer look and translation of its contents!
*EDIT: missed a 0 when I first posted, ratio was off by an order of magnitude. 17mg Glu per 100g flour is correct
Ha so basically... we're not smart enough to tinker around *too* much :) We kinda specialize in researching/communicating the tried and true methods - whenever we're 'creative' it's usually simply a matter of trying to find the best sub possible for people (whether re ingredients, or adjustments to Western home kitchens). That said, if you're looking to play around with things, a couple notes/ideas...
- We'd add the reducer *after* you do the initial kneading. Obviously, we could be wrong (never tried adding it in early!)... but I'd be extremely careful with the reducing agent. We once tried upping the sodium metabisulfite to the 2-3% range and the end result was almost inedibly soft. When it comes to pulled noodles, I think sometimes people get so caught up in the pull that it's easy to forget the true end goal - a thin, chewy noodle with a nice bite to it.
- I think everyone's so focused on gluten relaxers that they're forgetting about the emulsifier. There's some other competing brands of lamian additives that don't even have reducers! But the *do* have emulsifiers. Why is it important? Not sure!
- Here's a random article that I found interesting on the subject: link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40538-017-0113-9
Again, we're neither chefs nor food scientists, so I'll leave it up to someone smarter than me to parse it all :) I do think the path of least resistance is just to find a better way to mix the additives used in the blue bag.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified You're being much too humble! Your work on this stuff is fantastic, and I appreciate that you sometimes just say "to hell with it, we're just going to recreate actual conditions!" (especially thinking of the washing machine simulation in the black bean spareribs video).
Adding after: I have definitely seen this as a stressed point in all the traditional sources and interviews with lamian chefs. The dough is mixed and kneaded without penghui, then penghui is added as more kneading happens. This gets explained away in a bunch of manners, but it makes sense; the reducing agents (penghui, SMS, glutathione, etc) will act upon and destroy portions of an existing gluten structure, but perhaps leaving that until later will help form the gluten you need for a stronger noodle. Very much to your note, noodles that pull and then fall apart aren't lamian.
Emulsifiers: That's such an amazing point. I have very little knowledge of an emulsifier's role in this process, will definitely dig down and integrate that.
Thanks for the link, this seems like a good article in general for unpacking "mystical" processes in Chinese flour products.
Let me add a couple links too:
www.yamatonoodle.com/noodle-master-labs/ramen-noodle-ingredients-kansui-etc/
(great general resource for alkaline noodles, has been useful for understanding different styles' balances between K2CO3 and Na2CO3, etc)
songshuhui.net/archives/56131
songshuhui.net/archives/56138
(Two non-published but still thorough posts on the components of lamian and alkaline noodles)
Interested to know about the outcome of the Glutathione noodles. How many pulls,etc? Also what would the 10000:17 ratio break down to in bakers percents? I tried to convert with limited math knowledge, but i would venture to bet its 1% or less of the total batch? .5%? .05%? Are you mixing the Glutathione in at the beginning or make a bowl of solution similar to the Penghui and applying it after kneading?
@@midwestside1969 I can answer some of those questions:
Pulls: will need to get back to you on that. The limit of the pulls tended to be unevenness that led to certain strands breaking. Not sure if that's my technique or the chemistry.
10000:17 == 100g flour : 0.17g glutathione powder, so baker's percentage is 0.17
I tried both, both seemed to work. This is somewhat new for me, so limited testing so far. For the water-based solution, I took a capsule of 500mg glutathione and dissolved it in various (large) amounts of water to get different grams(Glu) per mL(water) and watched how much I added after kneading before the dough gained enough elongation.
@@vinitlee Thanks. Probably wont go down that path. I had many uneven pulls with the nutritional yeast as well.
The term "Pizza Flour" can be a little misleading here since not all pizza flour is milled to specifications appropriate for la mein.
To understand what flour is appropriate for noodle making you need to be familiar with two rheological principles of dough and something called ash content. Ash content measures the the degree of the endosperm separation from the bran, germ and husk during milling. Lower ash content implies that more starch and gluten forming proteins are present in the flour per gram. Therefore flour with lower ash content will more readily hydrate and form a cohesive dough at lower hydrations.
When it comes to Italian flour, tipo "X" is a reference to the ash content. Tipo 00 classification implies that the flour has below 0.50% ash content, typically around 0.35-0.45%. Not all Italian millers mill pizza flour to 00 specifications, it just so happens that antimo caputo chef's flour is "00". Japanese udon flour for example is usually formulated to 0.30 - 0.35% ash content.
