Noodle Quest, Shanxi. Part 1: Yang Feifei.

Noodle Quest, Shanxi. Part 1: Yang Feifei.

Photos and video by Graeme Kennedy.

The following post is highly nerdy and gets technical with noodle-making specifics. It is the information I'd want to know — was that a hot- or cold-water dough? what was the exact mix of flours? — that I can't find elsewhere, and so I write it here as much for my own notekeeping as I do for you. Still, I hope the serious noodleheads among you will find something to appreciate in the granular details of how noodles in Shanxi are made, and why.

The first noodle I saw on my second trip to Shanxi was a cat’s ear. I was on the third floor of the Taiyuan Mianshi Dian (太原面食店) in the provincial capital, a formerly state-owned restaurant that collectivized a bunch of smaller noodle makers in the 1950s to make a noodle supergroup. Now privately run, a contact in Taiyuan had persuaded them to give me and my small crew — researcher Xu Junqian and photographer Graeme Kennedy — a run-through of some of Shanxi’s more famous noodles, of which there are said to be upwards of 500 different types.

Video by Graeme Kennedy.

We took the elevator up to the third-floor formal dining room, where one round table was covered with bags of different doughs and flours. In front of us, there was another rectangular table set out in front of stage. A chubby chef with a mischievous smile came out and started checking the doughs. This was our shifu for the afternoon, our noodle master, not yet 30 years old, a Taiyuan native who had learned at a range of shops before becoming the head chef of Taiyuan Mianshi Dian: Yang Feifei (杨飞飞).

Yang stepped up to the table and began without a word. Leaning over the table, he rolled out a dough made with oat flour. When it was a centimeter thick, he cut it into cubes with a knife and then, using the edge of his right thumb, pressed the cube down and smeared it to the side on the surface of a ridged wooden board (what the Italians call a pettine for gnocchi or tavola for garganelli). The result was a curved shell with a strong texture across the back, good for soaking up sauces.

Cat’s ears, or 猫耳朵 in Chinese, aren’t actually called cat’s ears in Taiyuan, according to Shanxi noodle historian and writer Li Yali (李雅丽), who I would meet a few days later. Li told me that the feline name comes from the visit of an emperor, whose remark that the noodles looked ear-like stuck. But in Shanxi, most people still call them ge tuo (圪坨).

Yang then took us through a dozen more noodles (I’ll write about most but not all of them). He cut a spinach and wheat flour dough, the color of the underside of a leaf, into the same cubes as before, but this time used the small, round end of a chopstick to press a hole into them while rolling the cubes in his hand. These were jiu wo mian (酒窝面): “dimples”.

Yang made them for our sake, poking the cubes one by one, but told us we’d never find them in a restaurant; they were too much work, he said, and no one in Shanxi was going to pay enough for a bowl of noodles to cover the labor cost. Dimples, like many varieties of noodles, we would come to learn, were a home noodle, rarely seen outside of a home kitchen.

After fussing with the small noodles, Yang brought up a bowl of oat flour. We were going to the north. Shanxi, according to every noodle person I met in Shanxi, is divided into three regions from north to south, in every way that matters (geography, climate, agriculture, noodles).

In Jinnan, the southern third of the province, the climate and geography are good for wheat, and the noodles are made from pure wheat flour. In Jinzhong, the middle third, wheat doesn’t grow as well, but “coarse grains” (粗粮) like sorghum, beans and corn do, and so that’s what people have historically made noodles from. (Li told me that, growing up in Taiyuan, people ate coarse-grain noodles exclusively until the Reform and Opening (改革开放) period, when the improvement in people's daily lives was seen in the flour they made their noodles from: before, sorghum and bean; after, fine white wheat flour.) In the north, beyond the Yanmen Pass and towards the border with Inner Mongolia, it’s oats and buckwheat. That’s where Yang was headed with this next noodle.

Kao laolao (栲栳栳) were popularized by the Xibei Oat Noodle Village chain, which jammed together a bunch of regional specialties to become “the northwestern” restaurant; they call them by a different regional name, youmian wowo. But the process is the same. Boiling water — not just hot but boiling to the point that kneading the dough becomes an occupational hazard — is added to the oat flour, and then turned out onto a board to be worked into a smooth, steaming dough.

