Shangzhou Noodles in Thick Soup 商州糊汤面
Shangzhou Noodles in Thick Soup is featured among the local specialties of Shaanxi.
Shangzhou Noodles in Thick Soup (商州糊汤面) are noodles cooked in hutang (糊汤), a gruel of maize meal or cracked maize, in Shangzhou (商州) in Shangluo (商洛), Shaanxi. Huashang Daily (华商报) calls a hot bowl of it in the early morning Shangluo's plainest farmhouse taste.
How it is made
Huashang Daily describes a base of hutang cooked from maize flour or cracked maize, with hand-rolled noodle pieces added, along with diced tofu, carrot and green vegetables. It is simmered over a low flame until the gruel and noodles blend.
A writer in Shangluo Daily (商洛日报) records an older, poorer version made by the writer's grandmother for a household of eleven. She rolled out a mixed-flour dough of soybean, maize and dark flour, cooked the noodles in the pot of gruel, added two big bowls of pickled greens from the crock, brought it back to a strong boil and seasoned it with salt.
Where it comes from
Shangzhou is hilly with thin soil, and the Shangluo Daily writer explains that wheat yields there were so low that white flour was eaten only at festivals. Gruel in the morning and gruel with noodles in the afternoon was the standard village diet. The Shangzhou city gazetteer, quoted in a Shangluo University (商洛学院) paper on local folk culture, likewise lists sour greens with gruel for breakfast and noodles in gruel, among other noodle dishes, for the midday meal east of the city.
How it is eaten
The dish has changed with each generation. In the town in the 1960s the pickled greens were fried in a little oil first, and sometimes a dish of chillies fried in lard came on the side. By 2018 the Shangluo Daily writer ate it now and then as a change from rich food, with hot-oil chilli and chopped spring onion on cold days.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.