Hand Pulled Noodles in Chili Oil

There's a hand-pulled noodle shop local to me that I am in love with. There's a little window where you can watch the expert the noodles completely by hand. The menu is sized perfectly to cover all of your (authentic) Chinese food cravings without being overwhelming. The space is cozy, simple, and unpretentious. The staff are friendly and accommodating. It's one of my top five local eateries for sure.

My favorite dish to order at this place is the hand pulled noodles in chili oil, a.k.a. the biang biang noodles. They're a wide, flat noodle tossed in a really savory, well-spiced chili oil. That dish is the one that inspired today's recipe.

Ingredients [serves 2]:
noodles
225 grams cake flour
½ teaspoon salt
115 milliliters cold water

chili oil
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon crushed pepper flakes
½ teaspoon grated ginger
2 cloves garlic, sliced
2 scallions, chopped
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon black vinegar

Start by dissolving the salt in the water and slowly drizzling it over the flour while tossing with a fork. Once the mixture becomes crumbly and too difficult to continue mixing by fork, use your hands to start kneading. The dough will seem pretty dry. If it's not coming together at all, add a little more water, a ½ teaspoon at a time, until it forms one cohesive mass.

Knead the dough for a good 15 to 20 minutes or until it's smooth, elastic, and bouncy. If you're not keen on getting a workout, you can always use a stand mixer instead. I just think that if you're hand pulling the noodles, you might as well also knead by hand.

Put the dough in a bowl and cover with cling film and set aside to rest for 2 hours. The kneading process really develops the gluten in the dough which will help yield a deliciously chewy noodle. However, this also means that the dough will be way too springy and will not be easy to stretch. That's why the dough needs to rest.

Once the dough has been rested, divide into 12 pieces and roll each piece into a log.

Oil the logs, put in a bowl, cover with cling film, and rest the dough for another hour.

Get a big pot of water on to boil before you start making the noodles. To form the noodles, use a rolling pin to gently flatten the logs of dough into flat ovals.

Use a skewer or chopstick to make an indent through the center of the dough, long ways. This will allow you to be able to easily divide the pulled dough into two noodles. Grab each end of the dough between your thumb and first two fingers. Start to gently pull the noodles apart, swinging the dough up and down, tapping the center of the dough onto the counter as you pull.

Gently pry apart the dough along the "perforation" made by the dowel and then separate the dough into two noodles.

Continue with the rest of the dough pieces until you have a pile of noodles. Make sure to leave the noodles as spread out as possible so they don't end up sticking together.

Drop the noodles into boiling water and cook for just a couple of minutes until they're slightly translucent looking.

Drain the noodles and drop into the sauce, which will be explained below.

Okay, so traditionally, the way you make biang biang noodles is to pile the noodles into a bowl with aromatics (ginger and garlic) and chili flakes and then you're supposed to pour boiling hot oil over the top of the noodles. I wasn't comfortable making them this way, so I decided to dress them in a method I was more comfortable with.

The sauce should be prepared before you boil the noodles so that when they're done cooking, which doesn't take long, the noodles can be dropped right into the sauce.

Start by adding a good amount of canola oil and sesame oil to a pan over low heat. Add in the garlic, ginger, the whites and light greens of the chopped scallions, and chili flakes. Let these ingredients cook until the garlic is fragrant and the oil is tinged red from the chili.

Once the spices and aromatics have bloomed in the oil, add in the soy sauce and black vinegar and that's the sauce; done.

Toss the noodles in the fragrant chili oil, garnish with the dark green chopped scallion bits, and serve immediately.

I served the noodles alongside a big pan of mapo tofu.

The noodles are springy and chewy and delicious. There's no faking this texture with dried noodles. I love the saltiness and bite from the soy sauce and black vinegar. I enjoy how spicy the noodles are and biting into a crisp piece of garlic is a great textural contrast to the noodles. This is a really enjoyable dish, despite it being pretty time consuming (though, 90% that time is just spent resting the dough).

Here's the recipe page: