In view of the "early arrival" of Hualong people, in recent years, the Lanzhou municipal government has also made a unified industry calibration of beef noodles, and registered a unified logo-an image of a cow's head and an image of noodles being pulled. The noodle restaurants in Lanzhou have also begun to go out of Lanzhou, and they have been renamed as "Lanzhou Beef Lamian Noodles", among which the famous ones are Mazilu, Oriental Palace and Jinding. However, in the eyes of people in Lanzhou, although these beef noodles that go out are still the flavor of their hometown, they lack the real Lanzhou flavor without the soil and water in Lanzhou. In Lanzhou, people love the old Huimin shop in the corner of the street.
In the street downstairs of Douma's hometown, there is such a pure Lanzhou-flavored beef noodle restaurant called "Mogouyan". This is a noodle restaurant with ethnic characteristics. The decoration style is halal, and the staff in the store are all Muslims. The girls are wearing scarves and the boys are wearing clean white hats. These days in Lanzhou, this is also my default breakfast point.
The dawn here is a little late. After seven or eight o'clock in the morning, there are more people on the street. At this time, it is also the most crowded time to eat beef noodles. Usually around eight o'clock, I walk to the grinding ditch to eat a bowl of beef noodles with my bean mother, wearing a loose jacket, sandals and holding a small one-sided bean.
When you enter the store, first buy tickets at the cashier on the side of the door. Generally, I want a bowl, and Mama Doudou and Xiao Douding want a bowl together. After buying the tickets, Mama Dou took the little one they called Dou to find a seat first-the dining tables here are all terrazzo-poured long tables, and one table can seat six people. No matter whether you know each other or not, everyone picks up the empty seats and sits. In a conspicuous place in the area with the largest number of dining tables, there is a table with self-help tableware, on which there are two large heat preservation barrels-one for red jujube water and the other for noodle soup, which is the standard of Lanzhou Beef Noodle Restaurant. In the past, the special service of Lanzhou Beef Noodle Restaurant to attract customers was "sending noodle soup into the door". Regardless of whether you eat it or not, as long as you enter the store, you will be presented with a bowl of free hot noodle soup to show the enthusiasm and generosity of the store.
While Mama Dou was looking for a seat, I went to the window with my ticket in my hand and stood in line. Basically, the queue will be after seven or eight people, and when there are many people, it will be more than a dozen people away. However, the team is moving very fast, less than three to five minutes. When you get to the top five, the guy on the other side of the window will accept your face ticket, say hello to the thickness of the noodles you want, and let the innermost Lamian Noodles guy start giving you Lamian Noodles.
Inside the noodle window, there is an all-pass kitchen, in which there are at least four people, Lamian Noodles, noodle-cooking, noodle-cooking and soup-mixing. The innermost part is Lamian Noodles's. After hearing the noodles shouted by the end face, Master Lamian Noodles will quickly choose a piece of dough to start Lamian Noodles, and all kinds of noodles will come out in his magical hands. Lamian Noodles is a skilled and cool job. The logo image of Lanzhou beef noodles comes from Master Lamian Noodles. There are many types of beef noodles, such as round and flat, thick and thin, round from thick to thin is "one thin, two thin, three thin, thin and capillary", flat from wide to narrow is "wide, wide and leek leaves", and triangular "buckwheat edges", and so on. I usually want "leek leaves", flat noodles about half a centimeter wide, cooked thoroughly and chewy, and Douma wants a fine noodle because she has to take into account the taste of the small one-sided bean. I'm not used to a round face. What's "capillary" and "thin" is not strong enough, and what's more than "three thin" and "two thin" will be a little hard. As for "buckwheat edge", I personally think it tastes similar to three thin. Although the "big width" like a belt is flat, it is still too rough, so leek leaves are the best.
After master Lamian Noodles pulls the noodles, he throws them directly into the cauldron in front of the noodle-cooking boy, and then the noodle-cooking boy with long chopsticks is responsible for controlling the time and temperature. We will ask the noodle chef to cook the fine noodles of Mama Doudou and Xiao Douding for a while, so that they are thoroughly cooked, so that children can eat them well.
When the noodle chef cooks the noodles and takes them out, he puts them in a big bowl and hands them to the outermost guy. A bowl of beef noodles is the last functional process of filling soup and adding materials. The end-face guy took the noodle bowl and quickly scooped soup, added meat, radish, coriander and garlic, and added chili pepper. When the noodle chef is serving soup, you should pay close attention to your special requirements-more chili pepper, no garlic sprouts or coriander, no radish or some radish. Douma doesn't eat coriander, and Xiao Douding can't eat spicy food, so Douma's bowl of fine noodles needs to go twice. First, she takes it back without coriander and chili pepper, and sets aside half a bowl of noodles to pour some soup, and then takes it back to the window and fills it with Tonga and chili pepper.
Of course, generally speaking, it is a full soup, radish, garlic, coriander and two spoonfuls of chili pepper. In addition, people who eat noodles rarely mention "more meat". In fact, even if you mention it, the noodle chef just waved the spoon symbolically, and there is no substantial change in the amount of meat. Lanzhou beef noodles pay attention to "one clear, two white, three red and four green wuhuang", one clear refers to Tang Qing, two white radish white, three red chili pepper red, four green garlic sprouts, coriander green and wuhuang noodles yellow, which seems to be nothing about beef. In fact, the core meaning of Lanzhou beef noodles is "clear soup", and the highlight of beef is not in the noodle bowl but in the soup pot. Therefore, the noodle chef, who is opposite to the soup pot and seems to be not involved in the production process of each bowl of noodles, is the most indispensable person in the noodle restaurant kitchen. He controls the amount and heat of beef used for cooking soup, the proportion of other things such as mutton and chicken, and the addition of various seasonings. Although beef is the absolute main ingredient in the noodle soup of beef noodles, different additions and proportions will bring subtle differences in the taste of beef noodle soup. This subtle difference will be magnified by a thousand times in the taste buds of Lanzhou locals who are extremely awkward, which directly determines the reputation and customers of a noodle restaurant. Therefore, it is said that many noodle soup chefs are noodle shop owners who go into battle in person-at four or five o'clock before dawn, before the store door opened and the waiter didn't come, the boss got up, quietly went to the kitchen, prepared beef and water in the pot, and after the fire boiled, he took out a big bag of seasoning packets secretly prepared in advance from his pocket and poured them into the pot. When the beef soup tasted, it was the time for the waiter to take up his post and open the store door.
Legends are always a little mysterious. In fact, although the soup master is not resident in the kitchen, he will still appear. At about 8: 30 one morning, I saw the soup master beating soup and adding water and spices in the window. However, I really can't tell what kind of magical things he poured into the cauldron. Perhaps, there is really a mystery in this. The prescriptions of beef soup in various noodle restaurants really affect the taste, but for a foreigner like me, it is actually impossible to tell. My little one they called bean and I only know that it's just a good time to start the day by eating a bowl of delicious beef noodles every morning.
But for Douma, there is a bowl of beef noodles in the street of her hometown, which contains mellow noodle soup, crisp radish, slim with tendons, yellow river water in the early morning, dry smoke and dust, rough blue silver cavity, and a piece of 50 cents that reached the counter over her head when she bought noodles for the first time.