Furthermore the rheological properties (namely extensibility and elasticity) also play a significant role in noodle texture. Noodle flour requires a certain ratio of extensibility to elasticity. Higher levels of gliadin result in more extensible (easier to stretch) doughs, whereas glutenin results in more elastic (spring back) ones. Millers will blend different varieties of wheats to obtain specific ratios that are optimal for bread, pasta, pastry etc. So just going by ash content is not always enough.
While i'm not an expert on la mein noodles, I know for wonton men and ramen noodles doughs with high elasticity and protein content are preferred. Elastic doughs are chewier and have more texture and very difficult to knead and role out. Precisely why you need a bamboo pole or special machinery to produce those noodles.
Japanese Udon-Ko is formulated at 8-9% protein but is quite tenacious. "00" Pizza Flour usually runs between 13-14% total protein and "00" Pasta Flour i've seen as far as "9% - 12".
Maybe you'll appreciate me nerding out.
Thanks for all these info. Unfortunately, flour in China doesn't include the info on ash content. While I was researching for the recipe, I saw some product examination reports mentioning, but never on the package. So there's no way for us to know the exact number, but it seem like lamian flour is would also fall into the category of low ash content.
i am born and raised in Lanzhou, and I approve this message ! Thank you for spreading the gospel of my hometown to the world !
“Just do it later" lol that t-shirt suits me perfectly
Thanks for going above & beyond once again! You really need to replace that marble mortar with a Thai granite mortar & pestle - way more friction & less slipperiness when wet. You can grind rather than pound, which makes pulverising salt (& most spices) much faster and finer. I use it daily for all sorts of things - salad dressings, curry pastes, guacamole (yesterday for crushing Australian Arnott’s Gingernut biscuits - the hardest cookie on the planet) and crushing salt, sugar and spices.
I'm looking for proper sized and colored one, takes a bit of finding. I just love that tool so much that I also want it to be part of the decoration in the apartment, so I want it to be perfect, lol.
they both have a place in cooking while a granite mortar is definitely my choice for grinding up salt or spices as it makes easy work of this by actually grinding like a millstone. the marble one is far superior for making things like garlic and black bean sauce or pepper paste where you realy want to mas things to a paste
my opinion though also for making the last bits is also a lot easier to clean and has no taste lingering
DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A CHEMIST. I am a physcist however and have studied a lot of chemistry and have a general understanding of the proceses behind these reactions. I'm still not a chemist so take what I'm gonna say here with a grain of salt.
Something to keep in mind, sodium carbonate will turn back into sodium bicarbonate by re-capturing CO2 in the presence of water under 100ºC. In fact this property of sodium carbonate is used in CO2 capture processes. So if exposed to air, it is not a super fast process but it definetly happens. In moist air sodium metabisulfide also turns into sodium sulfate. That might be the reason why your homemade mix didn't turn out the way you expected it to. What I'd do is try to mix them with everything above 100ºC and immediately transfer into a container with desecants.
So I found Peng Hui online (The real blue stuff) The probelm is with transport costs it'd be about 70$ for 1 kg and take a long time due to having to send it from China. Given that you used 2 grams of penghui however this would last for 500 tries of the recipe. Would you say the difference is worth the additional cost here? I'm also worried about being able to keep such a big amount of powder in it's anhydrous state for long enough to even use.
I would say that if you are serious about trying to learn, I would find a friend or two, pick up the bagged Penghui, and learn on that. I think that would be the most realistic - otherwise, you might not be sure if the problem is your technique or the homemade Penghui. Some people on our Patreon discord were splitting a shipment, something like that would probably be the most realistic idea for people just starting out (promise not trying to upsell here lol, but joining the Patreon costs a buck... might be worth rolling the dice & seeing if you can get in on it/seeing if others there also wanna split a shipment? just looking at things from an expected return sort of perspective haha).
Basically, the homemade Penghui was way better than nothing though, even though I wasn't overly content with it. I wanted a *direct* sub, but I'd say it was 70-80% as effective. I think someone smarter than me could get to 100, and I also hope that there could be some random company out there that says 'hey, we've got a screw mixer and desiccants, this seems easy enough'... so that people don't NEED to import it.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified This will probably banboozle whatever authority that comes across the powder, but I salute every one of your efforts
It's not crack, but deservedly more addictive
Hey! I recently found a simplified recipe that call for alkaline water (the stuff they sell in grocery store with health benefit claims) instead of Peng Hui. I’m not sure how well it work versus real recipe but from the video ... the guy seems knowledgeable and done this for years
There are probably hand pulled noodle shops around (at least where I live, in Canada), they must be getting their Peng Hui from somewhere. You may be able to ask them to order some for you? It's worth a try. I know they can sometimes be tight lipped about how to make it, but penghui isn't exactly a secret, so hopefully they'll be willing to pass some on.
