In view of the "early arrival" of Hualong people, in recent years, the Lanzhou municipal government has also standardized the beef noodles industry, and registered a unified logo-an image of a bull's head and an image of Lamian Noodles. The noodle restaurants in Lanzhou have also started to leave Lanzhou and changed their names to "Lanzhou Beef Lamian Noodles", among which Mazilu, Dongfang Palace and Jinding are famous. But in the eyes of Lanzhou people, although these beef noodles are still the flavor of their hometown, they lack the soil and water of Lanzhou and the real flavor of Lanzhou. In Lanzhou, people love the old Huimin shop on the corner.
In a street downstairs of Douma's hometown, there is such a pure Lanzhou-style beef noodle restaurant called "Mogouyan". This is a noodle restaurant with ethnic characteristics. The decoration style is halal, and the staff in the shop 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 comes a little late. After seven or eight in the morning, there are more people in the street. This time is also the most crowded time to eat beef noodles. Usually around eight o'clock, my mother and I go to the grinding ditch to eat a bowl of beef noodles, wearing a loose coat and sandals and holding a small one-sided bean in our hand.
When you enter the store, first buy tickets at the cashier by the door. Usually I want a bowl, and Doudou's mother and Xiao Douding want a bowl together. After buying the ticket, mother Dou took their little guy named Dou to find a seat first-the dining tables here are all long tables made of terrazzo, and one table can seat six people. Whether they know each other or not, everyone picks up empty seats and sits down. In a conspicuous place in the area with the largest number of dining tables, there is a buffet table with two large heat preservation barrels-one for 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 "delivering noodle soup to the door". No matter whether you eat or not, as long as you enter the store, you will be given a bowl of free hot noodle soup to show the enthusiasm and generosity of the store.
When mother Dou was looking for a seat, I walked to the window with a ticket in my hand and stood in line. Basically, there will be seven or eight people in line, and when there are many people, there will be more than a dozen people. However, the team marched very fast, less than three to five minutes. When you reach the top five, the guy on the other side of the window will accept your face ticket, say hello to the thickness of the face you want, and let the guy in the innermost Lamian Noodles start to give you Lamian Noodles.
Inside the window, there is an all-pass kitchen. There are at least four people in it, Lamian Noodles, cooking noodles, cooking noodles and mixing soup. The innermost part is Lamian Noodles's. When Master Lamian Noodles heard the end face shouting noodles, he would quickly choose a piece of dough to start Lamian Noodles, and all kinds of noodles would come out in his magical hands. Lamian Noodles is a technical job, and it's also a great job. The logo image of Lanzhou beef noodles comes from Master Lamian Noodles. There are many kinds of beef noodles, such as round and flat, thick and thin, round from thick to thin is "one thin, two thin, three thin and capillary", flat from wide to narrow is "wide, wide and leek leaves", and triangular "buckwheat noodles", and so on. I usually want "leek leaves", flat noodles about half a centimeter wide, cooked thoroughly and chewy, and bean mother wants fine noodles, because she has to take into account the taste of small one-sided beans. I'm not used to round faces. What is "capillary" and "thin" is not strong enough, and what is "three thin" and "two thin" will be harder. As for "buckwheat edge", I personally think it tastes similar to Sanbo. Although the "big width" like a belt is flat, it is still too rough, and leek leaves are the best.
After master Lamian Noodles pulled the noodles, he threw them directly into the cauldron in front of the noodle boy, and then the noodle boy with long chopsticks was responsible for controlling the time and temperature. We will ask the noodle chef to cook the fine noodles of Mama Doudou and Little Douding for a while, so that they can be cooked thoroughly and the children can eat well.
The noodle chef cooked the noodles, took them out, put them in a big bowl and handed them to the outermost guy. A bowl of beef noodles is the last functional process of filling soup. The guy at the end took the noodle bowl and quickly scooped up the soup, adding meat, radish, coriander, garlic and pepper. When the noodle chef is serving soup, you should pay close attention to your special requirements-put more peppers, 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 be visited twice. She took it back first without coriander and pepper, set aside half a bowl of noodles to pour some soup, and then took it back to the window and filled it with Tonga pepper.
Of course, generally speaking, it is full of soup, radish, garlic, coriander and two spoonfuls of pepper. In addition, people who eat noodles rarely mention "meaty". In fact, even if it was mentioned, the noodle chef only waved the spoon symbolically, and the meat quantity did not change substantially. Lanzhou beef noodles pay attention to "one clear, two white, three red and four green Huang Wu". One clear refers to Tang Qing, two white radishes, three red peppers, four green garlic sprouts, green parsley and yellow Huang Wu noodles, which seems to have nothing to do with beef. In fact, the core meaning of Lanzhou beef noodles is "clear soup", and the highlight of beef is not the noodle bowl but the soup pot. Therefore, the most indispensable person in the noodle restaurant kitchen is the noodle chef who seems not to participate in the production process of each bowl of noodles, as opposed to the soup pot. He controls the quantity and quantity of beef used for cooking soup, the proportion of mutton, chicken and other things, and the addition of various seasonings. Although beef is the absolute main ingredient in beef noodle soup, different amounts and proportions will bring subtle differences in the taste of beef noodle soup. This subtle difference, in the extremely clumsy taste buds of Lanzhou locals, will be magnified by a thousand times, 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, the shop door opens, and before the waiter comes, the boss gets up, quietly goes to the kitchen, prepares beef and water in the pot, and when the fire boils, takes out a big bag of seasoning packets secretly prepared in advance from his pocket and pours them into the pot. When the beef soup is tasty, it's time for the waiter to go to work and open the shop door.
Legends are always a little mysterious. Actually, Master Tang will still appear although he is not resident in the kitchen. One morning at about 8: 30, I saw Master Tang beating soup in the window, adding water and seasoning. However, I really can't tell you what magic things he poured into the cauldron. Perhaps, there really is a mystery. The formula of beef soup in various noodle restaurants really affects the taste, but for a foreigner like me, it is actually unclear. My little bean and I only know that eating a bowl of delicious beef noodles every morning is a good time to start the day.
But for Douma, there is a bowl of beef noodles in the street of her hometown, which contains mellow noodle soup, crispy radish, slender tendons, early morning yellow river water, dry smoke, rough blue and silver cavity, and a piece of fifty cents that reached the counter from her head when she bought noodles for the first time.