Wonton Noodles

01

Noodles, wontons and soup, all three good

Guangzhou cooks say a good bowl needs three things to be good: the noodles, the wontons and the soup.

A bowl of wonton noodles is small. Thin, pale-yellow noodles sit in a clear, golden broth with four or so wontons, each a little parcel of shrimp and pork in a wrapper so thin the pink shows through, trailing a frilled tail. A pinch of yellow chives goes on top. The noodles are springy and slightly crunchy, the wontons are sweet with shrimp, and the broth smells of the sea even though it is mostly bones and dried fish.

The name is simply how 馄饨, the usual Chinese word for these dumplings, sounds in Cantonese: close to wan4 tan1, which came to be written with the characters 云吞, “cloud” and “swallow.” The sound came first. The meaning was read into the characters later: some Cantonese writers say the wontons float like small clouds and go down in one bite. The word traveled with Cantonese cooks. In 1932 the writer Chen Yiyi noted that the Japanese, fond of Cantonese food, called these dumplings wantan and wrote them as 云吞; the English “wonton” comes from the same Cantonese sound. A Hong Kong saying sets out the standard bowl: a ladle of fresh soup, half an inch of yellow chives, four wontons and nine qian, about 34 grams, of noodles. A Guangzhou must-eat list for visitors puts wonton noodles among the dishes not to miss, alongside roast goose, white-cut chicken, char siu and double-skin milk.

Sources [1][2][4]

02

Noodles pressed with a bamboo pole

The noodle is the hardest part to copy.

Wonton noodles use 银丝面, “silver-thread noodles”: very thin alkaline egg noodles, yellow and translucent, springy enough that people from elsewhere in China tease Cantonese for eating rubber bands. Guangzhou eaters add a splash of red vinegar at the table, both for taste and to soften the alkaline edge. Before machines, the dough was made with duck eggs and no water and pressed under a long bamboo pole. A noodle maker sits on one end of the pole and bounces along the sheet of dough, again and again. The pole, 竹竿, was renamed 竹升 because 竿 sounds unlucky in Cantonese, so these are bamboo-pole noodles, 竹升面.

The skill is getting the spring without much lye water. Proper bamboo-pole noodles use little or none, and the pressing does the work; a little too much lye makes the noodles bitter and dry on the tongue. The Guangzhou gourmet Zhuang Chen, who runs a wonton noodle shop, says good noodles crunch audibly when you bite them, a quality that lasts only a moment: once they sit in the soup, the crunch is gone, so eat them hot and fast. In Macau, the noodle shop Lok Kei still presses its dough by hand with chicken and duck eggs and no water, folding and pressing it for about two and a half hours, more than twenty thousand presses. In Guangzhou, the MICHELIN Guide lists Xiguan Zhuyuan, a noodle shop that doubles as a factory, whose duck-egg noodles dry outside the shop and are sold to restaurants in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

Sources [1][2][6][7]

03

The wontons and the broth

The broth tastes of the sea because of one dried fish.

The first wontons in Guangzhou were pure pork; whole shrimp came later and gave the shrimp wonton, 鲜虾云吞, its name. They are boiled in water at a hard, rolling boil, which cooks say should look like galloping horses, so that they cook in the shortest time and keep their sweetness. Wrapped well, the frilled wrapper trails behind like a goldfish tail.

The broth is clear but strong. It is simmered from chicken, pork bones, dried shrimp and dried scallops, and above all 大地鱼, dried flatfish. Dried flatfish is called the soul of wonton noodles: dried, it looks like a sheet of rusty iron; it is toasted over charcoal to bring out its oil, ground and simmered in the stock, which turns pale gold and sweet. Some recipes add ham and a little rock sugar. Shops that cut corners skip the stock pot and stir ground dried-flatfish powder into hot water.

Sources [1][2][6][10]

04

Wonton, huntun or chaoshou?

People often ask whether a wonton is just a huntun. It is, by another name.

Huntun, 馄饨, are among the oldest Chinese dumplings, and Cantonese wontons and Sichuan chaoshou, 抄手, both developed from them. One explanation for the old name is that people thought of the dumpling as a sealed bun with no openings, like 混沌, primal chaos, and the characters changed later. Sheng Hui, who grew up in Jiangsu, puts it plainly: what Cantonese call yuntun, his hometown calls huntun and Sichuan calls chaoshou.

What changes from place to place is the size, the wrapper and the soup. The Cantonese wonton is defined less by its shape than by its shrimp filling and the dried-flatfish broth it sits in. Northern huntun can be nearly as big as jiaozi, with a wrapper about as thick, though cut square rather than round. The small huntun of the Jiangnan towns are thumb-sized with very little filling, and the point is the broth. Sichuan chaoshou are about the size of a Cantonese wonton; the name, “folded arms,” is said to come from how quickly the thin wrappers cook, in the time it takes a cook to fold their arms. They are usually served in chili oil.

Sources [2][4]

05

From a Guangzhou bridge to Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s wonton noodles came from Guangzhou.

Food historians date wonton noodles in Guangzhou to the late Qing. The usual account is that a man from Hunan opened the Sanchu noodle house at Shuangmendi in Guangzhou during the Tongzhi reign (1862–1874) and sold wonton noodles there. Another story says that in the same reign a Yangzhou-style noodle became popular in Guangzhou and local cooks added wontons to it. Neither can be checked. In the 1920s and 1930s the most famous seller was Mak Woon-chi, 麦焕池, whose Chi Kee stall in Xiguan was called the king of Guangzhou wonton noodles. A 1948 magazine piece described the scene: the stall set up by a bridge and opened at nine at night, and high officials, rich men, opera stars and society women parked their cars by the road to eat its silver-thread noodles. A Guangzhou newspaper poem of the time praised a stall with “one carrying pole” that charged three times the usual price while “guests in cars came like running water.” A bowl there held four wontons and a small twist of noodles, and was called 细蓉, sai yung, a name Hong Kong shops still use for a small bowl of wonton noodles.

In October 1938 the Japanese army took Guangzhou, and Mak moved his family to Hong Kong, where the craft spread. Several of the best-known wonton noodle shops in Hong Kong and Macau trace their craft back to Guangzhou. Sheng Hui writes that the founder of Ho Hung Kee was Mak’s apprentice; the MICHELIN Guide says Ho Hung Kee opened in Wan Chai in the 1940s and is known for springy wonton noodles and a fresh, sweet soup, and it later became the first wonton noodle shop in Hong Kong to win a MICHELIN star.

Sources [2][3][4][5]

06

Where to eat it

Almost every Cantonese neighborhood has a noodle shop; these are the ones people name.

Sources [2][5][6][7][8][9]

07

How to order

The menu is short, but the words matter.

云吞面 is noodles and wontons in soup. 捞面 is tossed noodles, served dry with sauce and a bowl of broth on the side; shrimp-roe tossed noodles, 虾子捞面, are scattered with dried shrimp roe, and others come with beef brisket or a meat sauce. 净云吞 means wontons only, without noodles, and many shops also sell brisket noodles and plain noodles in soup.

Eat it as soon as it arrives. The noodles start losing their crunch the moment they meet the soup. Add a little red vinegar to the noodles if the alkaline taste bothers you, and treat the bowl as a snack: it is meant to be small, and in Guangzhou it is as common at breakfast as at midnight.

Sources [1][7][8]

08

At home

Sources [2][7][10]

09

More from a Cantonese noodle shop