That difference on the flour explains why all chinese cooks that i see hydrates their flour so well, i thought it was only the chopsticks
Was happily surprised that you are watching both Nilered and Kenji! Would be beyond excited to see you collaborate with them. All that's left if for Ryan from Way of Ramen to get involved in the soup-making process.
Love Kenji and he does seem to poke around here now and then (which is... totally awesome, a kind of 'senpai notices us' kind of feeling lol), but he's way too big time for a collab haha. NileRed is a touch more realistic but he's also also an order of magnitude more popular :) My dream collab with NileRed is on an MSG video - I want nothing more than NileRed to make MSG on his channel haha.
As a Lanzhou-er (not sure that's the right way to put it), I have to say I am utterly impressed.
Hope lamian masters won't be mad at us for spilling the "secret ingredient" to westerners, lol.
Turns out that penghui is available on AliExpress for 36 EUR/39 USD for 500g package or 61 EUR/66 USD for 1 kg package, is that a decent price?
Supposedly you get the same result without that extra "ash" ingredient by just kneading the dough for a lot longer or by just adding nutritional yeast as the extra ingredient.
My gut tells me that in that cocktail of homemade penghui ingredients, only one or two of the additives is doing most of the work. At least in terms of stretchability. When it comes down to color, flavor, and final texture, maybe the other players have a substantial role. So many individual objectives in food chemistry come down to just one ion in the additive replacing some ion in the food, or changing the overall pH. In either case, this generally seems to be achievable with fewer than three chemical compounds. If my hunch is right, then by narrowing the cocktail down to only the ones essential to the shaping objective, the iterative process will have fewer variables.
You can use 00 flour (which is often used in pizza flour, the package you got is just 00-flour), 00 refers to how fine it is but most of it on the market (at least in the US) is geared towards pizza and pasta making so it has the higher gluten content.
...... that my friend , THAT'S HOW CHINA ACCIDENTALLY DISCOVERED GUN POWDER
Damn, you guys are really dedicated! I remember that I asked for this recipe some time ago and you guys replied saying it was hard recipe to master. Now I can see why.
MAD RESPECT!
4:00 I apologize if someone already suggested this, but what about popcorn salt?
Wait did you guys read my mind. I literally made a big pot of 兰州牛肉面 broth two days ago, and was trying to make some homemade noodles since I ran out of store bought fresh noodles.
This is one of the best cooking videos I've ever seen. I have no intention of making Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles but I found the process and the modern history behind it fascinating.
Holy crap dude. You two definitely like a challenge!
1. Congrats!
2. You two are crazy!! Good job though, very informative.
8:10 Me just watching this video. Seriously you can tell how much effort Steph is using when folding the dough because with the way the table bends.
"screw mixers" I love these captions hahahahaha
I think that's a correction; that is, it's not a "hopper"- it's a "screw mixer". A mixer that uses a corkscrew kind of thing instead of a paddle
I thought he was essentially saying “fuck mixers” lol
@@thegoodwitch2u yeah that's correct. IIRC the hopper is the name of a storage container? I was doing research and the mixers used visually looked like a lot like hoppers, which's why that made it into the final script. While I was editing I was like 'wait... I should double check what these things are actually called".
But... 'fuck stand mixers' is also a strangely valid interpretation in this specific instance :)
This is it, you found the holy grail!!!
I've been trying to make these on and off for the last 12 years and tried so many bullshit techniques and recipes, and read posts speculating how to do it.
This looks like the real deal and your food looks amazingly authentic and well prepared, and I'm a trained chef
Thanks for the videos , I watched a few when you were starting out and made the crispy roast pork belly and haven't checked them out in a while. You guys have leveled them up!!
Nutritional yeast apparently does a good job of relaxing the dough - serious eats did a video on it a few weeks ago - worth checking out: ruclips.net/video/WmwRAnd-mQo/видео.html
Ha so we've talked about this approach elsewhere in these comments. But the overly direct tl;dr for those comments/notes is... get back to me when nutritional yeast can relax successfully an alkaline dough :)
I've been experimenting for the last few months. With King Arthur AP flour, tearing the dough produces similar results and makes the dough easier to pull. I roll the dough into a log, tear it with my palm, make a rope again and repeat this 4 times. The rest of the process is similar to your video. I pull using the Uyghurs technique
This was fantastic, also puts the difficulty Binging with Babish was having, when he tried it last year, into context. Thank you.
