The first step to making a good bowl of biangbiang mian, is, of course, making some good mian. At the Shaanxi restaurants we visited, the noodles were hand-pulled right before cooking, and the belt-strap wide chewy noodles of charmingly uneven thickness is a big part of what makes this dish so enjoyable. Therefore, we took a shot at making our own hand-pulled noodles. We pulled together a recipe from a number of sources (we are indebted to advice from eGullet; a recipe for Kazahk noodles by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid from the book, Beyond the Great Wall, available online here; and this fantastic post from a Chinese blog).
