Carb counting be damned — Los Angeles is a noodle town. In strip mall shops and sit-down restaurants, hungry Angelenos inhale aromatic bowls of pho, twirl sweet-sour tangles of pad Thai, hunch over steaming portions of ramen, and scoop up glassy strands of japchae.
And then there are Chinese noodles, perhaps the granddaddy of them all. Chinese noodles made from millet date back at least 4,000 years; these days they typically contain wheat, rice flour or other starches. The most familiar versions are made from a simple dough of water, wheat and sometimes a trace of alkaline minerals (which make the dough chewy and resilient in hot liquid) and take on a variety of shapes and sizes: round, flat, broad, thin and everything in between. They can be found filling bowls of soup, tossed in stir-fries or topped with sauce.
These noodles are especially tasty when handmade, as the inevitable variations and imperfections soak up surrounding flavors and offer subtly different textures in each bite. Fortunately, the San Gabriel Valley is a noodle lover’s playground, with plenty of restaurants serving up noodles cut or pulled by hand.
Lamb soup with knife-cut noodles at JTYH
Zha jiang mian at Malan Noodles