A couple of comments about Peng Hui.
First, all plant ash contains a significant amount of POTASSIUM and much less Sodium unless the plant is a halophile growing in a high salt environment like a marsh or estuary. An example of a salt marsh plant used for glassmaking in Renaissance times is glasswort and it was burned for it's ash to make glass in Venice . An example of a plant used to make potash for nixtamalization of corn masa is Rabbitbrush or Chamisa. The potassium is called POTASH in English because prior to POTASH mining operations, it was refined from wood ash as in it's name of pot ash. Why does this matter? Because Potassium carbonate is slightly more basic or alkaline than sodium carbonate or standard soda ash. It is also much more soluble in water than soda ash and also much more hygroscopic. So does Peng Hui contain potash or potassium carbonate? If it was made from a plant ash, it would but for cost reasons, it likely does not currently contain potassium carbonate Potassium carbonate costs at least twice as much per gram as sodium carbonate and while less is needed to get to the same end point and old fashioned Peng Hui was mostly potassium carbonate, the plant free synthetic version sold today is all sodium based per the label. I think the TSP (trisodium phosphate) is a modern additive that is not present in the original plant ash Peng Hui as well. It was a additive that makes the noodle more slippery and is also a very alkaline ingredient, even more so than sodium or potassium carbonate.
Second. Emulsifiers and Peng Hui. Oil is not an emulsifier but the Peng Hui may saponify or partially saponify the oil to make some extremely potent emulsifiers. You see, the basic nature of sodium carbonate and TSP can cleave the ester bonds in the fatty acid triglyceride (the long name for the vegetable oil) to make an extremely potent food grade emulsifier called glycerol monostearate or glycerol monooleate. Either are very active emulsifiers and are formed by the partial hydrolysis of one or two glycerol ester bonds (there are 3 as in triglyceride). Look on a package of cake or brownie mix and you will see one or the other emulsifier listed way down on the list of ingredients.
Third. Adding the sodium metabisulfite reducing agent right before use will be MUCH more efficient as it can't degrade in your kitchen during your processing steps to compound a homemade Peng Hui salt mixture. You also wont need to prepare an anhydrous Peng Hui from hygroscopic salts in a kitchen environment. So try compounding all the salts (sodium chloride, TSP, and washing soda or Na2CO3) together and add the metabisulfite using a dropper bottle containing enough bisulfite for the Lamian. The only reactive salt is the metabisulfite and the rest are rock stable, even if very water loving and prone to absorbing water from the kitchen air. Isee your statement that this did not work well for you in trials. So more trial and error kitchen work would be kneaded to work this out.
Was just talking to my wife about how I'd love to learn how to make hand pulled lanzhou noodles the other day. Thanks for the info!
I don't know... I've seen so many videos of lamian making, an they all show different methods. Honestly, this one seems way too - unnecessarily - complex.
While Korea and Japan argue about who has the best ramyun/ramen...lets not forget the OG creators behind it...lamian! I didnt think making lamian noodles would be complicated
Best instant noodles you can ever get is called LAO Zheng zhou hui mian. I braise my own beef shank and add pickled diacon, green onion and onions along with Chilli and garlic oil. I can make restaurant quality soup with these bagged noodles.
Thank you for the sincerity. I’ve tried it several times after watching those happy-music smiling-faces videos on YT that just endlessly repeat how easy it is to do at home! Every time ended in pathetic disaster. You are one of the few real cooking channels, not entertainment vaguely related to food, glitzy and empty of useful content. I will now proceed to delete any intention in my head of doing la mien, ramen it is from now on :) PS Maybe you can start a business shipping out that magic flower out of China.
So in your cooking we see ofter penut and or course the Sichuan rapeseed oil. But how about rice bran oil. It is quite available here and makes for a great frying oil with a smokepoint of 230 to 255C scources vary a bit. To me this sounds like somthing more traditional as penuts are not native in china though available about as long as chilly is. But im wondering how much its actually used
I use this stuff often it works well has a nice natural though rich taste. High smoke point and its not penut oil which im mildly alergic for.
Need to slap the mian on the table harder so it scares everyone around you! In the north we eat a lot of wide noodles which is also awesome, things that are missing in Toronto
What do you think of Serious Eats version using Nutritional Yeast?
