Authentic Lanzhou Lamian, alkaline hand pulled noodles: The Mount Everest of Chinese cooking.

Teaching you how to make Lanzhoustyle Lamian is a bit awkward. See… it’s less of a recipe, and more of a skill. It’d be like teaching you a language – I can introduce the stuff you need to know, but you won’t be fluent after your first class. And that’s ok.

As such, there’s been a relative dearth of good information out there in Chinese on this noodle, let alone in English. So we felt like this would be a good video to clear the air a bit.

Written recipe is over here on /r/cooking apologies for the delay, there was some... feature creep:

  / a_definitiveish_guide_to_chinese_pulled_no...  


250g Pizza flour
120g Ice Water mixed with ½ tsp salt
Any dense oil for rubbing. Olive would work great. We used about ~3 tbsp through the whole process
10g water mixed with 2g Penghui

Homemade Penghui: 100g salt, 90g sodium carbonate, 8g sodium triphosphate, 2.5g (3/4tsp) sodium metabisulfite.

Remember the fundamental kneading technique the ‘making the abacus string’: Press everything flat by first punching it down with all your force, then twisting and doing the ‘hand cross’ flattening motion. Then curl up the dough about an inch or so, move down the dough, and repeat that once or twice (depending on the size of your dough) to get a long string. The fold that in half, and optionally fold again if it’s still a little too long. Repeat.

Besides that, Lamian is simply a matter of:
Do the cat claw to incorporate the flour. Quick knead
Optional but recommended rest
Make your abacus string. This will likely take 3040 minutes and suck
Add the Penghui. Do either the 3fold2box technique or the abacus string, up to you
Comb your gluten. Do the twist if you want to look cool and impress your friends. Do the folding if you want to follow us. 56 folds is good to pull
Pull the noodles. Five times for ‘normal thin’, six for ‘hair thin’

So easy lah

If you’re curious about where to buy some of this stuff…

The Penghui is available through agents, but you need to buy a stupid amount of it: https://www.chinahao.com/product/5979...

The sodium triphosphate: https://www.amazon.com/Tripolyphospha...

The sodium metabisulfite: https://www.amazon.com/LDCarlsonRH...
And if you don’t feel like pounding salt, some powdered sodium chloride: https://www.amazon.com/reagentgrade...

As always, huge thank you to Trevor James a.k.a. the Food Ranger for continuing to allow us to raid his backlog for broll haha. Super nice of him, if you'd like to see the full video of him eating noodles in Xi'an (and it's a good one), definitely check it out:

   • EXTREME Hand Pulled Noodles Tour in X...  

Also a big thank you to “the Perfect Loaf” for their footage of the stretch and fold technique. Hope to see more content from them :)

   • Stretch and Folds During Bulk Ferment...  

And the video of the conical screw mixer is over here. Super satisfying thing to watch lol. As an aside, if any budding entrepreneurs out there want to manufacture their own penghui… I think the 5L version of this would get the job done. I think this is precisely the type of thing our homemade Penghui was missing:

   • Mixing Dry Powders  Conical Screw Mi...  

And lastly, the slow motion pizza toss is here. I would implore you to check out his other videos, especially the squirrel videos. Some old school YouTube right there:

   • Pizza Toss Slow Mo  

And check out our Patreon if you'd like to support the project!

  / chinesecookingdemystified  

Outro Music: คิดถึงคุณจัง by ธานินทร์ อินทรเทพ
Found via My Analog Journal (great channel):    • Live Stream: Favourite BSide Tracks