This Refreshing Dish Lets You Make Mixian a Part of Any Meal

It’s hard to overstate how important and popular rice noodles are in Yunnan’s culinary landscape. Walk through the food stalls at any wet market, or browse the selection of snacks offered by a collection of street vendors, and you might come away with the impression that rice noodles are the province’s lifeblood. I’ve never seen a study on the subject, but I’d bet good money that rice noodles are Yunnan’s most popular food. They’re such a common breakfast and lunch item that it’s sometimes hard to find anything else to eat at those times of day, especially if you don’t want to sit down with a group of people and have a multi-dish meal. They’re also a great democratizer: Stop by a noodle stand in Kunming at mid-day, and you’ll find everyone from students to businessmen to farmers in from the countryside all slurping up bowls of noodles in one form or another.

These rice noodles take many shapes, from wide, handkerchief-like squares to chewy strands of 饵丝, ěrsī, noodles made from the province’s famous 饵块, ěrkuài rice cakes. But the most popular version, by far, are mǐxiàn (米线), thin round noodles that are cooked until they are tender and almost bouncy between the teeth.

Mixian are so popular in Yunnan that they easily cross cultural boundaries; pretty much every region and every minority group in the province has their own rice noodle dishes. In Dali, you’ll find bowls of cold-chicken rice noodles with a broth that cooks tend to for months and years, like a mother sauce, augmenting it with more meat and seasonings every day so that it becomes richer and more flavorful over time. In Tengchong, at the edge of Yunnan’s famous Tea Horse Road, you’ll find them topped with a creamy yellow pea porridge (稀豆粉, xīdòu fěn) that clings to the noodles like a sauce. And in the mountains in the province’s west, you can find restaurants serving “crossing hand rice noodles” (过手米线, guòshǒu mǐxiàn), a specialty of the Achang minority that involves grabbing bite-sized portions of noodles in your hand, then topping them with a sauce made from grilled pork belly and condiments like cabbage and chilies before popping it in your mouth. 

When I was living in Kunming, I could probably have eaten at a different noodle stand every day of the week without repeating for a year or longer, trying a different soup or cold noodle dish for both breakfast and lunch. But the one place I rarely saw mixian was on dinner tables. Yunnan’s noodle dishes are primarily meant as solitary meals for one and are not designed to be shared or to join an array of other dishes. So I was happily surprised one day when I wandered into a restaurant I’d never tried before and saw an interesting dish on the menu: a cold rice noodle salad (凉拌米线, liángbàn mǐxiàn) topped with fresh vegetables and cilantro, which the restaurant just called “traditional” cold rice noodles (传统凉米线, chuántǒng liáng mǐxiàn). 

I ordered a plate of the noodles, along with a few other dishes, and asked the staff if I could pop into the kitchen and watch the cooks as they made my food (as I often do when I’m in Yunnan). It turned out that the noodles were as simple as could be: They were draped in a tangle of raw vegetables and seasoned with a sauce made up of soy sauce and dark vinegar, with some Sichuan pepper oil and chili oil to add a little kick. The whole thing was topped with sesame oil, fresh cilantro, some chilies in oil, and a handful of oil-preserved mushrooms—a local specialty ingredient sold in bulk in nearby street markets. 

When the noodles were served, alongside other classic Kunming dishes like quick-cooked pork and scallions and stir-fried mushrooms, they felt like a revelation. I had been eating noodles almost every day for months, but having them as part of a larger meal made them feel somehow even more special—each bite was a cooling, flavorful treat to offset the rich flavors of the meats and stir-fried vegetables on the table. I immediately added this dish to my home-cooking repertoire, and I’ve been making them ever since for dinners, potlucks and even summer cookouts. They’re good for any occasion and always a hit with my guests.

