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I have successfully made hand pulled noodles (la mian, la mien). It’s taken me about 35 batches of dough and a lot of experimenting. I talked about the ingredients in my last post, and now it’s time to talk about a recipe.

I’ll give a couple recipes (one with lye water and one without), and then provide some instructions on how to mix the ingredients together. Should you need more information about the ingredients, I’ve made a post talking about that.

Note that these recipes are by weight. You’ll need a kitchen scale to make these (or you could try converting them to volume measurements). I recommend a digital scale since it’s more precise. I’ve created these recipes by weight because it’s the only way to get a perfect mix every time. If you follow these recipes, you shouldn’t need much (if any) flour during the kneading process.

Each recipe is 300g total. This is enough to make noodles for two people who like noodles, or three to four people who just want to see you make hand pulled noodles.

Hand Pulled Noodle Recipe #19 – with Lye Water

152g cake flour
24g all-purpose flour
1g salt
25g sesame oil
95g water
3g lye water

Hand Pulled Noodle Recipe #21 – without Lye Water

152g cake flour
24g all-purpose flour
1g salt
28g sesame oil
95g water

Now for the mixing process. I’ve been successful with the following, but feel free to try your own way. I don’t think it makes a huge difference, as long as the lye water (if you’re using it) goes in last.

Step 1, measure your flour into the bowl:

Step 2, add salt:
Step 3, add oil:
Step 4, add water:
Finally, if necessary, add your lye water. Be careful here as you only need a little, and I found that my bottle sometimes got excited about pouring itself into my mixture .

For the mixing, you can just take a heavy spoon and start stirring. It should look like this as you work:
And finally, when when you’ve got it into a nice ball, you should be able to see that it is very uneven. You should knead it for a few minutes. There will be oily spots and dry spots. This smooths out very quickly. Be careful when kneading, though, since this dough is right at the edge of being too sticky. If you’re quick enough, it won’t stick to your hands. If you have to, though, adding a little bit of flour to keep it from sticking to you is just fine. Here’s the progression from chunky to smooth, to give you and idea of how to knead it:

and now you’ve go hand pulled noodle dough. You can stick this in a ziploc baggie for later, or dive in and try to make noodles. I’ve found that keeping the dough in the fridge overnight makes it a little easier to get the dough to a point where you can pull noodles, but you can still pull noodles from fresh dough. The difference in knead times is about 15 minutes for overnight dough versus about 25 minutes for fresh dough.

My next post will talk about some pulling techniques. I’ve yet to perfect my ability to pull noodles, but I can pretty much get noodles every time I try now. The good news with this dough is that you can try repeatedly, and you can actually re-wet the dough if you feel like it’s drying out a bit. Once you get it to a point where it can be pulled, it’s very forgiving. I’ll save the details for my next post.

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I have successfully made hand pulled noodles (la mian, la mien). It’s taken me about 35 batches of dough and a lot of experimenting. The pulling part requires a bit of technique, but without a proper recipe, it’s possible to have dough that will never reach a point where you can pull it. That’s a bit disappointing.

So the first thing to deal with is a good recipe. I went through 21 different dough recipes. The good news is I found a proper recipe that works really well. The bad news is I’ve done all my recipes by weight. That’s a little scary, but it’s the only way to get a perfect ball of dough every time. If anyone comes across this and wants to try to convert to a volume based recipe, feel free, but i recommend going out and buying a cooking scale. It will save a lot of time if you’re planning on committing to learning how to pull noodles.

Ingredients for making hand pulled noodles are relatively simple. You need flour, water, some oil, and a little salt. In addition, you can add some lye water, which I’ll talk about at the end.

Flour

Flour is probably the most troublesome of the ingredients because you have to get your gluten levels just right. The gluten is what makes the dough stretchy. In my experience, too much gluten will result in a dough that will never reach the right texture for pulling. It will tear very early. A proper amount of gluten will result in dough that stretches into hair thin noodles.

