This recipe is for a La Mian-style hand-pulled noodle. you will hand-pull these noodles, however, this is a simplified version that you can do at home, and it is not supposed to get you to be able to make noodles like you’ve seen in videos!
Active Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour 50 minutes
Ingredients
- 2 cups of all-purpose flour | 8½ oz | 240g
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ½ cup room temp water | 4 fluid ounces | 120ml
Equipment
- Food Processor with the standard metal blade
- This recipe makes enough noodles for 4 servings if your noodle dish is one of many dishes in a meal. If it is the meal, it’s enough for 2-3 servings depending on how much more you add to the noodles, and how hungry you are!
Instructions
- Measure the dry ingredients, and add them to the work bowl of your food processor.
- Measure the water into something that you can easily pour from like a liquid measuring cup with spout.
- With the food processor running, slowly pour the water into the work bowl. The dough will slowly come together. Scrape the bowl down if it needed. Once the dough forms into a single bowl, allow the processor to run for another 25-30 seconds.
- Decide the dough into two equal portions, and roll into a rectangle about ¼-inch thick.
- Place them on a lightly oiled plate or tray. Turn each piece over so that both sides are lightly oiled. Cover with plastic and let them rest for 90 minutes.
- Set a large pot of water on the stove and bring to a boil. Add a pinch of salt.
- To make the noodles, take one of the rectangles, and cut it into strips about ⅜-inch wide or 1 cm for thin noodles. You can cut wider strips for wider noodles.
- Hold each end of the strip in each hand, and gently pull in opposite directions to stretch the noodle. While pulling, use and up and down motion and allow the noodle to hit your countertop on the downward movement.
- When your hands are a bit wider than your shoulders, you can gather both ends into one hand, and loop your finger through the dough, and repeat the stretching and up/down motion to get some more stretch out of the noodle.
- Lay out the formed noodles on a sheet pan or counter, and lightly dust with flour. Transfer all the noodles at once to the boiling water.
- Cook the noodles for 2 minutes. Serve immediately.
Notes:
- To hand-knead, use chopsticks to mix the dough until the flour is absorbed. Use your hands to form a cohesive dough ball, then cover and let it rest for 10 minutes covered. Then knead for 2-3 minutes until you form a smooth dough.
- Chopsticks are great for mixing small amounts of dough because the dough doesn’t have a lot of surface area to stick to. It’s easy to use one chopstick to scrape any sticky dough off of the other as needed.
- If you are using a stand mixer, use the dough hook and mix all the ingredients together and run on a low speed until the dough is smooth, about 3 minutes.