This recipe takes about 1 – 1.5 hours (half an hour of rest included)
Equipment:
A mixer
A pasta rolling machine
Ingredients:
(given in bakers percentages and in grams. This will result in 3 small or 2 really big portions)
Wheat flour: 100% (300 g)
Italian 00 is good. High protein content is important.
Water: 37 – 40% (111 – 120 g)
if you are starting out, 40% is easier to handle. Anything below 35% is not practical in a home setting in my opinion. Also it’s best to use soft water.
Kansui: 1.5% (~4.5 g)
Salt: 2% (6 g)
Steps:
Weigh your ingredients. I like to weigh the flour directly into the mixer to save a step. The water should also be weighed, and not measured by volume.Dissolve the Kansui and the salt in the water. Don’t mix the Kansui into the flour, it needs to be dissolved into the water, to ensure that it is spread evenly.Pour the water very slowly into the spinning mixer (max speed!). This is a very important step. With this technique, the water will be spread very evenly throughout the flour. I doubt that it’d be possible by hand (except for a master of the craft).The result should look something like this. There will be lots of small dough granules. Notice how the color changed. The dough is much more yellowish now. This is due to the Kansui.Let the dough granules rest for half an hour. I like to use a plastic bag, to ensure that it does not dry out at all. In this half an hour, the gluten structure has time to develop.After half an hour, press the granules hard, in order to fuse them into two pieces of dough. While you work on one piece, keep the other in the plastic bag.Roll out the dough. You will notice that it’s quite hard and relatively dry. That’s normal.Roll it some more.I like to cut away the ugly sides of the dough and then work those into the dough again.I don’t have a rolling pin, so a bottle will have to make do.Much better now. Roll the dough as thin as you can. Your pasta roller will thank you for it.When this machine saw the light of the day, it wasn’t expecting ramen dough. Be kind to it. Start with the biggest setting.It’s hard work for the machine. Pass it two times through the biggest setting. Then make your way through the next 3 – 4 thickness settings.Fold your dough and start over at the biggest setting. This helps to get the dough to the proper broadness, and it also develops the gluten structure.Then continue to make it as thin as you wish.Now is the time to cut the sheet to the desired length of your noodles.Pass the sheets through the noodle cutting thing. I have two sizes, one is too broad for my taste, and the other is way too thin. So the broad setting it is.Done.At this point, I put on some flour and toss them in it, to avoid any clumping.Prepare your soup, preferably with a good miso ;)You should use a lot of cooking water. If you don’t use enough water, it will cool down too much when you put in the noodles. Your noodles will then soak up too much water before they are cooked, which results in mushy noodles, and we don’t want that. Also, I use soft water (actually this is water from reverse-osmosis, our tapwater here is very hard). Dissolve a quarter teaspoon of Kansui in the water before cooking your noodles. This raises pH and shortens the cooking time. Again, your noodles will be done faster and thus have less time to soak and get mushy.They cook extremely fast. I’d say not longer than two minutes. Stay with your noodles and taste them all the time. Once they start to seem as if they close to done, get them out. I sieve them off, but if you have cooking baskets for noodles, all the better.Prepare your ramen. In this case it’s a katsuobushi broth with our shiro miso. Add in an egg, some finely cut leeks and spring onions, sesame, sesame oil and some laogonma.Enjoy!
