Hand pulled noodles

Pork sautéed with fermented black beans and spicy fermented cabbage on a bed of hand pulled noodles.

If my instagram feed and meals of late are anything to go by you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’ve gone a little bit noodle mad, and well I guess I have. But it’s probably more that I made a large batch of hand pulled noodle dough and it freezes and thaws well. So you’ll have to forgive what is almost a repost of a recipe, but this one has more pretty pictures!

Noodles (enough for 4 portions)
400 g Flour, high gluten such as bread flour
240 ml Water
6 g salt (dissolved in the water)


Tip the flour into a large bowl and make a well in the centre. Pour in the water and mix to form a ball of dough. Don’t worry about mixing it too much, it doesn’t need to be a smooth ball of dough. Cover with cling film and let it rest for 15 minutes.


Place the dough on a clean work surface and start to roll out into a log about 60cm in length, take one end and fold it in half to the other end, repeat the rolling and folding for about 15 minutes, giving it a chance to rest for a couple of minutes every five or so. The dough should be very smooth by now, if not keep kneading. Place the dough in a clean bowl and cover with cling film, let it rest at room temperature for a hour.


Take the dough and shape it into a rectangle about 10 cm wide and 3–4 cm thick, cut off a 1 cm slice, so you should have a rough rectangle of dough 10 cm long, 3 cm wide and 1 cm thick, coat the slice in a neutral oil, such as Canola or rice bran, lay the piece on a tray. Repeat until done. Cover the tray with cling film and place in the fridge for a hour.

Tip: Now is the stage to freeze off portions if you wish to do so, lay the portioned noodles between sheets of baking paper and in an airtight container/bag/cling-film. Just take out of the freezer 20 minutes before you’re ready to pull and cook the noodles.


Take the dough out of the fridge ten minutes or so before you want to cook, and have a large pot of salted water on the boil, you want to stretch the noodles and get them straight into the pot, this is best done one serving at a time, so don’t try and do the whole lot at once, five pieces is a pretty generous serving size.


Take a piece of dough and start to stretch it out holding one end in each hand and oscillating it up and down as you go, slapping it against the bench. Sounds a bit weird, but easy once you’ve got the hang of it. Lay the pulled noodle out on the bench and move on to the next. Once the serving of noodles have been pulled, gently roll a rolling pin over the noodles, don't really use any pressure just let the weight of the pin help even out the noodles.

You can either cook the noodles as they are in salted boiling water, which I think is my preferred way or you can take one end of a noodle and tear it down the middle right to the other end, but don’t tear it in two leave it as one long noodle, cook in boiling salted water for about 3 minutes, once they float to the surface they’re done.


A must have condiment for any noodle dish, chilli oil. Pretty damn easy to make too, Chilli, oil, salt and xanthan gum (0.5%) blended together.

Pizza dough, revised

With the death of my trusty Kenwood mixer, well not death but I need to order a couple of capacitors and get out the trusty soldering iron, I’ve had to revisit my trusty pizza dough recipe, I used to make a pretty standard 60% hydration dough but recently have been experimenting with the water content of the dough and have found nudging up the liquid content to 80% and adding about 5% fat, in the form of olive oil, has drastically improved my crust. I mentioned earlier, the trusty mixer is dead, and quite frankly I’ve become pretty lazy when it comes to kneading dough, I rely pretty heavily on it, and hey I broke a bone in my wrist so kneading is not that pleasant at the moment, excuses excuses, anyway this is my no knead method that doesn’t take 24+ hours but does involve a little more labour than mix and forget. It will require a good 3-4 hours of your time, but probably no more than 10 minutes of attention, the initial mixing, and then hourly folding, and by the end of it you should have a wonderful light puffy dough.

500 g flour
400 g warm water
25 ml Olive oil
5 g salt
2 g yeast
2 g sugar/honey

Stir together the water, sugar and yeast, let it sit until the yeast has bloomed and you have nice frothy mixture.

Mix together the salt and olive oil, make a well and pour in the yeast-water along with the oil. Set aside for 30-45 minutes, this will give the gluten a chance to hydrate.

