Personal essays
On learning more than how to make a bowl of ramen
Pull noodles
I’ve had an obsession with hand-pulled noodles for a long time.
After using just the right ingredients and preparing the dough, the actual process of pulling the noodles goes really quickly.
There are a couple of styles and two weeks ago when I was in New York I just happened to see both of them.
I’m even more obsessed.
Kevin and I had stopped into a food court to order something for lunch. We’d gotten rice noodles on the street and now wanted to sit and share an order of dumplings.
While we sat, the stall that we ordered from got an order for noodle soup.
Without much fuss, a guy came out of the back, grabbed some dough, and pulled each end to arms length. He folded it in half, dipped it in flour, and stretched it again. He rinsed and repeated seven or eight times until he had hundreds of strands of noodles which he dropped into boiling water.
I want to learn how to do that.
Biangbiang noodles
We wandered a bit, had some tea, and were joined by Kevin’s youngest son Ben.
Ben found a place where we could have an early dinner before heading into the city for jazz.
We went into a small place in a basement and ordered noodle soup.
The cook grabbed a handful of dough, flattened it out, pulled it out a little bit. He tore off strips and pulled the noodles while banging them onto the counter top and made perfect thin wide noodles that he boiled then added to soup.
I have no idea if the banging on the countertop is why these are called biangbiang noodles.
All I know is I want to learn how to do that too.
Ramen noodles
These days when I travel for work, I try to add in some days for fun and often take a class to learn something.
The New York trip was for fun, but the San Francisco trip last month was for work and I scheduled some fun things around it.
But first, I searched for a class to learn how to make pull noodles.
The closest I came was a ramen class.
It turns out the Japanese word ramen comes from the Chinese word lamian which means pulled noodles. The two types of noodles aren’t at all the same and they aren’t made in the same way, although ramen also contains an alkaline additive that gives ramen noodles their distinctive chew and helps them hold up in the broth.
We mixed flour, salt, water, and lye water to make the dough. We then rolled it out and cut it. After we prepared out bowls, we boiled the noodles briefly, shook them out, added the cooked noodles to the bowls, and ate the ramen soup immediately.
But that’s not what I learned.
The real lesson
One of the two teachers let us in to the five o’clock class at a quarter til.
He checked each group in and led us to a table that had already been set up for the right number of people in our party.
I was by myself and so in front of me was a water glass, a pitcher of water, a plate, a pen, and chopsticks in a paper wrapper.
A few minutes later the other teacher delivered a dumpling appetizer and asked me to fill out the information on the paper wrapper.
So within minutes of entering I had a snack and had filled out a small form with my name, allergy information, and preferences for the final bowl of ramen (yes, I would like an egg).
The first teacher cleared the dumpling plate and took the form, read it, and placed it in front of one of the KitchenAid mixers. There was one per table.
While one teacher delivered a short lecture the other prepared the broth and the boiling water.
Both teachers then talked us through adding the ingredients to the mixer and finishing the kneading on the counter. As we finished with the ingredients, one instructor cleared the bowls they were in and had them cleaned and dried while we went on to the next step.
We rolled and cut the noodles using attachments for the KitchenAid.
A couple of groups at a time went to the big vats of boiling water to boil our noodles in noodle strainers. We shook them out and returned to our stations where a bowl had been set up with hot broth. We added the noodles to the broth and then were instructed to add the tare, vegetables, and egg.
While we ate, one of the instructors cleaned the bowls and noodle attachments for each machine while the other cleaned the kitchen. The first one wiped up the stations and before we had finished our ramen, all of the stations had been set up for the next class.
They served mochi and one instructor washed our bowls while the other took our questions and had us out of there exactly on time.
Sure, I learned to make ramen noodles in the class, but I learned so much about efficiency and class organization. It was a lesson in instruction.
I still want to learn to make pull noodles.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 276. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe