Yongfeng Chilli Paste Tossed Noodles 永丰辣酱拌面

Ingredients

The paste starts from a wheat base. The wheat is left to go mouldy, dried and milled, then mixed with cooked glutinous rice; ten days later chopped chillies go into the drying pots, and the mix spends more than a month in strong sun until the flavours merge into a heat with sweetness in it. Makers pick long, sun-facing red horn chillies for a hotter paste and thick-fleshed lantern chillies for a sweeter one, alongside wheat, soybeans, glutinous rice and sword beans. The whole process runs to 29 steps and uses no oil.

A Shuangfeng saying, "sun-dry the paste in the dog days, the oil comes out in golden autumn", sums up the timing: drying begins in the hottest weeks of summer and goes on until autumn, when the paste yields its own oil. The cycle takes as long as 100 days, and only one batch is made a year.

Flavour and texture

The provincial culture and tourism department counts five tastes in the paste: hot, savoury, salty, sweet and fragrant. Eaten straight it is sweet-hot and crisp; the Rednet seller describes it as hot without harshness and sweet without being cloying.

Where it comes from

The culture and tourism department cites the Shuangfeng county gazetteer as recording paste-drying around Yongfeng in the 16th century; Rednet, citing the same gazetteer, dates it to the Chongzhen reign (崇祯) of the Ming dynasty. Local stories credit Zeng Guofan (曾国藩) with taking the paste to the capital, where it became a court tribute. Yongfeng chilli paste received national geographical-indication protection in December 2007, entered Hunan's second provincial list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009, and joined the China–EU list of mutually protected geographical indications in 2022. A folk rhyme sums up its place at the Shuangfeng table: "three liang of rice, so fragrant; no other dish, just pick up the chilli paste".