- Hey guys, my name's Tim.
I'm a professional cook and today we're gonna learn
how to make hand-pulled noodles or lamian.
(upbeat music)
Lamian is thin pulled noodles.
They're not the wide slap noodles, the bang bang mian
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've found, they suck.
Where they fail is that you can't get
the 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 in 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 gliadin.
If you can imagine, glutenin 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.
Gliadins, they're these little circles
that are floating around in that matrix.
And they're not bonded to each other, generally.
And they kind of move freely around.
Gliadins 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 a dough, 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 in 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 knead the (beep) out of it.
I've 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 dough relaxer.
So a dough relaxer is an ingredient
that chemically breaks gluten bonds.
And you can stretch the dough after you use it.
The most traditional dough relaxer that's used in China
is something called penghui.
Now, penghui 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,
Penghui 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've ever, unfortunately, had the experience
of finding a hair in your food,
I really don't recommend using cysteine
because it's made processing hair.
(crew member laughs)
Fortunately, I've found an ingredient that works.
You might even have it already in your own pantry
and it's nutritional yeast.
Basically, nutritional yeast is inactive 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.
So that was way too much science,
so let's get to making some noodles.
(upbeat music)
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've 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 nooch.
From now on, I'm gonna refer to nutritional yeast as nooch.
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 the 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.
(machine whirring)
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.
(machine whirring)
And a little bit of oil.
(machine whirring)
We're gonna let it go for like 30 seconds,
just until the dough forms
and starts running around the blade.
All right, that's pretty good.
It looks like dough.
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 knead,
it's in a circular motion like this.
And that's to distribute the gluten network in a random way.
For bread doughs, 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 gonna show you the kneading process here.
You basically wanna 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 could twist it like that.
Or you can roll it.
Whatever 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 a dough 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 than 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 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 to stretch,
and then twist, and you're twisting everything back
so that when you go to stretch again,
it sort of mashes 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, it 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 for my pulls.
Which is great.
Now at this point, I'm gonna show you
how you can practice pulling actual noodles
without flouring them.
Because when you flour them,
that's sort of a point of no return.
All right, so, to practice, you start from a log,
about 15 inches, about that.
Just pull.
And then I like to grip it not 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 flouring 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 fine.
And you can practice as much or as little 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 dough together.
I actually find that if you
leave the dough alone for too long it's like over-relaxed.
So when you work the dough 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
until it's a little bit thinner, 15 inches, give or take.
The focus of this is just to get it even.
I'm gonna take my both ends, and just like I was practicing,
I'm gonna pull, double over.
I'm doing about five pulls per log.
And you want it to look something like that.
Fairly even, like a little bit thinner than udon,
little bit thicker than ramen.
And these'll go straight into water to 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.
(upbeat music)
Yep, they're super chewy,
they soak up that really, really aromatic broth really well.
The lamb is nice and spicy,
but I can still taste the noodles.
And that nooch gives that really, really nice
like umami, savory backbone,
which complements the soup really nicely.
Soup-er good, (laughs) I mean...
(slurping)
(upbeat music)