Songtao Green Soybean Sheet Noodles 松桃锅巴粉

Songtao Green Soybean Sheet Noodles (松桃锅巴粉) are the guobafen (锅巴粉) of Songtao (松桃) and Bijiang (碧江) in Tongren (铜仁), Guizhou: a noodle made from soybeans and turned green by leafy greens added to it.

Ingredients

In May 2020 the "Guangchi Guizhou" (逛吃贵州) food column of Guizhou Radio and Television corrected an earlier piece that had called guobafen another name for mung-bean noodles (绿豆粉). Readers from Tongren wrote in to say the two are different things, and the columnist accepted the correction. According to them, guobafen is made from soybeans, and its green colour comes from the greens mixed into it.

The two noodles look very alike, but the readers describe guobafen as thicker and wider than mung-bean noodles and a deeper green.

Where it comes from

According to the same readers, guobafen is popular in Songtao and Bijiang and belongs to Tongren alone, while mung-bean noodles are the noodle of Tongren's five western counties, around Sinan (思南) and Yinjiang (印江).

A reader whose family comes from Xiushan (秀山), in south-east Chongqing on the border with Songtao, remembered eating guobafen as a child with mujiao oil (木椒油). He traced it from Xiushan to Songtao, then across Tongren and through Jiangkou (江口) to the rest of the world. The columnist, Zhou Zhijiang (周之江), noted that the old history cannot be checked and that the route is likely to be disputed, but that food generally travels along migration routes and changes at each place it reaches. In his view the guobafen and mung-bean noodles of these places probably come from one source and have diverged a little in method and ingredients, with fewer differences than similarities.