I enjoy making noodles but I often have trouble developing the gluten. Anyone have thoughts on how to do this without spending an hour working/resting the dough?
I don’t think you can get out of doing the work necessary. You could use machines to make it easier to stretch it, but you still gotta put the time in and let it rest and such.
Any thoughts on the best kind of flour for a glutenous dough? Most sources I found say to use bread flour
Bread flour contains a lot of gluten. There’s also specialty flour for making pasta, usually “00” flour. Surprisingly, it has less gluten than bread flour.
But yeah, gotta knead the dough to get the gluten to develop. There’s no way around it. You could get a mixer, if you can afford one and are making noodles regularly. That’s definitely the easiest way.
Bread flour contains a lot of gluten. There’s also specialty flour for making pasta, usually “00” flour. Surprisingly, it has less gluten than bread flour.
american flours are graded by their gluten content. Bread, being higher gluten than AP, which is higher than pastry or cake. Italian (eurpean?) flours are graded by fineness, and 00 is a finer powder than what you’d see in typical american flours. I would suggest using AP over Bread- the gluten will make it somewhat difficult to roll out since it’ll stretch out and spring back.
Unless OP is talking about asian noddles, particularly hand pulled noodles…
Look up autolyse. Time can substitute for physical work when developing gluten.
I’m nowhere near a good enough baker/pasta maker to comment on ratios and how to adjust your recipes, techniques and such, but you could possibly try adding a bit of vital wheat gluten to up the gluten even higher
At the end of the day though, I don’t think there’s really any getting around the process of kneading and resting and such other than using a stand mixer to do some of the hard work for you.
Developing the gluten in the dough takes time and effort. No real shortcuts to use here. If you’re specifically talking noodles only, you can try the work>rest>work method: work 3m, cover and rest a few mins, repeat twice, with a little extra work at the end. Some people swear by it, but I’ve noticed only a minor change, of any.
Also, make sure you use a well made and properly calibrated roller when making your sheets. Some of the cheaper ones that don’t have decent spacing calibration will work the dough too quickly between steps. Speaking of which, don’t skip steps when rolling out your dough.
For pasta, I just mix a bulk restaurant flour (~10% gluten) 2:1 with egg, knead until incorporated and smooth, then tightly wrap and let rest for at least twenty minutes before rolling and cutting.
You could try substituting bread flour. It has more protein than all-purpose flour, therefore develops gluten faster with less working and resting. But I make hand-pulled noodles from all-purpose flour with 15 minutes of working. I can tell when the dough is ready by how it stretches when I twist it.
Don’t use cake flour. It’s a lower protein flour that is designed to not make much gluten.
You could try a stand mixer. I dont think there’s a way to develop gluten without kneeding
