Asian Wheat Noodles
and Dumplings
Two very different families of noodles are
made in Asia. Starch noodles are described
below. Asian wheat noodles — Chinese mian
— bear some resemblance to European pastas
made from bread wheat. They’re typically
made from low-or moderate-protein flours,
and are formed not by extrusion but by
sheeting and cutting or by stretching. The
most spectacular form of noodle production is
that of Shanghai’s hand-pulled noodles, la
mian, for which the maker starts with a thick
rope of dough, swings, twists, and stretches it
to arms’ length, brings the ends together to
make the one strand into two — and repeats
the stretching and folding as many as eleven
times to make up to 4,096 thin noodles! Asian
noodles are both elastic and soft, their texture
created by both their weak gluten and by
amylopectin-rich starch granules. Salt, usually