Noo dles

I've been baking (almost all) the daily bread for 40 years now. I was happy to buy a decent wholemeal loaf until the relentless industrial rise and rise of Greggs ate all the early rising mom&pop bakers out of business. I could and did make cheap and cheerful - every loaf is different but every loaf is good - bread thereafter. But my bread was never stellar because I was too lazy to put in the time to knead and knead and prove. The Beloved's grandmother put my efforts to shame because she wasn't ever lazy. Cheap + tasty + interesting + nutritious + ethical bread is a myth: you have to sacrifice one or more of those desiderata.

Like a lot of people we have given house-room to a pasta-maker but in our hands it was an expensive and cupboard-cluttering toy. We compromise in pasta and buy from Aldi like normal people. I had an Italian pal who routinely made the family tortellini by hand every day: spending much more time working at the process that it took her kids to eat it. I am in awe of such a parent; but I am not that parent.

I was therefore primed when pulled noodles popped up on Metafilter. As with [ferment] bread, these noodles require physico-chemical energy to make the proteins in flour do the cook's bidding. Leavened bread works best if the dough is worked - by hand or dough-hook - in a series of repeated push-pulls to s t r e t c h the glutenin molecules out into long chains which can mesh together in microsheets to catch the CO₂ bubbles produced by the yeast. The other component of 'gluten' is several types of gliadin which are the trigger for the gut intolerance in celiac disease.

Noodles [R in the making] don't rise but they're better for having a similar push-pull work-over. Dough has two properties: stretchibility vs elasticity. Depending on the product - bread, croissant, pastry-crust, noodle - the cook needs to tilt the balance one way or the other.

• resting allows the dough to de-sproinnnng itself and allow more stretching. When you're rolling and folding the dough and butter laminations of croissants, you pop the block in the fridge every so often to let it unwind
• over-kneading you can totally deconstruct the molecular matrix of dough by grinding it in a stand-mixed for two hours but most stand-mixers can't stand that and the bearings burn out.
• Use penghui 蓬灰 as a chemical dough softener. Trad chinese cooks use "alkaline water" which is a decoction of the plant Halogeton arachnoideus which is rich in potassium carbonate,K₂CO₃ this alk-water makes the noodle dough softer and more stretchable. 
• the carbonate salt is released from the plant by burning and the ash dissolved in water
• H. arachnoideus is in the same family as spinach Spinacia oleracea, fat-hen Chenopodium album; orache, Atriplex spp.; quinoa Chenopodium quinoa 
• penghui is not available in Tesco!
  
• glutathione from 'nutritional' = killed yeast aka nooch this is a potent dough-relaxer

Watch Tim Chin make Lamian pulled noodles: super informative; not too sciencey; practical.