Ok! So I'm sure we'll get some questions on this, so let me consolidate some thoughts on the Tim's SeriousEats recipe here. As I said in the notes though, I want to be completely clear that any critiques we have are *not* a value judgement. Lamian is brutally difficult to research - I (Chris) never would've been able to find all this info, and I live here! Steph is just a phenomenal researcher. So while we do have some pretty fundamental differences of opinion with Tim, I really liked his article and I would suggest everyone go read it.
- First off, I think his selection of nutritional yeast as a reducer is completely genius.
- Second, I think his (and other more recent Lamian recipes) are a badly needed corrective from other earlier English language recipes that used low gluten cake flour. In the defense of Luke and other people that were desperately trying to figure this out a decade ago... there was a certain logic to the cake flour recipes - it *is* true that for any given 'level' of gluten, Chinese flours tends to be on average ~1% lower protein than their Western counterparts (e.g. Chinese AP is often 8-10% while in the West it's 9-11%; Chinese noodle flour is ~12.5% while Western bread flour is ~13.5% etc). And low protein flour would certainly be easier to pull! The problem with those earlier recipes, however, was the end result using a low protein flour would not make a very good noodle. The ever-excellent Andong also tossed out a high-gluten Lamian recipe a couple months ago. All of these recent recipes would make for tasty noodles.
- My fundamental critique of Tim's noodles is that it feels like they're having a bit of an identity crisis. Do they want to be the restaurant style alkaline noodles, or the homestyle non-alkaline noodles? Because if you don't care about whether your noodles are alkaline or not, you certainly don't need to go through this whole song and dance! Use some lamian/pizza flour, make some abacus strings, do a couple rests, cut the noodles, pull them to your liking! It'd save a lot of headache :) We'll toss a recipe for that out next week.
- His recipe is pretty high hydration, which kind of shocked us when we first saw it. That said, bread flour (what he's using) absorbs a *lot* more water than pizza flour. So it's possible that we're actually in the same ballpark: slice.seriouseats.com/2011/06/the-pizza-lab-on-flour-foams-and-dough.html That said, I've seen some reports of people having overly sticky dough when following that recipe (however, it could simply be because they were using the wrong flour though)
- I think it's possible that some recipe writer out there might be able to combine his approach with this one in order to make a stretchy alkaline Lamian without resorting to sodium metabisulfite/sodium triphosphate. I would guess that his recipe could use some sort of emulsifier, together with a more finely milled flour, in order to successfully incorporate the alkaline. We, however, are not those recipe writers :)
Thanks so much for responding this way I totally wanted your thoughts on this. :D
I used that recipe once and it worked far better than any other "hack" I've tried. It definitely reduced the noodles to a putty and they were easily pulled. The came out uneven, but I believe that was just my technique.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified I tried Tim's recipe up in Canada where it is EXTREMELY dry and he was around 67% hydration whereas when I followed his recipe I could not get the dough to relax at all - it was an elastic band after 35mins of kneading so I started adding more water to the dough in stages (via wet hands) and was probably up to an 85% hydration when it was all said and done. After 80mins of kneading I never had a relaxed enough dough to even consider pulling it more than 1ft so I gave up, rolled it out and sliced it. Next time I try I will be upping hydration from the start and probably adding more nutritional yeast to see if that does it.
@@MrRatFinkster If you're comfortable working with doughs/going by feel... perhaps try his recipe with some pizza flour? Perhaps it's simply a failure of imagination, but 85% hydration just seems *way* too high... even with bread flour. Another variable I've heard through discussions on Reddit is the age of your nutritional yeast - people seem to have gotten better results with new bottles than old. Or because I'm biased... if you're cool with a non-alkaline dough at a 'normal-thin' level, you could also wait for our 'home-style pulled noodle' recipe next week :)
My personal Hack?; I roll up to Q HOUSE OF NOODLE & order fresh noodles 🍝 to go....... with noodle size choices to boot
Andong didn't commit RUclips espionage!? 😁
Love it!
There's a super-thin pasta made in Sardinia called "god's wool". It's made from semolina flour and water, and then it gets kneaded forever and a day before stretching. They even have little motorized dough-beating rigs to help make that happen.
Great video but I feel like you overcomplicate things a little. And it might scare some people off. The noodles can come together in around 15 min if not less after the rest period. Add the peng hui after resting the dough for as little as an hour, fold and stretch and it should come together to be ready to pull noodles very quickly. Check out this recipe ruclips.net/video/Mw5DK_XNByU/видео.htmlsi=Zaye8XqNB8AquI1g
By the way, it is possible to make the noodles without peng hui, in that case you would probably need to knead the dough for as much as you did in the video, likely more depending on the flour, hydration and salt.
