Wonderful noodle stretching and folding video
How do you make 4096 noodles in hurry? By stretching and folding the dough 12 times.
A clip from Philip Morrison's 1987 PBS program "The Ring of Truth: Atoms" featuring chef Kin Jing Mark making noodles to demonstrate the principle of halving.
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There was a little Chinese restaurant when I was a kid called Pearl City. They used to make their own noodles, for all to see. It's amazing that they don't break every time he tugs on them!
I've seen this sort of thing done before on cooking shows. It's an amazing skill - and I'm sure the chef is making it look much simpler than it actually is.
The narrator reminded me of my favorite BBC science show, Connections by science historian James Burke. I used to watch that show on TLC and hated when it was canceled. You can still watch episodes of Connections on the video website guba.
http://www.guba.com/
If you haven't seen Connections, trust me, you'll love it.
great......2 hours til lunch and now I'm dying for udon.
The most important thing on making noodles like this is the dough recipe.
That same episode of "The Ring of Truth" had a couple of other great demos of how tiny atoms were. There was an amazing sequence of a guy taking a small ingot of pure gold and turning it into yards and yards of gold leaf. And there was a cool demo that anyone could do of pouring just a quarter teaspoon of (harmless and non-polluting) olive oil onto a still pond or swimming pool and watching as the oil slick gets wider and wider (which also means it's getting thinner and thinner).
It's hard to get a hold of copies of "The Ring of Truth", but often school or public libraries still have a copy gathering dust. It's well worth finding and watching.
Jackie Chan did the same thing in mr nice guy :)
there is a recent globtrekker episode that shows this... can't remember where, i think hongkong.
There's a place that does this down the street and around the block from the D.C. Chinatown metro stop.
You can see them making noodles, from the large window near the entrance, all day long for the meals (either a fried lomein style or a ramen style are your choices) and dumplings fresh all day long. They don't get nearly as thin as the ones in the video but they're cheap (~$5 for beef/chicken/veg with tofu lomen, soup, or dumplings), delicious, and fun to watch being made.
@7, You wouldn't happen to know the name of the place, would you? I'd like to make that my next Chinese food destination :)
Ring of truth was one of my absolute favorite PBS specials as a kid. They used to rerun it constantly. I still remember being amazed when they measured the weight of the dot on the letter "i".
I miss all those PBS documentaries with Phillip Morrison's distinctive voice. Good times.
Why, oh why, did PBS dumb itself down? I started to watch the documentary about Winston Churchill, hosted by his granddaughter, and I thought I was watching commercial TV. It was vapid. The only good documentaries now are the BBC nature documentaries with David Attenborough.
Oh goodness. I figured after I finished chemistry last year I'd never see those videos again. Granted, of all the ones we watched, this was the most interesting (especially the already mentioned section about gold leaf)
Is Phillip Morrison the same guy who narrated the Eames' Powers of Ten film?
You can see this done every day in the Insadong neighborhood of Seoul (and probably others for all I know, but Insadong is more or less the art district). Fascinating.
If you're lucky you might also catch a similar process by which a strange, fibrous confection is made using nothing but honey and cornstarch.
Usually the makers put on the show in their shop's main window, but sometimes the artisan is right in front of you. Tough not to buy some when you've watched the entire process.
#13: Yes, Morrison narrated the similarly lovely "Powers of Ten" film.
Powers of Ten on YouTube
Ring of Truth, The First Eden, The Story of English, Eyes on the Prize... 80s PBS was a beautiful thing.
The odd but soothing narrators voice reminded me of this:
Imagining the Tenth Dimension
Pt1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
Pt2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o&NR=1