Why 7 rollers are used, instead of extruding, in our obsession for good noodles
Protein nearly blew up our noodle rollers.
But we were committed to making high protein noodles with the right chew and bounce, and we weren’t going to settle for gummy and mushy, pushed out of an extruder, just for the sake of easier production.
So despite everyone claiming rolling high protein noodles were impossible...
We committed to doing it anyway.
But… why were we so committed to rolling them?
And why SEVEN sets of rollers?
See, generally speaking, there's two popular ways of making long noodles like ours. The first, extrusion, makes noodles by forcing dough through holes in a metal plate. This works alright for regular noodles, but it doesn't create the protein alignment that gives us the texture we're looking for, and can end up with something that's somehow both soft AND gummy at the same time.
But what if you press the dough together, and roll it thinner and thinner gradually, kinda like how you'd do with a rolling pin?
The first two sets of rollers take the crumb-like, dry dough and compresses it into two separate dough sheets. They've got special grooves cut into them to help catch that dry mixture, which also helps align the protein structures.
Then, those two sheets get guided into a third set of rollers, which presses them together into one thick sheet. Why not just do one sheet to begin with, though?
Consistency! If just one sheet were made from the start, then the protein structures may not interlace quite in the way we want it to. By having both the grooves to guide the protein structures, and pressing two different sheets into one, we make sure that the noodles will have that chew and bounce that we're looking for.
Trouble is, at this point, it’s still about an INCH thick, and we need to get that down to 1.5 millimeters, or thinning it down by 94%!
If we tried to to squish it down all at once, it'd end up forcing the protein structures in all kinds of weird places, undoing the careful guidance we started with. If you've ever tried rolling out dough, and it just shrunk back together on you-- well, that's actually one of the big problems we were dealing with.
Do it too fast, and it'll shrink back on you. Too slow, and it'll also bunch up. Making it go through the rollers at just the right speed, rolling it out through four more sets of rollers to thin it down little by little, while not letting it shrink back, snap, or do anything weird is a much, much harder task than it seems.
But, that same stubbornness of the protein does help us out once we reach that final 1.5mm roller.
See, we want wavy noodles, because wavy noodles capture sauce and soup better when you lift them. We make them wavy by pushing flaps with weights on them, after the noodles are cut. That same stubborn protein from before now helps create the waves, sort of like how crinkling a piece of paper and then trying to flatten it out again won't make it perfectly flat anymore.
The same structure we’ve been working to develop now helps give the noodles their curls, too!
It's a ton of work, calibrations, and skill to be able to make high protein ramen through these rollers, so much so that it was considered impossible before we made it happen ten years ago.
But you get all of that work, protein, and texture with just a five minute boil, with:
23g protein
6g fiber
and the freedom to put whatever sauce, broth, and toppings you want on the noodle with the chew and bounce we refused to compromise on!
We're in the middle of cranking out some big batches of noodles, so Vite Naked Noods ARE considered in stock, and shipping in the next week or two.
Get your place in line today!