How To: Andrew Wong’s noodle-pulling step-by-step

1. Place your rested dough on a lightly oiled work surface.
2. Gently pull the dough between your hands outwards to check its elasticity. If there is lots of resistance and the dough breaks easily, you have messed up! Either you haven’t added enough water to the original dough, or you haven’t allowed enough time for the dough to relax.
3. Once your dough is suffi ciently elastic, start to whip it against the work surface. It should extend in length with each whipping action.
4. You should hear a loud bang as the dough hits against the table with each whip, giving you a good indication of the condition of the dough. The hitting action also warms your dough up, enhancing its elasticity.
5. Widen your arms with each whip, making the dough longer each time.
6. When the rope of dough is about twice your arm span, fold it in half.
7. Repeat the whipping action against the table. Each time the dough becomes twice your arm span, fold it in half and repeat the process. You will really begin to get a feel for the dough by doing this 10, 20, 30, maybe 100 times! You will also get a massive shoulder ache, but just think like Rocky Balboa and repeat ‘No pain, no gain’!
8. Now lightly bounce the rope of dough between your arms, and when it extends to around 1½ times its original length, rotate your right hand around your left hand to start a plaiting action in the dough. The dough will begin to spin round itself into a single length.
9. Grab the bottom of this single length of dough and repeat the process of lightly bouncing the rope of dough between your arms and plaiting it.
10. When you feel that the dough is elastic enough to start pulling (this will become intuitive eventually), lay the rope of dough on the work surface in a ‘C’ shape. Lightly flour the dough and, using your hands, roll the rope downwards so that you being to see a plait pattern form in the rope.
11. Grab either end of the dough with your hands and gently pull outwards. This is the moment of truth. If it breaks, you need to knead the dough further using the methods described so far, but if it extends without any problem, you are about to pull your first set of noodles!
12. Extend your rope of dough; you have now created 2 dough strands.
13. With a hand at either end of the dough, join your right hand with your left, allowing the dough to join. You should now have 4 strands of dough hanging from one hand.
14. Using the middle finger of your right hand, pass through the loop created from the 4 strands of dough and pull gently and extend the dough to arm’s length. Bring your hands together to create 8 strands of dough.
15. Repeat the process 6 times in total to achieve 128 strands of dough, or what you would then call noodles!

CHEF’S TIP

If the noodle-pulling as well as your will to live begins to fail, do not fear. Cover the dough for another few hours before trying again. And if this still fails, add more flour to the dough to make it firm to the touch and unsticky. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin to a thickness of 2mm and then roll up the sheet of dough. Using a sharp knife, begin to cut the rolled-up dough into 2mm slices, which, when unravelled, will look like strands of noodles. Lightly dust your cut noodles before cooking them as instructed.

Recipe taken from A Wong: The Cookbook by Andrew Wong. Available here.