Making You Po Mian From Scratch | Hand Pulled Noodles For Home Cooking (油泼面)

Hey there! Today we are going to make an amazing tasting bowl of Jopomyeon from scratch. And when I say from scratch, I mean everything from scratch. We're going to pull our own noodles and do our own condiments and it's going to be amazing. We're going to do a really nice and thick belt noodle that is going to absorb all the flavors and have a nice chewy texture. Now, I am not the most amazing or experienced when it comes to working with flour, dough, pastries, noodles, making any of these things. But if I can pull a bowl of noodles that tasted great, you can probably do it too. And that's where I think the value of this video really comes in. Now, there are much more efficient ways of doing a bowl of noodles like this, but the point of this is that we exchange amazing skill and technique for some time and patience. If you are patient and you follow this recipe, you'll get great results. So let's just get started. For the noodles, you're going to want to measure out a kilogram of all-purpose white flour to five grams of salt to about 450-ish grams of water. What you'll find in North America, or at least here in Canada, is that our white all-purpose flour is quite a bit higher in gluten content compared to what I used to find in China. The effects of this is that when you make the noodles, you'll find that the surface will often split and break and the gluten will rip apart and you can't get a nice and smooth ball of dough. If you find that you are really struggling with a hard ripping ball of dough, the solution to that is you want to sort of mix one part wheat starch to about nine parts all-purpose flour to even out the gluten content. Another thing you want to be particularly careful about is that depending on whether the humidity in the air and by effect in your dough or rather flour will change. Right now in Canada it's sort of like autumn and what we find is that the flour is drier right now than it is in summer per se and so I would use 10 to maybe 15 grams extra water to balance that out. You're going to add water little by little into the flour with your hands scraping the edge of the bowl to get any sort of dry flour into the middle and combine. This way what you avoid is pressing against the bottom and sides of the wall while the flour is really really wet. What that's going to do is it's going to create a sticky mess where you just have a ball of wet dough that is stuck to the side and not wanting to combine and share its moisture content with the rest of the flour. You're going to keep doing this until you've added all of your water into the bowl and then we're going to knead that into a ball. You're going to grab all of the flakes of flour and just keep pressing them together going from the edge and pressing into it in the middle. At some point the ball of dough will want to stick to itself more than your hand and once it's sort of stopped being sticky you'll still find some flakes of flour around the edges and the end of the bowl. What you're going to want to do is you're going to want to pound that with the weight of your body using your fist and you're going to pound a little bit until it's flat and then fold and then flip and then pound and then fold again. You're going to do that until the flour combines nicely into a ball. It's not going to be smooth but then we're going to rest that flour and let it be for a little bit. That will help break down the gluten content and make our lives much easier. What you'll find is that over time the ball of dough becomes a harder and stiffer and bouncier and it doesn't want to stretch or fold. When you find that that's when you know you have to rest the dough. What you're going to want to do is just cover the dough with a large lid so it doesn't dry out and just let it sit for 20 minutes. What that will do is the gluten will slowly break down as you're resting the dough and when you come back to it that dough will be much easier to work with. So now we just wait. Go drink a cup of coffee tea and watch another one of my videos and we'll be back. It's been 20 minutes. I have one of my friends stepping in to help me knead the dough. What you'll notice when you knead the dough or when you press on it touch it is that it'll be smoother, more moist and a lot more pliable. When she sort of presses on the dough she can actually leave finger marks with her fist on the dough which you could not do before. Before resting the dough will be sort of stiff and hard and bouncy and you can't really fold it or change its shape very easily. Now the reason why I called for a friend to come in and help beyond me being lazy is because you're going to want to sort of repeat this knead and rest knead rest knead rest process three to six times or just however many times it takes until the dough is nice and pliable sort of even throughout and really smooth. That's going to take a while and you're going to want to be patient because if you're not patient and the dough is not well combined and it's not smooth enough you're going to have a really hard time pulling the noodles without having it rip. Now the dough is much more pliable after a few cycles of resting and kneading we can start to separate the ball of dough into smaller pieces so we can start to pull them. What you're going to want to do is you're going to roll that dough out into a stick that is slightly thicker than your forearm and about as long as