I started out working with some flour I found at an asian market near my home (it’s called Marina Food and it’s in Cupertino, CA). Unfortunately, it seems this flour isn’t readily available everywhere, and it seems to be sold out at Marina pretty often. For the record though, here’s what it looks like:

and the nutrition information:

This Korean flour seems to have just the amount of gluten in it, but a flour mix with more common flours is more useful to people who can’t go to Marina to get this. The solution to getting a proper mixture with normal American flours comes from this recipe. However, in my searching, I have been unable to find proper “Pastry” flour, but I’ve been successful with cake flour. For my recipe, I used Softasilk cake flour and Gold Medal All-Purpose flour. These were available at my local Safeway, and you can see them in the image above. Here’s the nutrition information just in case you need it:

for the Softasilk:
And for the Gold Medal:

Now if you can find it, I had really good luck with the Korean flour, but the cake / all-purpose works really well too. If you do go with the Korean flour, just use it as 100% of your flour. The recipe I post will be for the cake / all-purpose mix. Regardless of what you choose to use, your recipe should contain about 59% flour.

Water

Water is pretty simple. Water from the tap is just fine. I generally tried to use warm water, as the dough is much easier to work with when it’s warm. In my recipes, I use about 31% water.

Oil

The purpose of sesame oil in the recipe is for a couple things. The first is flavor. The second, more importantly, is that it gives the dough a bit more springiness when you’re trying to stretch it. It’s almost like liquid rubberband. Thirdly, it helps keep the dough from sticking to your hands. This means we can make a wetter dough recipe and still knead it easily. I’ve tried recipes with no sesame oil, recipe with a little, and recipes with a lot. I’ve had the most success with recipes that have 8-9% sesame oil.

You can use any type of sesame oil. I tried a recipe with a sesame /soy oil that did not work well, so i recommend using 100% sesame oil. The green bottle that’s generally available in the ethnic section of a supermarket is good. I’ve also been successful with random sesame oils from asian markets, too.

Salt

Salt is generally for a little more flavor in the noodles. I did, however, try a recipe with 2% salt, and it made the dough very tough (to a point that i couldn’t pull it). I recommend about .3% salt (which comes out to 1 gram in my recipe).

Lye Water

If you read through forums about hand pulled noodles, you’ll read about “lye water” and “kansui powder”. I was unable to find anything called “kansui powder”, but i did find lye water. Most asian markets have it alongside the oil and soy sauce related ingredients.

Lye water is supposed to be the secret ingredient in hand pulled noodles. I’ve tried recipes with it and without it, and it does not make the dough any easier to pull. There’s almost no difference in the dough when using lye water, although if you use too much, you’ll get something a lot like when you add too much salt. The dough will be too tough to pull. I’ve come to a happy ground with about 1% lye water in my dough.

What lye water DOES add is a nice bit of chewiness to the noodles. The flavor is supposed to be slightly different, too, but i haven’t noticed that yet. I’m always just happy that i was able to make some noodles

I’ll post two recipes, one with lye water, and one without. You can be the judge.

So I’ve been working on getting a recipe and technique together to make hand pulled noodles, or la mian. I’m basically done at this point, and I’m going to make a series of posts that talk about everything. I tried a while back to find a recipe and instruction on how to make said noodles, but came up dry after hours of searching on the internet. I found a few “recipes” that were mostly just guidelines, and the only instructions came in the form of some kind of video in front of a noodle shop. slim pickins. So I decided to put together something that would help the online community, and the picture in this post is of noodles that I pulled myself. So my next post will talk about ingredients, and then I’ll go from there.

In videogames, I’m still on a turn based strategy kick. I’ve picked up Disgaea for the PSP. It’s leaps and bounds better than Jeanne D’Arc. The key to why it’s better is that it’s just really fast. The gameplay is smokin’ in comparison to Jeanne D’Arc. Plus, there’s all kinds of neat stuff like the item world and throwing characters around. Funny thing is, I played Disgaea for the PS2 when it came out way back when. I beat it, and I remembered it being good, but i guess i forgot.