If you want ramen, you gotta have wheat.
Classic ramen chew and flavor can ONLY be done with gluten. The specific way those protein structures align and react, something you just can't fake with substitutes.
Wheat contains two important, specific proteins:
Gliadin: This protein lets dough streeeeeeetch, providing extensibility, or stretching without breaking.
Glutenin: Good noodles have a bounce and chew to them, and that's just what glutenin does! It bounces back when pushed, instead of some other noodle types that behave more like clay when you bite into it.
Together they create viscoelasticity, which is a fancy word for "acts like noodles."
When you add water and start working the dough, these two come together to form gluten. Gluten is a protein network that holds everything together while you're eating it, and it's what gives you that satisfying resistance when you bite down.
In fact, this strong protein network is one of the reasons why we couldn't find anyone to help us make the noodles when we first started. We didn't have any experience building or running a factory, so we wanted to get a co-packer, or an existing factory, to help us make it! But everyone told us that high protein noodles would be too difficult to make, and would ruin machinery, so they wouldn't do it, and said that we'd never be able to do it either.
So out of spite, we said, "skill issue," and built our own tiny one. Despite it being significantly more difficult, we also use rollers that slowly thin our dough out, aligning the gluten and protein networks for optimal chew and mouthfeel. This takes longer, is WAY more difficult than using extruders, which just forces the dough through holes in a metal plate to make noodles. If you've ever kneaded dough before, and saw how it shrinks after you stretch it(hello, glutenin and gliadin!), then imagine that happening... but between high pressure steel rollers.
Rolling is slow and gradual, much slower than an extrusion process. Each pass through the rollers aligns the gluten structures more precisely. The proteins line up parallel, creating that specific bite and texture that shows high quality noodles. But that same process means that if not managed well, it shrinks, and SNAPS, and then we need to stop the machines, clean things out, and then start the process of thinning it all over again.
Amethyst, our noodle machine, is temperamental like that sometimes.
We started with an Italian pasta machine before we moved to Amethyst (that's a whole story for another day). But the principle stayed the same, getting proper gluten alignment through patient, methodical rolling.
Wheat proteins react with kansui in ways other flours don't, because that alkaline environment changes how the gluten behaves, creating the firm, springy texture that defines ramen.
