The knife-shaved noodles, or DiaoXiaoMian, is one of the top ten famous Chinese noodles. It is a specialty of the Shanxi province, which is my father’s hometown. It is one of the most common types of noodles that I ate growing up. Nowadays, people rarely make knife-shaved noodles at home because the process of both making the dough and slicing it requires special skills. Most of the time, they are made with standardized process and professional tools in restaurants. There are also frozen, machine-made knife-shaved noodles in the market, but most of them taste differently from the handmade ones, usually they are thicker and lack the unique texture that knife-shaved noodles should have. Therefore, I decide to make knife-shaved noodles by myself, hoping that I could replicate the taste I had back in China. I consider this good practice for my cooking skills as well as an opportunity to reinforce my connections with the culture of my hometown.

The knife-shaved noodles can be paired with various kinds of sauce, and the tomato egg sauce is one of the signature types. Almost all kinds of sauce are combinations of vegetables and proteins. Some of the common proteins used include eggs in this case, diced pork, and beef. One thing interesting about the sauce is that it is very flexible in terms of content. There is no standard for the ingredients used, so there is a lot of space for people to improvise based on the ingredients they have, and restaurants sometimes have their own special sauce. The knife-shaved noodles can be seen as a representation of the fan-cai principle. The noodles serve the role of “fan,” though it is not exactly rice, and the sauce serves as the “cai”. In the past, when food ingredients were scarce, people tended to make the sauce saltier so the noodles would have enough flavor with fewer vegetables and meat. Nowadays, people put more ingredients into the sauce to reach a more balanced diet.

As mentioned earlier, the knife-shaved noodle originated in the Shanxi province. It became a signature noodle of the area, and a lot of knife-shaved noodle restaurants have places from Shanxi in their names, for example, “Shanxi Knife-Shaved Noodles” or “DaTong Knife-Shaved Noodles”, where DaTong is a city from the Shanxi Province. Whenever knife-shaved noodles, are mentioned, people think about the Shanxi province, so it is actually a signature of Shanxi. The slicing process is what makes it unique from other types of noodles and brings it the special texture. I wonder how people came up with this unique way of creating noodles. It is said that the knife-shaved noodle was invented during the Yuan Dynasty, after the Mongol invasion. All metal utensils people had were expropriated by the governor, including knives. Whenever people needed to use knives for cooking, they needed to borrow one from the local governor, and many homes shared one knife. One day there was one family that forgot to borrow a knife at mealtime. However, on the way back home, the old man found a piece of metal sheet and brought it back home, hoping it would be useful for cutting things up. His wife figured out a way to chop the dough using that piece of metal. From there, the earliest version of knife-shaved noodles was invented.

Before making the noodles by myself, I called my aunt who is currently living in the Shanxi province and has plenty of experience with flour-made dishes. She emphasized that the dough for making knife-shaved noodles should be stiffer than doughs for making dumplings, or it would be hard to slice. I had a particularly hard time with the dough because it was dry and very hard to knead, especially when trying to rid it of cracks in order to make it smoother. If the dough was not smooth enough, the noodles would break when they were sliced. Besides kneading the dough, slicing was another process that reflected the proficient skills needed for making knife-shaved noodles. There are special kinds of tools for slicing the noodles. For example, the first one looks like a simple piece of iron sheet, and it is the most traditional slicer. The second and third are easier for people to use and are more common nowadays. However, I had none of them, so, as mentioned above, I used a meat-cutting knife to slice the dough. The slicing process was not as fast as what the professional chefs did in a restaurant, but I tried to slice the noodle to be as long as possible. The final product was thicker than the usual knife-shaved noodle, but luckily, the noodles had the right texture, thicker in the middle and thinner on the edges. Overall, it was a successful experience, and I realized that making noodles, from beginning to end, indeed requires lots of effort and practice.