After the dough has rested, and risen, probably about doubled, use a spatula to bring one edge up to the centre, rotate the bowl 90° and repeat until all four ‘sides’ have been folded over 3 or 4 times, let the dough rest for another hour and repeat. This is a long fermenting dough and the folding will be repeated 3 more times, about 4 hours rising time in total.

Pick off a lump of dough, roll thin, trying to use as little extra flour as possible, and cook in a very hot oven (250-300°C) on a pizza stone that has been preheating for 40-60 minutes until blistered and golden.

Mandarin Pancakes

Well it's a lazy Sunday. I've just got my pork cheek on the smoker, after a two week wait as it cured and hung. Hrmm actually it looks like it might be smoking a bit too much, maybe the woods on fire. False alarm. Anyway, after that's done and I've finished writing this post, I'll be relaxing in the sun with a cold beer devouring the latest issue of Lucky Peach. But enough about lazy Sundays and sunshine, on with the post.

Guess what? I was having pork belly again! This time with a tasty Chinese spice rub. The conundrum of it though, was what to have it with. A bit over roast vege and rice, but I wanted some carbs to have with it. After a deep introspection, or rather making myself hungrier by working my way through cookbooks, blogs and magazines, and still at a loss, a little light of inspiration went off. I thought of those pancakes you get with Peking duck, they can’t be hard to make right? I’m pretty sure I’d have all of the ingredients, they can’t be that complicated. I’m not leading up to a ‘but I was wrong’ I promise. After a bit of research on the Internet, and comparing several recipes, I was fairly confident, they were indeed easy to make, and I had everything I needed, a pan, sesame oil, flour, boiling water.


Mix together 2 cups of flour and 1 cup of boiling water, and kneed until it forms a smooth ball. Wrap and rest the dough for 30 minutes.

Roll out the dough to a thickness of a 2mm, then cut out rounds with a cutter, repeat this until all the dough is used. You will need an even number of rounds.

Coat one side of a round with sesame oil using a pastry brush and then place another dough round on top, the sesame oil in the middle. Repeat until all the rounds are sandwiched together.

Roll out each round paper thin, store between a couple of tea-towels so they don't dry out.


In a dry frying pan, cook for 60-90 seconds on each side. And again store the cooked pancakes between a couple of tea-towels.


When all the pancakes have been cooked, pull apart into two pancakes.

Bread Dough

basic bread dough (great for pizza)

1kg Strong(Bread) Flour (a mix of fine semolina (flour) and strong wheat flour makes for a crunchier crust)
600 ml Warm Water
1 Tbsp Yeast
Salt to Taste (flour can take a lot of salt)
Pinch of sugar

Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the water and let it sit for about 10 minutes until the yeast blooms (froths).

Work the flour and salt in to the the liquid bringing together and then tip out on to a work surface and kneed for about 10 minutes (until the dough is smooth and elastic).

Put in a covered bowl and let sit for about 30 minutes to an hour (until it has at least doubled in size, depending on room temperature etc this could take longer than an hour).

Once it has doubled you could pull off balls and roll out in to pizza bases, but it is better to knock it back and let it double in size again.

Take a chunk of dough about the size of an orange and on a floured surface roll out with a rolling pin making sure it doesn't stick. I prefer a thin base for my pizza but you can have what ever thickness you desire, just add a minute or two for cooking times.

Place a tray on the middle shelf of your oven and heat to 225°C (fan if you have it)

Once the oven is hot, and your pizza assembled (best to do this just before it goes in the oven).
Take the tray out of the oven and slide the pizza on to it and put back in the oven (I find it easiest to have the pizza on a sheet of baking paper and transfer that to the tray).

If you have a thinnish base and not overloaded with toppings the pizza should only take 10 minutes max.

You can easily get 6 - 8 thin crust pizzas from the quantities in this recipe.

You can also use it to make pita breads.

1. Don't use semolina in the dough mix.
   
2. Use a smaller ball of dough and don't roll too thick.
3. Have the tray in the lower third of the oven and temperature the highest your oven will go.
4. Place the rolled out dough on the tray (don't take it out of the oven, but be careful not to burn yourself)
5. They will take about 2 minutes to cook.