Xinye Board-Stretched Noodles 新野板面

Xinye Board-Stretched Noodles (新野板面), also called Zhang Fei noodles (张飞板面), come from Xinye County (新野县) in Nanyang (南阳), Henan. The dough is slapped against a stone or wooden board until it forms wide, springy strips, cooked with vegetables and topped with saozi (臊子), a slow-cooked beef-and-mutton sauce that carries most of the flavour.

How it is made

CRI Online explains the name: in the Nanyang dialect, "ban" (板) means to slap or beat, and proper banmian is slapped out on a stone or wooden board, so the word names both the action and the tool. A report supplied to China Daily by the Xinye county publicity department describes a noodle shop on Jiefang Road (解放路) in Xinye where the cook pulls, stretches, slaps and presses each piece of dough into an even, wide, thin strip that bounces off the board before it slides into boiling broth. Chinese Wikipedia says the noodles are cooked with vegetables, ladled into a large bowl and topped with Xinye's own saozi; the China Daily report specifies a beef-and-mutton saozi simmered for several hours and a scattering of chopped scallion. It also names bean sprouts and Chinese chives as banmian side vegetables.

Flavour and texture

The noodles are valued for their firm, chewy bite. According to Wikipedia, the flavour comes mainly from the saozi, while the noodles and broth themselves are plain. China Daily describes the finished bowl as a red, oil-glossed broth that is fragrant with a chilli edge.

Where it comes from

Local legend ties the dish to the Three Kingdoms period, when Liu Bei (刘备) stationed troops in Xinye. In the version on Wikipedia, Zhang Fei (张飞) found ordinary noodles too soft, so the cooks worked out these slapped board noodles. The China Daily report tells it as a field ration: Zhang Fei had the dough pressed into strips on a stone slab and paired with a saozi that kept well. The same report says that in the 1980s traders from Anhui learned the craft in Xinye and took it to Taihe (太和), from where banmian spread across China, and that a banmian association from Taihe has visited Xinye to trace its roots. CRI Online reports that Xinye has been given the title "Home of Chinese Banmian" (中华板面之乡), and the county is seeking a provincial intangible-heritage listing for the technique.