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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.

You know how I said I was done with Jeanne D’Arc? Well, something about that game just doesn’t bore me. I’m still playing it, even after I’ve beaten it. Its addictive qualities are not as impressive as Disgaea, but they present some pretty significant challenges after you complete the game and it makes it feel like you haven’t really played the game fully. So now I’m working on leveling a few characters to the level cap, and then we’ll see if I get tired of the darned thing.

I’ve also been introduced to Patapon by a coworker. I didn’t realize it was made by the same people who made Loco Roco. That is, until I booted it up. The artwork and sound is immediately recognizable. I think that’ll be my next PSP game. I loved Loco Roco

I’m working on something. Something I’ve wanted to work on for a pretty long while, but never really committed fully to it. I worked on it previously, but was never able to find enough resources on the web. So I went to the drawing board and decided to tackle the problem from the start and document everything so I could put the resources on the web for other people to use. I’ll be making a post soon with lots of details. Until then, here’s a teaser:

I just got done with Jeanne D’Arc for the PSP. Well, i should clarify. I BEAT it about 3 weeks ago, but there is a bit of gameplay to be had after you beat it, and i was playing with that. I DECIDED three days ago that i was done. I tried pretty hard to level my characters enough such that i could beat the extra Colosseum levels, but the play style i chose for the normal part of the game just didn’t work for some of the colosseum levels.

I don’t think i play strategy games correctly. I think maybe i don’t like them. I know i don’t really care for RTS games, but i’ve always had fun with turn based strategy games. FF Tactics and Disgaea were tons of fun. The problem i have with them is that i don’t see how any RTS games are different. Warcraft is the same as Total Annihilation is the same as Starcraft is the same as you get the idea. this definitely hinder my ability to enjoy them. The biggest issue with not seeing the differences is that i play them all the same way, and so i’m always just playing the same game. I don’t know if that’s my fault or it’s the fault of the game designers…

Anyways, the way i play all strategy games is with brute force. If my units aren’t tough enough to kill the baddies, i don’t go find the kryptonite unit for what i’m up against, i just make more of the unit i’ve already committed myself to. Maybe i should read some strategy before i play my next strategy game. I bet that would make it a lot more fun.

I was over at the NAB Show on Monday, and one of the booths I spent a good bit of time at was Adobe. They showed a demo of some kind of new flash web UI tool that was all drag and drop (no coding required) and that looked very cool. Web developers have it too easy.

But what impressed me a lot was the Flash Media Server 2.5 demo. They showed Hulu.com, which I had checked out about 6 months ago when they were in beta (and wasn’t really impressed). It has come a long ways, and it is really quite cool now. It’s literally TV on the internet. You can watch tv episodes and movies (uncut, apparently), and they splice in a few 15 second advertisements here and there. They’ve also got HD (you can get there by clicking the “HD Gallery” link at the very bottom of their page. I’m guessing NBC.com has done stuff LIKE this, but it’s really nice to have a one stop shop. I want everything to be really easy, and Hulu makes it that way.

Ok, so Adobe was also doing some nifty stuff with H.264. Namely, streaming a live feed. Up until now, I didn’t think it was possible to stream an H.264 flv if it wasn’t closed for write (there are some header issues to deal with when the file is closed). I’d like to find out how they did that… More homework, I suppose.

Well, I “fixed” my compy. I’ve known for a while that there were problems with the nvidia sata controller (i have an a8n-sli premium), and I’ve been working off the Silicon Image controller since then.

When i moved into my new place, i put a wireless card into one of my PCI slots to “borrow” some bandwidth until we got our AT&T set up. Apparently, the wireless card was the source of the problem. I had tried an AirLink card at first, and it made my computer have some serious problems booting up. I then switched to a NetGear, and i was able to get it working. It was secretly malfunctioning, though. Either i have a bad PCI bus, or my computer is not good with Wireless cards. I took the card out, and i haven’t had a crash since. It’s been about a week now. That’s good news. I don’t have to reformat. HOORAY!

April fools is tomorrow, and I wish I knew someone with a Mac. This would be a fun prank to pull. Oh well, I’ll just have to think of something else.

Well, my computer has been blue screening itself with a “MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION” a lot recently. I get about an hour of use before it dies and i have to restart it.

I ran some diagnostics, and it doesn’t appear to be the motherboard, CPU, or RAM. I had this problem before when i had my hard drives connected to the Nvidia raid controller on my board (an A8N-SLI premium), and after moving over to the silicon image raid controller, i thought my problems were solved. It was ok for about 6 months.

Well, since all the system hardware checked out, I’m beginning to wonder if the problem lies in one of my hard drives. I have two 10k raptors for an OS, and a 500GB drive for data, and one of them is … squeaking. I think it’s the 500GB. more experiments tonight…

I heard some Fats Waller music on Pandora the other day, so I bought the Handlful of Keys boxed set. Well, it’s a lot of fun. Fats’ favorite word seems to be an enthusiastic “YEAH!”, although it sounds a bit more like “EAH!”

Top songs so far are “My good friend the milkman says” and “The curse of an aching heart.” Tracks where Fats talks are most amusing. “Let me tell you something woman, you made a big fat greasy bum outta me, and I ain’t gonna stand for it.” fun stuff.

Ok, Professor Layton is a good game. But god damn, every once in a while one of those puzzles just makes me angry. Specifically, puzzle no 116:

Now, when the instructions say “any three numbers” and “vertically, horizontally, or diagonally”, I’m gonna expect that EVERY row and EVERY column must add to the same amount, not just the middle row and middle column. I spent about 30 minutes playing around under that impression, only to find out I was doing it wrong (the answer for what i thought it was is 47, by the way). I was a little frustrated by that. Only problem is, I’m not really sure how it should be worded to make it any better…

Or take puzzle no. 67. It’s simply not solvable on your own. There isn’t enough information.

That being said, it’s a good game. You take the bad with the good, i guess.