After wrapping it in plastic wrap to retain its heat and malleability, Yang almost immediately began pinching off bits of dough and smushing them with his palm down the flat blade of an oiled vegetable cleaver. Once he had a proper smear of dough, he used his pointer finger to lift it off the cleaver (which he used because it was more non-stick than a wooden cutting board), and with a flick of the wrist, he twirled the length of dough around his finger to make a tube. He stood it up lengthwise in a steamer basket.

One noodle done. A full steamer would require a hundred. We let him demonstrate a few and then we moved on.

Yang pinched off bits from the same oat dough and laid them on his meaty left palm, two at a time. Pressing and then rubbing his hands together formed minnows (搓鱼儿), or what Taiyuan people call ge cuocuo (圪搓搓). Up close, the handprints from his palms were still visible on the soft dough.

Next, Yang used his thumb and first finger to press out conch shells (海螺), a fantasy shape in this seafood-deprived, landlocked province.

Li and others were quick to tell me that the imagination and variety of noodles are closely linked to a historically limited pantry. Shanxi didn’t have a huge variety of vegetables or meats, and certainly no seafood. Against that backdrop, it’s easy to see how cooks would come up with so many shapes and textures to keep themselves entertained while eating the same basic dough over and over and over again. They didn’t have much but they had noodles, so that’s where the creativity went.

ang put the oat dough to the side and pulled out a pure wheat dough, which he rolled into cones about the length of his hand. Placing the fat base of the cone towards him, with the top tapering away towards his fingers, he picked up a huge pair of scissors and began snipping: these were scissor noodles (剪刀面).

We went from the scissor to the knife. Picking up the cleaver that he had been using to make kao laolao, Yang sliced noodles out of a dough made with wheat flour and 20% soybean flour, which he rolled thinner around his date-wood rolling pin until finally folding the long sheet over on itself, dusting with flour and turning it into noodles.

These were a basic rolled noodle with a slight twist from the soybean flour, and the technique echoed (or predicted) the traditional pasta rollers, the sfoglina, of Emilia-Romagna in northeastern Italy, who roll pasta sheets out with meter-long rolling pins and cut them into noodles by hand.

Yang called for an assistant. He didn’t need help making a noodle; he only needed someone to hold the plate for him. On that plate was a tight, shiny coil of noodle, brushed with oil and sitting under plastic wrap to keep it moist. Until this point, Yang had been showing us rather humble noodles, focusing on technique and not spectacle. But 一根面 lend themselves to a show.

As his assistant held the plate around waist level, Yang used his left hand to feed the fat string into his right hand, which he then flicked, throwing the noodle high into the area like a cowboy tossing a lasso, and thinning it out in the process.

A metaphorical noodle, also called long-life noodles, the single unbroken strand represents life or marriage and is usually done at weddings in Shanxi to celebrate the occasion. (I’ve also seen this in Xinjiang, where it’s called la tiaozi, but I don’t know the relationship between that and Shanxi.)

Yang tossed meters of noodle across the table, whipping them down into flour on the cutting board and off onto the floor beyond that, and then left his assistant to clean it all up.

he sun was setting outside so we made our way down to the second-floor dining room, where the restaurant serves a few of the noodles we had just seen — the kao laolao stir-fried with garlic, onion and potato chips was a keeper — but not all. Yang sent out the customary three toppings seen across Shanxi — egg-and-tomato, a stewed ground pork sauce and a stewed pork belly sauce.

We were off to visit The Noodle Boss in the morning and then Noodle School the following day. My first trip to Taiyuan the previous year had been a bit of a bust, an anti-climax of mediocre food and not much noodle variety, but this time, less than two hours had passed since we first arrived at the restaurant, and my mind was spinning. Yang sent out one more noodle, this one made from a sorghum flour dough grated over boiling water. I had eaten this before, disappointed in its soggy texture, but in Yang’s hands, it had bite.

It was far from the last noodle in Shanxi. But it was the last one of the night.

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