On 8/11/2021 at 10:46 PM, Tropicalsenior said:This recipe for Chinese hand-pulled noodles showed up in my email the other day. I'm just curious. Do very many people make their own noodles and have you ever made them?
Very, very few people make their own noodles. In fact, the only people I've met who do so are professional noodle makers, one of whom attempted to teach me about twenty years ago. I go with the majority in this. It is not worth the effort.
Why spend time and effort making something so difficult to get right, when you can buy them so easily for much less than it would cost you to make them, to say nothing of the hard work and the high probability of failure?
I buy my lamian (拉面 - lā miàn, pulled noodles) freshly made from a small restaurant near my home which makes them to order as you watch. They are from Lanzhou and serve the noodles in various dishes, but also sell them uncooked for you to take home.
I doubt very much anyone has successfully made them from that recipe you linked to. For a start, the flour here is different (usually lower in gluten), and a herbal alkali known as 蓬灰 (péng huī), erigeron acris is added to the mix to make them more elastic. Only true masters can make the noodles without it; it takes years of practice.
I had a look at a few of the "Chinese" recipes listed below, too. They are awful; full of mistakes and false information. Hainanese chicken rice isn't Chinese; it's from Singapore. Kung pao isn't from Hunan; it's from Sichuan and the recipe is nothing like Kungpao (宫保- gōng bǎo) anyway! Those recipes are, at best, American restaurant dishes, but not good ones. Some of the comments are amusing, though. Especially one comment where the person substituted almost every ingredient in the recipe for something else then announced the recipe was garbage as it didn't taste good!
