Physical properties of materials and their desired application determine methods and instruments of their handling and processing.

While a clay pot can be made on a potter’s wheel, an iron one would require using tools for smelting and molding.

Now, think noodles.

Hard and dry noodles. Soft and chewy noodles. Can both these types be made using the same noodle making equipment?

While it depends on many different factors, usually the answer is NO (before we go into the details on what it may depend on, please refer to >this article< in our Noodle Master Labs blog for more situational awareness on the subject)

It all stars with flour and water:

1. the less water is added the more powdery is the dough, which would then require a great amount of pressure to form it into noodles
2. on the other hand, up from a certain point of hydration (i.e. the volume of water added relative to a given amount of flour), after mixing, the dough lumps would be too bulky and sticky to simply pass them between rollers, which in its turn makes it necessary to first press the dough into blocks, and only then roll and cut those blocks into noodles

(note: here we are not talking about the extrusion type of noodles – which usually have high hydration by default).

Various additional factors, such as protein content of flour or use of other ingredients, also play their roles in determining which processing method and type of equipment would be more appropriate to use for making this or that variety of noodles.

This makes it clear that to be able to produce noodles with such a high hydration level that would usually be impossible to make on a Roller-type noodle machine (like “Richmen“, which is equipped only with a mixer unit), in addition to standard mixing, we would need to add another dough-processing stage – pressing.