Mung Bean Noodles 绿豆面
Mung Bean Noodles is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
Mung Bean Noodles (绿豆面) are a handmade snack of Shizhu Tujia Autonomous County (石柱土家族自治县) in Chongqing. Despite the name, they are not made from mung beans alone: the main ingredients are usually rice, mung beans and green vegetables. In the twelfth lunar month, when Shizhu people go to market for New Year goods, handmade Mung Bean Noodles are among the things they buy, alongside boiled rice sweets (米糖).
How it is made
The beans are sifted clean of grit and soaked in water, for a full day and night in winter and half a day in summer. The rice is soaked until it crumbles to powder between the fingers with no hard core, then drained. Green leafy vegetables are washed, chopped and mixed with the soaked beans and rice, and the mixture is ground with water into a batter, into which starch is stirred.
The batter is cooked on a flat pan heated only gently and brushed with rapeseed oil. It is poured into the pan circle by circle; when a sheet is about eight-tenths done it is turned, cooked a little longer on the other side, and lifted onto a shaoji (筲箕, a shallow bamboo basket), where the sheets are stacked one on another to cool. The green colour comes from the vegetables rather than from added colouring.
How it is eaten
To serve, seasonings go into the bowl first, followed by a house broth. The noodles are dipped in boiling water for only a few seconds, then lifted out into the bowl.
Where it comes from
In 2025 Shizhu put forward Tujia mung bean noodles (土家绿豆面) as one of the ten dishes it nominated for the 'most cultural value' category of the 'Chongqing Flavour 360 Bowls' (渝味360碗) selection, a category meant for dishes tied to local history and tradition.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.