What flour and technique do I need for hand pulled noodles?

This is the last write-up on the topic, and it's much simpler:

For hand-pulled noodles, you need:
Bread flour (wet gluten 29-30%, protein 11%-12%)
45% added water
1% alkaline solution
kansui powder or (Lye Water + Baking powder) or Peng or Baking Soda

Ingredients (Alkaline solutions)
kansui powder
55% sodium carbonate (Na2CO3),
35% potassium carbonate (K2CO3),
10% sodium biphosphate dodecahydrate (NaHPO3.12H2O)

Lye Water
potassium carbonate (K2CO3) 74.5% in 100ml
sodium biphosphate (NaHPO3) 3.4% in 100ml

Instant ash Peng
sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) 90%
Sodium chloride (NaCl) 1.15%

It is recommended to use bread flour because of its higher wet gluten content compared to normal white flour. You will also need a small amount of alkali. One recommendation is to use kansui powder, due to its ph of 11. If kansui isn't available, the next option would be baking powder and lye water. If either isn't available, the next option would be to use sodium carbonate 1% of total weight flour weight (e.g. if you use 100g of flour, use 1g of sodium carbonate). If you're using a lower gluten dough like all-purpose flour, then baking powder will do just fine. If you're using cake flour, use baking soda.

(Remember to add the kansui/baking soda/baking powder/sodium carbonate to the flour and mix it in before adding water.)

Sodium carbonate vs. potassium carbonate:
I've haven't had success with bread flour, plain flour or all-purpose flour with potassium carbonate. Even though it increases the ph of the dough, it still does not give the dough its stretchability.

Why use alkaline solution in the first place?! Alkaline solution will increase the water absorption and gluten creation of the dough to enable it to be pulled sooner than normal by leaving the dough to rest at room temperature for 45 to 60 minutes. The downside of the alkaline solution is that it also breaks down gluten after the peak absorption is achieved. So on one side you have faster absorption but on the other side the dough will become more resilient to pulling if left too long.

For a non-alkaline solution, use this tutorial. It will cover all the basics that you will need to learn, and you WILL need to use all-purpose flour or plain flour. Noodle flour works best.

In conclusion:
Without sodium carbonate it's possible to have hand-pulled noodles with any flour. The downside is you will have to knead the dough for 45 minutes and leave to rest for 2 hours until you can start pulling your noodle strands.

Without sodium carbonate the noodles are harder to pull and I had most success with cutting each strand and going from there from the video.

The dough needs plenty of kneading, not yeast, knead in one direction (the pull direction). It's similar to pulling sugar

Use regular (low to medium gluten) flour and water, let it rest so the flour is fully saturated. Some cooks will use baking soda to help with tough dough

It's is probably wetter than you might expect too

It can takes a while for the dough to be good, so be patient

It can take years of practice to pull noodles well, it's probably not an ingredient problem

One technique is to pull and bang (gently bang the "pull" onto a floured bench), so that you are continuously resetting the "pull" into an even shape. This sets up a rhythm so that the dough has time to relax between pulls and wont break so easily

This is the best hand pulled noodle tutorial I've found out there. Enjoy!

Edit: (quotes copied without asking permission (what's the policy for that?)

Ingredients for making hand pulled noodles are relatively simple. You need flour, water, some oil, and a little salt. In addition, you can add some lye water or baking soda.

Since most U.S. flour is really high in gluten, we'll mix a little bit of it will something that is really low in gluten: cake flour.

The recipe is 300g total. Flour for dough. Salt for flavor. Baking soda for texture. Oil for workability.

-156g cake flour -25g regular flour -110g warm water (the warmer the better) -2g salt -1g baking soda -6g vegetable oil

Notice this is a formula, not a recipe.

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl. Take a heavy spoon and stir it a bit. When you're ready, pour the mix onto a kneading surface and begin working it with your hands. Once it feels relatively smooth, you need to start the real kneading process. You have to knead and stretch the dough until the gluten structue starts to break down. If you've ever made bread, you know you have to work the gluten by kneading the bread ball. With noodle dough, you have to take it PAST that bread stage. It will end up feeling a lot like clay, and when you stretch it you'll notice it doesn't tear.

Pulling 1. Be careful with the way you hold the dough. Make it a point to not grip the dough too tightly or it will tear when you pull it. Also try to hold the dough with anything BUT your fingertips (instead, hold the dough between your knuckles, for example), as your fingertips can apply too much point pressure and cause the dough to thin out and break. 2. The dough will resist long stretches. To get around this, it needs a rest here and there. You can provide this by stretching the dough like you're playing an accordion; many short, quick pulls. The dough also gets a rest when you fold it. 3. Speed helps if your noodles are uneven. The faster you stretch, the less the noodles will stretch under their own weight (which is the primary cause of unevenness). 4. Your first pull should be a full arms length. Pulls after that should be less than a full arms length. Otherwise you will end up with tears, especially with a smaller amount of dough.

It would be really helpful to know the recipe, as I'm not sure what technique you're trying to do--"pulling" noodles isn't familiar to me.

In general, if you can't get your noodles rolled out, these are the issues I'd look at, in order of likelihood:

1. Your hydration is too low (too much flour and/or not enough water). When this happens, the dough just breaks up instead of stretching.

2. You need to knead longer or let the dough autolyze (fancy word for let it sit for 20-30 minutes). Having more gluten makes the dough more stretchy and it'll hold together better.

3. Your dough is too cold. Don't heat your dough, but let it come up to room temperature (70f/20c) and it'll be easier to work.

4. Your flour is too "hard" for your application. This is not that likely to be your problem, though. Hardness is a measure of how much protein is in the flour, and harder flour will make a stiffer dough with the same amount of liquid because more gluten is formed. Cake flour is very soft, as is Italian 00 flour. All-purpose is harder, and bread flour is quite hard.

I thought at first that protein content was very important, but later I realized that it isn't so.Between 7-10% is good. Some (1%)salt and baking soda(1%).

10% needs a little more kneading and more water.

Two things are really important:

1- humidity. Dough must have humidity all time, don,t let it get dry. 2- kneading technique.perhaps you are not teaching the time to pull noodles and it is because you are not kneading good or enough time.

Use Chinese technique, first and second period, and knead like a machine

Hand-pulling noodles is more of a restaurant thing. I've seen a lot of videos of Chinese home cooks and every single one of them follows more or less the same procedure: make a basic dough (no alkaline solution at all) of just flour and water and sometimes salt, knead it and let it rest, roll it out and optionally let it rest again (oil it if resting), then cut it into strips, stretch the strips out into long noodles and cook them.