Shannxi Food & Traditional Cuisine

Shaanxi is north of the rice line, and its cooking is built on wheat — noodles, steamed breads and flatbreads rather than rice, in a range of forms that surprises visitors who expect a single Chinese cuisine.

The flavours are sour, savoury and moderately hot: black vinegar, garlic, cumin, chilli oil and the province’s own coarse chilli flakes. Lamb and mutton feature far more than in southern China, a legacy of the Silk Road and of the Hui Muslim population.

The Hui quarter in Xian is the region’s culinary heart: several streets of stalls and shops run by Muslim families, many for generations, serving food that is Chinese in technique and central Asian in ingredients. It is halal throughout, it is busiest after dark, and it is widely considered the best street food in the country.

Portions are large, prices are very low, and the province has an unusual number of dishes with no equivalent elsewhere.

Roujiamo is often called the Chinese hamburger and predates the hamburger by a couple of millennia: slow-braised pork, or beef in the Muslim quarter, chopped fine with its fat and stuffed into a flatbread baked on the side of a clay oven. The bread should shatter slightly.

Biang biang noodles, named for the sound of the dough being slapped against the counter — a single belt-wide noodle, thick and chewy, dressed with chilli, garlic and vinegar and finished with sizzling oil poured over. The character used to write biang has around fifty-eight strokes and exists for no other purpose.

Yangrou paomo: you are given a hard flatbread and a bowl, and you tear the bread into small pieces yourself — a process that takes fifteen minutes and is part of the meal — before it is returned with mutton broth poured over it.

Liangpi, cold wheat-starch noodles with vinegar, chilli oil and gluten, eaten in summer.

Also: guantang baozi soup dumplings in the Muslim quarter, persimmon cakes fried on the street, and cumin lamb skewers grilled over charcoal.

The Muslim quarter is the destination. Beiyuanmen and the surrounding lanes fill after dark with stalls pounding peanut brittle with mallets, grilling skewers, frying persimmon cakes and stretching noodles. Go hungry, eat small portions from several places, and follow the queues of locals rather than the signs in English.

Tearing your own bread for paomo is genuinely expected, and doing it too coarsely produces visible disappointment in the kitchen. Smaller than a fingernail is the standard.

Noodle shops specialise absolutely — one shape, one dressing — and the good ones have done it for decades.

Breakfast is hot: soup, steamed buns, or a bowl of noodles from six in the morning.

The Tang banquet shows are aimed at tour groups; the food at the stalls two streets away is better.

Shaanxi’s drinking traditions are grain-based, and one of them is very old.

Xifeng baijiu, made at Fengxiang in the west of the province, is one of China’s four historic famous spirits, with a documented history of more than two thousand years and a distinctive fengxiang aroma category of its own — fermented in clay-lined pits and aged in wicker baskets sealed with pig blood and lime, which is as unusual as it sounds.

Rice wine — huangjiu — and the sweet fermented jiuniang are drunk warm in winter.

Grape wine has a real if surprising history here: Tang Chang’an imported wine along the Silk Road and drank it fashionably, and Tang poetry is full of references to grape wine in jade cups. The modern industry is small, with vineyards in the east of the province, and most Chinese wine is made further north and east.

Tea from the Qinling south, and the Muslim quarter’s eight-treasure tea with dried fruit and rock sugar.