Rating Pending

I finally did it.  I bought a Kitchen Aid Pro 600 stand mixer.  I got it for a sweet $320 from Bed Bath and Beyond (I finally found a use for the 20% off coupon they keep sending me).  

So I went over the translations I got for a post I made about a chinese video I found (special thanks to Rusty), and I came up with another noodle recipe that’s a lot easier than the two previous ones. I did two test batches (the first was too dry, and I botched it with too much baking soda). Here’s what I came up with:

Literally.  I got to the end of Fable 2, and was working on getting the rest of the gargoyle heads, when I dropped into Archon’s Knot, where my LAST gargoyle head was.  As I swam out of the water, my character bugged.  I could shoot a single bullet, so I got the gargoyle, but I can’t swing a weapon, and casting a spell acts like I never release the spell button.  The big hurt, though in this bugged mode, I can’t get into the menu to save (you know, because I got all the Gargoyles!).  So I wandered my way (no fast travel if you don’t have the menu) to a game master, loaded up spinnerbox, and exited so it would autosave.  Then I reset my Xbox.

I had the idea to check out google.cn today to see if I could find a lamian recipe.  Well, I found video of a cooking show in which it looks like they explain… everything?  I’m not sure, but there’s information about alkali in there.  I can’t read it, however.  I’ll have to get some translation done.

Here’s some screenshots of particular importance.  I need to call my chinese friends to see who can read it

I had 6 hours of free time yesterday, so I decided to take some time to catch up on Xbox Live games.  I was figuring I’d land on Bionic Commando, but I tried the Braid demo first.  If you haven’t played it yet, and you’re like me, you probably look at the screenshots and go “meh”.  It looks a little… bubbly, I guess.  The name and the graphics don’t let on to how cool it is.  I immediately bought it after getting to the end of the demo.  Bionic Command will have to wait.

Holy crap. I don’t know how I missed out on this one all these years. I was reading last week’s escapist issue, and came across this article. “What kind of a name is ‘The Kingdom of Loathing’”, I thought.

I checked it out. It’s awesome.

The Kingdom of Loathing is a browser based pseudo mmo. Let me clarify. By browser based, I mean it runs in your browser, but it doesn’t use flash or fancy graphics. It’s all framed html, img tags, and a bit of javascript. A very plain UI. By pseudo mmo, I mean that you are playing alongside many other people, but they may as well be in parallel universes. You can communicate with them, give each other items, and apparently PvP (i haven’t checked it out yet), but on the whole you just play it alone.

All the graphics are hand drawn stick figures, and the humour in the writing is a lot like Douglas Adams; the humor is all in how it’s written on the page. For example, in the game, one of the quests takes you to The Misspelled Cemetary, where you fight Ghuols, Skleltons, and lihces.

And since it’s free, you should check it out. No, read the article, and then check it out. The guys behind this make their living purely on the donations, and they have an interesting story.

I’ve been learning about Bonsai lately, and I planted some seeds about two weeks ago. On Friday after work, I was delighted to find that some of my seeds had started growing. A chinese wisteria came up:

As well as two Jacarandas:

Now that was enough, but today (sunday), I also found that one of my giant california redwoods has also sprouted:

Now here’s the interesting thing. The Jacarandas have been growing like I’d expect them to, but the Chinese Wisteria is going wild. 72 hours after the first picture, it now looks like this:

Simply amazing.

I’ve made three posts now going through the process of making hand-pulled noodles. Here’s a quick recap:

An image of the final product

Information on ingredients

Recipes and mixing instructions
UPDATE December 6, 2008 -A better and easier recipe

I thought about taking a bunch of pictures to show show to actually pull the noodles, but it’s better explained in a video. So I’ve broken the whole ordeal up into two parts. The first deals with how to knead the dough and what to look for to know that it’s time to pull some noodles. The second shows you how to pull the noodles, and how to get the most practice time out of your dough.

Part 1 is here:

You really have to work the dough to get it pullable withing 20 minutes. Don’t be discouraged if it takes you 30 or 40 minutes to get the dough there.

And Part 2 is here:

The pulling technique I show here works really well for small balls of dough. I have yet to pull noodles out of a big piece of dough, but I think it requires the whipping technique you see in so many of the other videos on the web.

Some further notes that I’d like to mention:

1. Once you’ve kneaded the dough to a pullable consistency, it’s do or die. If you decide you’re done practicing, just throw the dough away. I haven’t had good luck with dough I’ve put back into the fridge for next day. To clarify, I’m not saying you get one chance to pull noodles for each batch of dough you make. Just don’t try to pull noodles out of the same batch on two different days, and you’ll be alright. The dough seems to lose just a little bit of stretchiness after it’s been kneaded and then gets put back into the fridge.
2. I once took my dough to a high elevation on and tried to pull it there. I had trouble with it, and even when I brought it back I had trouble. I don’t know anything about dough and elevation, but it seems to have caused issues.
3. Keep at it! It’s not easy to get this right, and it takes a lot of practice. Don’t try to pull noodles from recipe that are greater than 300g until you’re confident in your abilities. Larger dough is quite a bit hard to pull evenly.

Some Cooking notes:

1. The noodles don’t need a lot of boiling time. Maybe 3 to 5 minutes max. The first time I was successful, I had them with a little sesame oil and some Magi sauce (close to soy sauce in flavor). The two recipes I’ve posted have good flavor, but the selling point on hand pulled noodles in the texture. YUM!
2. For summertime, serving the noodles cold is good too. Go to an asian market and get some Somen sauce ( a light soy flavored sauce). Cook your noodles like normal, and rinse them in cold water. Put them in a bowl with a few ice cubes, 70% somen sauce and 30% water. Very refreshing on a hot summer day

Best of luck to everyone!

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.