Morning - flour, water, salt, time
Shaanxi is a wheat province and this is a wheat kitchen. The session starts with the dough itself: medium-gluten flour, water at roughly 30 to 35 degrees, a pinch of salt, and then rest. The rest is the part beginners underestimate - covered and left for half an hour to an hour, the gluten relaxes and a dough that tore when you tried to stretch it becomes one you can pull to arm's length. Your own batch is mixed in the first ten minutes so that it can stand while the morning carries on around it, and the difference between your first attempt and your second, an hour later, is the whole lesson. Nothing in the recipe is expensive and nothing is difficult; the technique is almost entirely patience and the feel of the dough under the palm.
Late morning - biangbiang, the belt noodle
Biangbiang mian is the emblem of the province: a noodle as wide as a belt, three or four centimetres across and a metre long, made from a single strip of dough pulled and slapped against the bench as it stretches - the slap is where the name comes from, and the character used to write it, with fifty-eight strokes, exists only for this dish. It is served with chilli flakes, garlic, spring onion and greens, and then finished at the table: smoking rapeseed oil is poured over the top so that it hisses and takes the rawness out of the chilli. You will also make youpo mian, the same idea on a thinner noodle, and taste a bowl of saozi mian, the sour-spicy noodle with pork and diced vegetables that is the everyday dish of the plain, and mashi, thumb-rolled pasta cooked in broth.
Late morning - the dumpling banquet and its shapes
The dumpling side of the workshop is built on the Xi'an jiaozi yan, the dumpling banquet that the house of Defachang has been serving on Bell Tower Square since 1936. A banquet runs to eighteen kinds, and the shape carries the filling: goldfish, duck, butterfly, walnut, and a finger-length pearl dumpling served in its own soup. You will learn four or five folds at a bench - the crescent, the ingot, the wheat-ear, the triangle - and the difference between a dumpling that holds its juice and one that leaks is demonstrated rather than described. Fillings include pork and cabbage, lamb, three-fresh, mushroom, and tomato with egg.
Lunch - what you cooked
Lunch is your own noodles and dumplings, boiled and dressed by the kitchen, with two or three side dishes and a bowl of soup. It is a good deal more food than a plate of noodles suggests: a bowl of biangbiang with chilli and oil, a small bowl of saozi mian, whatever you folded at the bench, and the kitchen's own dishes alongside so that there is something to compare your work against. Nobody leaves hungry, and a good number of people leave with a printed recipe sheet, a note of where in the city to buy the right flour, and an intention to try this at home.
Cultural Insight - shape as recipe
In northern Chinese cooking the shape of a noodle or a dumpling is not decoration; it decides how much sauce clings, how fast it cooks, and what it is served with. The same flour and water, handled differently, produces at least a dozen named dishes in Shaanxi alone - pulled, slapped, rolled, pressed through a wooden sieve, cut, pinched, steamed or boiled - and each has its own place on the table. That is the useful thing to take away from a morning at the bench, and it explains something about the rest of your trip: when a menu in Xi'an lists six noodles, they are not variations on one dish.
Notes
Vegetarian, halal and gluten-free versions can be arranged if you tell us at booking, though the gluten-free version is a separate noodle made from rice or buckwheat rather than a substitution. The kitchen is a working room rather than a studio, and aprons, ingredients and equipment are provided. The workshop is hands-on throughout, with about two and a half hours of the morning spent at the bench and a break for lunch; children from about eight years old manage it comfortably, and the kitchen will adjust the pace for a family. Morning and afternoon sessions are both available, and the workshop can be combined with the Muslim Quarter food walk on a different day.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.