So alkali noodles depend on the alkalinity of the water. Sodium Carbonate absorbs CO2 and water from the air to turn into sodium bicarbonate. You also may have added too much metabisulfite, which is acidic.
Get some ph test strips and get the pH up. More Sodium Carbonate or even food grade lye will likely help.
I've made croissants from scratch before but nah fuck this lmao. Huge respect for the people who understand this stuff scientifically.
You would think the lockdown and mass death would humble some of the more privileged, sadly not in this case. Still the MOST conceited voice on youtube.
this is like Nile Red by now
I bpught some peng hui got it from China.
I want to know what yours smelled like.
Mine smells terrible, almost like sewerage.
Does your's smell terrible too?
We have a version of alkali noodle here in the philippines which typically uses lye water, potassium carbonate if im not mistaken. Could this possibly be used for hand pulled noodle purpose? I think its more akin to japanese lye water for ramen than what you have used for lamian.
Pharmacist here, if you're trying to mix these powders together evenly and reducing granule size at same time in a mortar and pestle. You can try using what's called geometric dilution. We use it when compounding medication.
"It's totally normal to knead for 40 or even 50 minutes." Normal?! NORMAL?!
How about Japanese style Ramen? Do Chinese have an equivalent?
Chris has nice guns
well . .. that explains why I was not able to pull that dough no matter how much i kneaded or added. Well, to pull the rolling pin and a sharp knife if i don't get that flour.
I lived in Guangzhou China for a decade - lots of Lanzhou Lamian shops in every corner of the city - such a great go-to comfort food!
AFTER WATCHING this, I made the decision to buy dried noodles.
For substitution yes use 00 flour but add pure vital wheat gluten,its pure gluten powder.
I just watched a video from serious eats that says you can use nutritional yeast as the dough relaxer. Cannot yet vouch for efficacy or flavor but am eager to give it a try.
If you have one, run your salt and such through a food processor first. It won't get it all the way there but it will save you a lot of time with the mortar and pestle.
Serious Eats released their version of recipe using nutritional yeast to achieve the effect of penghui:
www.seriouseats.com/2020/04/homemade-hand-pulled-noodles-lamian.html
I love how I found somebody who is just as technical and specific and thorough as me. Never change, keep up the hard work.
Wow. For some reason I got randomly unsubbed from this amazing channel.
Fantastic video, but I am more certain than ever that I am happy with buying my noodles rather than making them, and I think that is good :)
Hmmm guess you can do it without this work and actually without penghui. Well at least I can
"just do it later"
Thank you so much for this. I've tried all the other methods I've seen so far, and they all come out flat. Cant wait to try this one!
I have no friends or husband, so I tag teamed my wife in and the kitchen exploded.
I'm really enjoying your next level science direction that you're occasionally taking, it's super smart and fascinating, well done guys.
Why did you need to pulverize the salt when you were going to dissolve the whole mixture in water anyway?
We tried to make solutions out of everything, for some reason it didn't work. Who knows?
It probably needed to be _absolutely_ fine, no solid left as suspension during mixing.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified It's really strange it didn't work. it violates all my chemistry knowledge, says a Chem Phd. may be you should wait for 1~2 hours after you dissolve everything? Though I didn't see any potential chemical reactions between those ingredients.....
BTW, I made some pulled noodles with Pottasche (a thing used for cooking gingerbread, basically just potassium carbonate) instead of 蓬灰, back in Germany. It worked, more or less. But I'm not sure whether it could be pulled six times (too lazy, didn't bother to optimizate my protocol).
@@mayz-7822 potash? Like the glass flux from burning wood? Or is that a different thing that I botched to translate?
@@ineedaname1341 yea, it's potash (also Chem PhD here)
Quarantine home work out: noodle edition
Right! I started making noodles once again early this year. Now almost every day, and I had already noodle dreams 😄
I am extremely uncomfortable with the mismatched voice over and hand gesture
I recently saw a video on RUclips where the chef used Nutritional Yeast as a sub for the dough relaxer, I haven’t tested yet.. curious to see if that give more stretch than this method. Either way I’ll be testing both! Thanks for the video !!!
See if you can find the question posted by buttoxide8 in this Comment Section. He asked about that vid and Chris gave a lengthy response.
Uekiguy cheers!