r/AskCulinary

Hi all!

I’m trying to make Lanzhou lamian noodles from scratch, but my dough has very little strength or elasticity. It stretches poorly and doesn’t seem to develop the extensibility needed for hand-pulled noodles.

I refrigerated the dough overnight hoping the elasticity would improve, but it still isn’t great.

I’ve uploaded a YouTube video showing my kneading process and the current condition of the dough. I’d appreciate any feedback on what might be going wrong and how I can improve the dough’s strength and elasticity.

Link to video is here:

Recipe:

-500g of blue twin spoons special dumpling wheat flour

-300ml water (60% hydration)

-5g sodium carbonate diluted in 12ml warm water (I baked bicarbonate of soda at 130 degrees celsius for 1 hour)

-4 g salt

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Just a random thought I've had for a while:

If I want a small amount of simple syrup, I mix 1 cup of sugar with 1 cup of water. If I want a lot of simple syrup, I mix 4 cups of sugar with 4 cups of water. Just multiply all of the components by the same number.

Is there anything that you cook where you change the amount of ingredients by different factors? Like if you want 2x the yield, you only want 1.5x of this ingredient.

I started preheating my oven to 400 degrees 40 minutes ago and it’s still at 330. Is this normal? The rest of my meal is already done and has been for a while, I expected it to take only a few minutes