LONG LOST POST: Handmade Chinese Noodles

THIS IS A LOST POST FROM MY TIME IN HANGZHOU LAST SUMMER.  I HAD PROBLEMS UPLOADING THE VIDEO FROM CHINA AND THEN FORGOT ABOUT IT… BUT STILL INTERESTING…

Here is an amazing noodle-making process that you will find in places all over China.  It is called 拉面 (which means “pulled noodle”, and is spoken as “La Mian”).  These noodles are hand made moments before you eat them.  And they are really pulled in order to produce them.  I’d always thought noodles were made from flattened, cut dough, or else passed through an extrusion-type machine.  But as you can see from this video, 拉面 is made by hand, and in moments you end up with thin, uniform, spaghetti-like noodles.

I took this video of my friend 马苏力毛 (or Ma Su Li Mao, or Souliman).  He is the chief noodle maker at the La Mian shop across from the bus stop I use every day.  I often visit the shop where he works with his friends and family from his native province of 青海 （Qinghai, in West-Northern China).  They serve the handmade noodles in a deliciously-seasoned soup with fresh Qinghai beef (flown in daily, I am told).  It is truly a good dish. The fresh and soft noodles are very satisfying for lunch or dinner.

In the video you can see him go through the whole noodle-pulling process. Starting from the large and thick block of dough, he pulls and stretches the dough at arms-length into an elongated rope.  This he then twists and folds, before pulling and elongating again. This ‘warms up’ the dough and softens the wheat.  This large-dough pulling process goes on for some time -- and we see a few cycles in the video here.  When the dough is soft enough, he then breaks it into workable pieces – each about 1 foot in length.  These small sections he quickly rolls out on the floured table before rapidly pulling the dough, doubling it over, pulling again, doubling, pulling.  At each doubling, the noodle strands get thinner and thinner, until eventually they are about the size we would recognize as spaghetti.  At that point, the noodles are tossed into a large pot of boiling water, where they are cooked before being added to the pre-prepared soup. 

It is truly remarkable to watch.  They make the La Mian on demand for every customer who comes in.  Souliman always gives me a front row seat so I can watch him prepare the noodles, and we can chat about the NBA basketball teams and other topics!  He was happy to allow me to video his handiwork.