THE RELUCTANT GOURMET

The Hardy Boy!

PHOTO: R. SHIVAJI RAO

Pulling noodles Gives Chef Hardy oodles of delight

Bend. And loop. And swing. Then bend. And loop… But don’t get out your bright pink leotards and Flashdance soundtrack just yet. This might sound like one of those exasperatingly peppy Jane Fonda workout videos. But, the skinny on all this bending, and looping, and did we mention swinging, is that this is the only way to get a bowl of perfectly supple, beautifully textured, fresh handmade noodles.

Not that it’s just a question of dough aerobics. The process of turning a pile of flour into a profusion of delicate stretchy noodles requires so much training, dedication and dexterity that, apparently, even in China — home of the hand pulled noodle — only about 400-500 people can actually do it.

Fortunately, Chef Hardy Cheung, who offers to give us a demonstration, is one of them.

Hardy, who began cooking at the age of 12, thanks to his mother who always wanted him to become a Chef, began work in The Beijing Restaurant in Hong Kong. Then, like all ambitious Chefs, he travelled, learning different Chinese food styles from various master Chefs along the way. He worked his way through Schezwan cooking, dim sums and Chinese barbeque in the Philippines, Indonesia and Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai as a Dim Sum Chef. He worked in Luxemburg, Belgium, Holland, France and Germany and eventually returned to India as the chef of Golden Dragon, Taj Coromandel, Chennai in 1995. Today, he’s working in Hong Kong again, though he’s currently orchestrating a food festival in Chennai, at Chin Chin, the Chinese restaurant at The Residency Hotel.

Along the way, in Hong Kong, Chef Hardy learned how to make these noodles. “They’re very qui,” he says, frantically trying to translate the untranslatable. “Qui is, um, fresh, chewy. Almost like chewing gum?”

Hand pulled noodles are basically more springy than their dried-then-cooked counterparts. “Those noodles are very soft… Almost melty,” says Chef Hardy, wrinkling up his nose. “Chinese people want to really bite through their noodles.” An added advantage is that unlike machine made noodles, which have a uniform forced texture, these have a rougher, bumpier surface, which enables them to hold on to more sauce and seasoning.

So why doesn’t everybody just pull their own noodles? Watching Chef Hardy battle his dough might give you a clue. “At first the dough is very hard. You have to use your whole body to push it down,” he says, explaining that he uses nothing besides flour and water to make his dough, and hence really needs to work hard on the kneading to soften it. “Once it’s mixed, you leave it out for 12 to 16 hours, without touching it. Then it has to be put into the freezer for one night. In the morning, you take it out and it’s really hard. So you have to let it defrost.” Only then is it ready to knead. And this is the hard part.

Chef Hardy pushes and stretches the tough dough for a while to make it more pliable. Then, pull and swings it around, forcing it to loop and twist. It’s really quite amazing to watch. In about ten minutes, it’s soft and flexible, which is when he begins to force it into noodles by pulling the dough, stretching his arms sideways and folding repeatedly. In a matter of ten minutes, he’s stretched it so many times there are hundreds of long strands, each roughly the thickness of twine.

“I took two years to learn this — practising 5 hours every day,” says Chef Hardy, adding that the cooking process is equally intricate even though it just takes 3 minutes. “I learned from my mentor, a Chef in Hong Kong called Long Chai Yen, who was more than a 100 years old when he taught me.” It’s inexplicably comforting to find a process that can’t be replicated by machines, and survives solely on passion. Who would have thought a bowl of noodles could represent a culture so ably?

shonali@thehindu.co.in

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