your forearm. You're going to let that rest for about 10 minutes and then you're going to come back and you're going to split it up. You're going to get a knife and cut it into twinkie size pieces. If you don't know what a twinkie is this is an image for reference. You're going to cut it up and then roll it into roughly the shape of a twinkie actually. The reason why we want to do this is we want to sort of pre-shape it and rest the dough again. This is the secret you're going to want to rest this again for 30 minutes so it becomes softer to pull. We're going to do this for all of our pieces of dough and then we're going to sort of brush them with a little bit of peanut oil so that it doesn't dry out cover it and we'll come back once the twinkies are rested. While the twinkies are resting we can get started on our condiments. First thing is going to be the dried chilies. I don't have the right variety here before any of you from the correct region of China start yelling at me. You're supposed to use this type which is qinjiao. It's longer in shape and it has a little bit more sweetness and more aroma with less spice but we're going to use some red lantern Chinese chilies and some chaotianjiao which is you know the typical variety that you can find in North America. Toast the chilies off in a wok with no oil on a medium low heat until all of it sort of starts it can really start smelling the spice. Take that off of the heat before it burns put it in the fridge or put it outside if it's winter for you guys as well to let the peppers cool really rapidly. That will get it really dry and crispy and then we're going to crush it in our pestle and mortar after removing the seeds. Now you're going to want to toast off some Sichuanese peppercorns. This particular variety is hanyuan huajiao. It's slightly more floral than what you'll typically find. This production in the particular city is really amazing and this is what I recommend. We're going to toast these off then we're going to put them in a coffee grinder or a pestle and mortar and we're going to grind it into a powder as well. More garnish. We're going to be eating all of this raw so make sure your board is clean and your knife is clean. First off is just some cilantro. We're going to hack it up into smaller chunks. Don't cut your hands and then we're going to put that in a bowl on its own which we're going to use when we make the actual noodles and then we're going to smash up a bunch of garlic and chop it into fine pieces. We use about two bulbs worth of garlic. You're going to need a lot of garlic for this dish. We're going to be pouring oil over it so make sure you don't chop too finely so it burns and make sure you don't chop sort of not fine enough where it doesn't release all of its flavors. Before you start pulling the noodles, boil a pot of water so we have something to boil it into immediately. Okay here's how you actually pull the noodles themselves. What you're going to want to do is take your pinky put it on the board and just smash it with the palm of your hand. If you smash it harder and get a thinner the end product of the noodle will be thinner but I like my noodles thick so I didn't go that thin. Take a rolling pin and just roll out the edges until they are really flat and sort of wavy and irregular. That thin edge will create interesting texture and soak up the chili oil a little bit better. It doesn't have to look neat just do whatever feels natural. Make a crease in the middle with your chopsticks and hold on to the edges with your thumb and sort of keep the palm of your hand under the noodle as you pull and smack it violently against the board. That's sort of the trick to not having the noodles rip and just keep smacking until you get to the right thickness and then rip it down the seam and you have belt noodles. Magic! Fresh noodles only take two to three minutes to cook in the pot so just cook your noodles briefly. I also blanch some vegetables to go with it. Now for the garnish we are going to start off with just a sprinkle of Sichuan peppercorns and then we are going to go in with our garlic. You can use more than I used. In fact I recommend using more than I used but I have friends around so we tried to keep it civil. We added some of our crushed chilies and for good measure we added some of the Korean crushed chilies that I had laying around because the particular variety that I had access to gave better color. And then we're going to do an oil pour. That was kind of disappointingly sad sounding. The oil wasn't quite hot enough. We went in with just a tip of a teaspoon of sugar, a little bit of salt, a generous sprinkle of MSG. If you don't like MSG, don't use it. Then I went in with a little bit of soy sauce for a little bit of color and some more flavor and then a few dashes of vinegar. You can always add more vinegar in as you go. I recommend exploring with the level of acidity you're comfortable with because it's one of those components that I have seen a lot of variance in preference. Taste as you go and then finish with some cilantro as garnish. That's it. It's as simple as that. There is your beautiful bowl of taste as you go. Mix well and enjoy. This is all it takes to make a beautiful bowl of noodles at home. I hope you found this video helpful and if you did and you want more recipes like this, feel free to give me a subscription. If you have questions, leave it in the comments. I read everything and yeah see you guys next time.