Jiaxian Pressed Noodles in Mutton Broth 郏县饸饹面
Jiaxian Pressed Noodles in Mutton Broth is featured among the local specialties of Henan.
Jiaxian Pressed Noodles in Mutton Broth (郏县饸饹面) are hele (饸饹) noodles from Jiaxian (郏县) in Pingdingshan (平顶山), Henan, made from buckwheat and fine wheat flour and served with mutton. The Pingdingshan Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism Bureau calls them a dish every household in the county knows.
Where it comes from
The bureau cites Jiaxian's historical records for the noodle's arrival: in the middle Tang dynasty Shanxi (山西) had too many people for its thin, poor land, and Emperor Xuanzong (唐玄宗) ordered large-scale migration into the Central Plains (中原). The migrants brought hele noodles with them and settled in Jiaxian, which the bureau dates to about 1,100 years ago.
In the bureau's telling, the Jiaxian style embodies the know-how of the Hui (回族) Muslim community and took shape over more than a thousand years of refinement and improvements to the technique.
Ingredients
The dough combines buckwheat flour with fine wheat flour, and the bowl is built on good mutton and seasonings. Hele noodles are pressed rather than rolled: the dough is forced through the holes of a press straight into the boiling pot.
The bureau profiles one shop, the Jiaxian Thirty-Year Jiayao Hele (郏县三十年佳肴饸饹) restaurant, whose own recipe was developed by Li Gui'an (李桂安) and his wife. It uses a special noodle flour and local goat meat, and adds more than twenty Chinese medicinal herbs to the traditional seasoning, among them ginseng, goji berries and tsaoko (草果), a dried pod related to cardamom. The shop's noodles carry the honorary title of a Henan provincial famous local snack.
Flavour and texture
The bureau sums up the Jiaxian style in five points: bright colour, good flavour, rich without being greasy, a clear broth (清汤离水), and a bite that is neither too soft nor too firm.
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Hele Pressed Noodles 饸饹面 →
The general Henan pressed hele noodle; the Jiaxian bowl stands out for its buckwheat-and-wheat dough, its mutton base and a migration story dated to the Tang.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.