Noodling Around: biangbiang noodles (youpo chemian 油泼扯面)

To a displaced American with southern Chinese-Taiwanese roots, where rice rules supreme, northern Chinese noodle and bread culture (mianshi 面食) is completely bewildering.

But the pleasures of biangbiang noodles are many.

Jen introduced me to biangbiang noodles, which I loved immediately. Biangbiang noodles are a specialty of Shaanxi 陕西 province, most often found in Xi’an 西安 as a street food. The character is infamously difficult, so there are several versions of a mnemonic poem that are used to invoke its 57 (52, or 56… depending on which version you subscribe to) strokes. It can also be found on menus as biaobiao mian 彪彪面, bangbang mian 邦邦面 or 棒棒面, and youpo chemian 油泼扯面. Or you can just look for the scribbled-in character, since it can’t be found in most modern word-processing programs.

There are several stories about the origin of its name, including one that tells of a poor scholar who passed by a noodle shop where the owner was advertising his wares by calling, “Biang, biang!” The scholar asked him how the character was written, but the noodle shop owner was illiterate and couldn’t tell him. The dispossessed, poverty-ridden scholar became a regular at the noodle shop. One day, he didn’t have enough money to pay for his noodles, so in return for his meal, this overeducated scholar made up a faux-erudite, elaborate character to repay the shop owner.

These noodles make another appearance in another folk saying as one of the “ten wonders of Shaanxi,” or the “noodles as wide as belt straps.” As the locals say, the defining characteristic of the noodles should be “one unbroken length, three lengths to a bowl 一根不断，一碗三根.” So wide and long it only takes three noodles to fill a bowl!

We made our own hand-pulled noodles here, and then figured out a biangbiang noodles recipe.