The world's most insanely beautiful noodles

Chinese noodles... we've all had them. Depending upon who makes them, they can be good, they can be lousy, they can be soft and silky, they can be soggy or doughy, they can be snappingly chewy, and they can be slithery conduits for sauce or soup. Noodles can easily make or break a dish, but you almost never hear the word "glorious" applied to what in fact is little more than strings of flour and water. 

Pulled noodles, though... now those are my idea of perfectly glorious food! But what's the big deal, right? After all, what are noodles anyway but flour and water? 

It's just not that simple, at least not when it comes to what the Chinese call lamian (pulled noodles) or shoulamian (hand-pulled noodles). Pulled noodles are truly extraordinary. They're totally different from any other noodle that I know of because of the artistry involved in shaping them and the resulting texture. (See the embedded video below for an almost 10-minute performance by Chef Tony Wu as he turns a blob of dough into thousands of threadlike strands, with Chef Martin Yan narrating.)

And yes, this is artistry in my book. This takes talent. This takes practice. And this takes the right ingredients.

If you've never seen them made or you've never enjoyed a ridiculously sensuous  mouthful of these delicate strands, I fully understand your skepticism and envy the moment when you take that first bite, because if you love noodles, you'll get a rush of pure joy. 

A skein of noodles in the making

It takes a master to pull these off (that was a pun, folks), and masters of this caliber are few and far between, especially outside of China. Let's first talk about why these pulled noodles are so perfect and some of the secrets I've been able to glean as to how they are made, and then come back to a video of a noodle master at work.

Pulled noodles are so great because the repeated pulling and twisting of the high-gluten dough results in an extremely resilient noodle. Water is added to the flour, it's kneaded until it's very smooth, and then it's left to rest until the dough becomes as soft as a baby's bottom. You can see how soft the dough is when the chef in the video starts pulling the dough, as the ends keep coming off, but that soon ends as the dough toughens up.

Chefs Yan & Wu having fun

Note that the chef keeps pulling away, but always in the same direction. The reason for this is that the gluten has been rudely startled out of its nice floury stupor and has come alive, ordering up all of its tiny protein strands into extremely tensile threads, and by carefully folding the dough back on itself in one direction, the strands get lined up, and then the noodles allow themselves to be pulled longer and longer and longer, all the while stretching out their tense little gluten muscles. So, when you bite down on them, they fight back a bit, and that is my idea of a wonderful noodle. Another thing is, all that pulling ensures that the surface of the noodle gets covered with little crags and jaggedly bits.


Why is that important, you may ask. Well, unlike rolled noodles that are soft and smooth and have the texture of silk sheets, those bumpy surfaces on lamian cradle droplets of sauce and soup, making each mouthful a mind-blowing combination of flavors. See, you don't have to slurp up your soup with a mouthful of these noodles - they're toting all those flavors on their own, thank you very much. And if you get a lusciously rich meat sauce on them with tiny nuggets, say, of garlic and ginger? What happens is that all those flavors are going to have a big party in your mouth, so you've got textures, tastes, aromas, mouth feel, and pure bliss, just from a mouthful of noodles.

Dragon whisker noodles

So, we have all the reasons for why the noodles do what they do, but what allows them to be pulled so perfectly? What are those secret little knacks that no one wants to mention? The answer to this eluded me for years. I talked to folks from Shanxi province up in the cold Chinese north where these noodles came from, but nothing was revealed. I read Chinese cookbooks, tracked down Chinese websites, and searched around for the longest time trying to ferret out the answer. And it wasn't until about a year ago that I finally landed a few of those precious ah-ha moments.

What happened was that famed Chinese chef Martin Yan came to our area last October and hosted an event called the Noodle Fest in Celebration of Autumn Moon. What's even better, we had a chance to meet and eat with this completely charming and personable t.v. host. The food and the wines were, as to be expected, more than simply fine, located as we were in his Yan Can Cook restaurant in the South Bay. There were little lessons on fruit and vegetable carving that warmed up our appetites and made us happy to be there. These alone should have been enough.

But then we had a fabulous demonstration of Shanxi province's bizarrely beautiful pulled noodles. Performing the honors was the astounding Tony Wu, executive chef of Fortune House Seafood Restaurant in Burnaby, B.C.

After watching Chef Wu at work, I figured out at least four secrets to pulled noodles: To begin with, they have to be made with Chinese high-gluten flour, which is a totally different animal from American bread flour. Chef Yan told a story about trying to bring Chinese noodle flour into the States and getting lots of grief from Customs, so that was clue number one.

Try this flour

Many of the Chinese flours I've tried have been of uneven quality, and about the best that I have found for Chinese dough is actually a Korean brand with a polar bear as the trademark; it comes in a white bag with green on it, and there's an illustration of a bowl full of dough and bread fixin's (see the photo on the left). I've used this flour for lots of Chinese noodles and breads, and it's the best I've found by far insofar as gluten count and quality of the product are concerned. The same brand also offers a flour with blue on it, and that's the low-gluten variety, so don't pick up the wrong kind.


The second secret has to do with moisture, I think. Watch the video below and see how Chef Wu skillfully pulls and winds the skein of noodles - it's a pretty wet dough to begin with that dries and toughens as the pulling gets going. Filtered water would be a good idea because at least in my area we have terribly hard water, and all those chemicals wouldn't do the dough any favors.

Water is important in another way, as well. Chef Yan pointed out that California's air is notoriously dry, and so the dough quickly becomes brittle if water isn't added at critical times. You can see Chef Wu occasionally dipping a hand into a pan of water, which drips down onto the dough and turns it supple again. Flour is scattered over the dough only at the end when he's ready to turn the dough into noodles, and then the dough is dipped in the flour at regular intervals so that the strands take on a bit of the flour and stay separate.

The finished noodles, fine as threads

A third key that Chef Yan mentioned was that the dough is twisted one way and then twisted in the opposite direction the second time around. That makes sense. In this way the dough strands stay more or less straight, because if the dough was twisted in only one direction, the strands would soon tighten up into an angry coil that nothing could ever untie.


Finally, even pressure is used in the pulling. And towards the end, when the strands are much more brittle, this careful monitoring of how much and how little pressure to exert on the dough appears critical.


Anyway, that's what I gleaned from watching these delightful chefs at work.

I'm still working on the ingredients, which seem to be little more than the flour, water, and some salt. I haven't discovered any secret additives yet. If I do, you'll be the first to know... (And if you happen to have any lamian secrets to share, please post a comment!)

Chef Tony Wu's pulled noodles, with Chef Martin Yan from C J Phillips on Vimeo.

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