Jiaozi, Jiaozi, Jiaozi!!!

So I finally got to go to the hand-pulled noodles and jiaozi cooking class at the cultural centre that I have been looking at for a long time. I convinced Tia to take the class with me despite the 200RMB fee (about $35) and we had super fantastic, embarrassing time!

Hand-pulled noodles are ridiculously hard to make for beginners. Our chef spent three months learning how to do it. You use a bouncing motion from the knees and the waist, not the arms. However, my shoulders and arms got very tired after only a few minutes. The dough is unbelievably sticky and elastic so it is very challenging releasing one hand to catch the dough after you've spun it around. None of us could really work the grain of the dough very well---my strand definitely fell on the floor once and broke at my hands multiple times. It was incredible watching the chef pull and twist the noodles into angel hair strands so delicate and uniform without using a knife or any kind of untensil!

I definitely broke the beautiful strand of dough and ended up with a mess of fettucini-shaped pasta lying sad and abused on the board. After the noodles we got to roll out dough for Jiaozi (dumplings--basically like perogies). I was pretty good at rolling out the dough but truly, truly awful at filling and crimping the dumplings. We were taught a squeezing/sealing method with your two thumbs and one index finger that left me bewildered with warped and sad looking Jiaozi. Oh well, the experience was awesome and I'll be looking for more classes in the future!