Changpo Soft Rice Noodles 长坡米烂

Changpo Soft Rice Noodles (长坡米烂) are fine threads of rice noodle, known locally as milan or milanzai, from Changpo (长坡), a small town on the Xuanlun River (宣伦江) in Danzhou (儋州), Hainan. The Hainan provincial government says the town is known for this snack, and a line of Danzhou folk song quoted by Hainan Daily begins "Changpo milan, Luoji zongzi" (长坡米烂洛基粽).

How it is made

Rice is soaked in water for one to two days and ground to a thin paste. The paste is wrapped in clean gauze, rubbed into balls and boiled in an iron wok, then pounded soft in a stone mortar. Cooks work in a measure of cooked paste (熟浆) until the dough is even, then shake it gently in a metal tool called a milan jing (米烂镜) so that the soft batter drops in threads into a large wok of boiling water. After about five minutes the fine noodles are lifted out.

How it is eaten

The noodles go into a bowl with garlic oil and greens, shredded dried beef, ground peanuts, pork belly, spring onion, pepper, chilli, soy sauce and ginger, and are stirred together with chopsticks before eating. Hainan Daily lists more than ten toppings in a Danzhou bowl, among them pickled greens, green beans, celery and bean sprouts, with small dried shrimp and small dried fish and a final spoon of garlic oil. One Danzhou resident told the paper he eats a bowl before work whenever he has time in the morning.

Where the name comes from

Milan shops are found all over Danzhou. The origin of the name is uncertain. One account holds that it refers to grinding the rice to a pulp (磨烂); another says the local word for rice noodles was milan written with a different character (米缆, "rice cables"), which was later misread and miswritten as the present name.