How noodles are made

Noodles are made on a simple scheme: knead, rest, roll out, cut, then boil or dry. What differs is how the dough turns into a strand: it is rolled and cut, stretched by hand, pressed through holes, or settled out of starch.

The usual route is kneading, resting, rolling, sheeting and cutting. Noodle dough is hardly developed the way bread dough is: it takes only about 29–30% water, and rests for 15–20 minutes. A 2023 review found that a good rest makes the gluten network more uniform and compact and improves texture and cooking, and repeated sheeting with rests also builds an ordered gluten network.

Hand-pulling is a route of its own: the dough is not cut but stretched. For tenobe somen Japan has the JAS 1189 standard.

Extrusion presses dough under pressure through a shaping die. In Japan fresh macaroni and spaghetti are made this way from high-protein flour, and the fresh-noodle code writes that difference down. In one comparison, cooking loss was 2.4–4.04% for noodles from a rolled sheet and 10.6–19.05% for extruded pasta. Rice noodles under the Japanese code are shaped from rice flour mixed with water or steam, and Longkou Fen Si is made from soaked beans: the starch is settled out, beaten, filtered and dried.

Finally, instant noodles are steamed at about 100 °C for 1–5 minutes and then fried or dried. The kansui in ramen is just one adjustment to this scheme.

Why it matters to you. The drying method shows in the ingredients. In the commercial samples tested, fried noodles held 12.86–17.49% fat on a dry basis, while hot-air dried ones held only 1.95–2.72%.