Lingtai Handmade Noodles 灵台手工面

How it is made

Gansu Daily lists eight steps: mixing the dough, rolling, cutting, boiling, frying the topping (saozi, 臊子), dressing cold side dishes, seasoning the soup and pouring it over. The dough is mixed with weak alkaline water and a fresh liquid boiled from elm bark, then rested in earthenware crocks before being rolled thin and folded. Lingtai cooks still use a home-made plant alkali from buckwheat stalks, and experienced makers set aside the coarse first-milled flour and use the second milling.

Households keep several rolling pins of different lengths, mostly of jujube or pear wood. The folded sheet is not 'cut' but 'ploughed' (犁) into fine, narrow or wide strips.

Flavour and texture

The soup is sour and refreshing, oily without being greasy, and the noodles are springy and fine. The other toppings are fried from farm eggs, wood-ear fungus, tofu, garlic chives, daylily and coriander. A local rhyme says the noodles spin like a lotus in the pot and hang like a single thread from the chopsticks. A version in sour soup is called suantang mian (酸汤面); one seasoned with a minced-meat topping is saozi mian (臊子面).

How it is eaten

The bowls are small, so a meal runs to several: a Gansu Daily writer eating in Shaozhai (邵寨) town had fine noodles in soup, wide noodles in soup, wide noodles without soup, then fine noodles again. Farm households serve guests four bowls at once as 'four-blessings noodles' (四喜面), or ten small bowls called yikou xiang (一口香). Side dishes of garlic cloves, chilli oil, minced meat and fried garlic chives come first.

The name changes with the occasion: longevity noodles for an elder's birthday, New Year noodles on the first day of the first lunar month, 'sickle-hanging noodles' (挂镰面) when the wheat harvest ends, and 'knife-test noodles' (试刀面) made by a bride on the fourth day of her marriage.

Where it comes from

Lingtai's long-growing winter wheat is rich in starch and gives a tough, elastic flour. A local legend links the noodles to King Wen of Zhou's victory over the Mixu state (密须国) and to the Daxi River (达溪河). In Shaozhai town, a processing park mills local winter wheat grown on black loessial soil into flour and packaged handmade noodles.