Lamian

Lamian

Lamian being stretched in a Lanzhou-style restaurant in Dongchong, Guangdong
Type	Chinese noodles
Place of origin	China

Lamian is a type of Chinese noodle. Lamian is made by twisting, stretching and folding the dough into strands, using the weight of the dough. The length and thickness of the strands depends on the number of times the dough is folded. This unique method of making noodles originated in China. The Songshi Yangsheng Bu (simplified Chinese: 宋氏养生部; traditional Chinese: 宋氏養生部), which was written by Song Xu and dates back to 1504, has the earliest description of the method to make lamian.

The hand-making process involves taking a lump of dough and repeatedly stretching it to produce many strands of thin, long noodle. Literally, lā, (拉) means to pull or stretch, while miàn (simplified: 面/traditional: 麵) means noodle.

There are several styles of twisting the dough but they all employ the same concept: a piece of dough is repeatedly stretched and folded onto itself in order to align the glutens and warm up the dough for stretching. Then it is rolled out to a workable thickness and cut into workable portions. The end pieces of the starting dough are never used because the glutens are not as aligned as the middle pieces.

This dough is then pulled to about an arm span's length. The puller then makes a loop with the dough, joining the two ends into one clump of dough, and inserts his fingers into the loop to keep the strand from sticking to itself. Doing this, the pull has doubled the length of the dough while fractioning its thickness. This process is repeated several times until the desired thickness and quantity is achieved. Some pullers dip the strands into flour between stretching phases to keep them separated. When flour is used, there generally is a final slap of noodles against the prep board to remove excess flour.

In the Lanzhou style, the dough is worked aggressively. It is pulled in straight, quick, tugs with no twisting or waving. Some pullers regularly slam the noodle against their prep boards to ensure even stretching and uniform thickness. Flour is sometimes used to dust the strands and prevent sticking.

In the Beijing style of preparation, the dough is twisted, stretched delicately by waving the arms and body, untwisted, looped to double the strands, and then repeated. When stretching, they coordinate waving their torso and arms to increase the potential length of the noodle beyond that of the puller's arm span. Flour dusting is more liberally employed in this style than in the Lanzhou style of preparation.