Cooking the Tenderest, Bounciest Rice Noodles

Cooking dried rice noodles doesn’t have to be complicated—the easiest way to prepare them is just to boil until they are tender, then rinse them under cold water to stop the cooking. But a few years ago, our Mala Market contributor Michelle Zhao, who is a Yunnan native, experimented with different ways of cooking the noodles in an effort to keep them tender and bouncy, just as they would be if prepared fresh. It turns out that it wasn’t very complicated, and I’ve been using her method ever since she first shared it (including in my recent recipe for Southern Yunnan-Style Beef Noodle Soup). It’s particularly important for this dish, and others served without broth, because the noodles themselves, not a broth, are the vehicle for all of the other ingredients and flavors. Moreover, the noodles don’t continue to cook and soften as you eat them, so the texture you start with will determine your enjoyment of the whole dish. Here’s her secret: 

To make perfectly cooked, bouncy, slightly chewy noodles, add them to a pot of boiling water and cook them as you would any noodle, but stop the cooking when they are still a little bit firm right in the center (the texture Italians would refer to as al dente). With the noodles we sell at The Mala Market, this usually takes about 12 minutes, depending on the batch. When your rice noodles reach this consistency, turn off the heat and let everything sit, without boiling, for another few minutes (usually 4–7). This treatment allows the insides to finish cooking in the residual heat without over-cooking the outer layers of the noodles, which will make them mushy. 

When the noodles are done, they should be springy enough that if you remove one from the water (and give it a quick rinse) you should be able to pull on it gently without breaking it. When you reach this stage, rinse them well in cold water to stop the cooking; you can use your hands to massage the noodles under the running water, to make sure it gets into the center of the tangle. 

Adding Classic Yunnan Flavor to Rice Noodle Salad—Plus a Few Favorite Variations

I’ve made this dish in a variety of ways over the years, and once I moved back to the States, I started  playing with the ingredients and seasonings to make use of whatever flavors and ingredients would best suit my meal. I’ve added strips of asparagus and snap peas cut into thin slices in the spring and mixed in bell pepper or squash “zoodles” in the summer. I’ve also piled on handfuls of fresh herbs, when I wanted to make the dish particularly fresh and aromatic. 

The recipe below uses essentially only the ingredients that were in the original dish, but I’ve made two swaps for convenience: First, instead of making a simple homemade chili oil (as I would have done in Kunming, using only dried ground chilies and a pinch of ground Sichuan peppercorn), I’ve used The Mala Market’s Sichuan-style Chengdu Crispy Chili Oil. The heat level is perfect, and the aromatics in the sauce add a punch that rounds out the flavors in a nice way. Second, I’ve used pre-made Sichuan pepper oil, a luxury that wasn’t available a decade ago when I first started making this dish. 

Lastly, I’ve skipped the arduous steps involved in making oil-preserved mushrooms (which are never as good homemade as they are when I buy them from a specialist in Kunming) and simply sizzle some strips of mushroom in oil just before cooking. This way, the dish gets a hint of the original ingredient’s chewy texture and umami-heavy flavor with a lot less work. If you’d like, you could even skip this step, or just stir-fry some mushroom to add to the top of the salad. 

Cutting Long Thin 丝 (Si) Strips the Modern Way 

The key to making this dish work is to cut all of the vegetables into long, thin, noodle-like strips, so that they mimic the shape of the noodles and you can pick everything up together with chopsticks. (The mushrooms also get pulled into a similar shape before they’re fried.) I used to think that all Chinese cooks made this shape—a traditional 丝 (sī or “silk”) cut—through careful knife work, but one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Kunming was that nearly all small restaurants were using hand-held julienne peelers to cut vegetables into these kinds of strips. While I’m sure there’s something lost when a generation of cooks abandons a particularly difficult knife skill (at least in lower-end restaurants), this tool makes prepping vegetables significantly easier for both small business owners and home cooks, and I have been leaning into this method ever since. I usually use a mandolin with teeth instead of the hand-held version, because it’s even easier, but both work fantastically.

For more flavorful cold dishes to add to your table, check out Zoe’s Qianlong Cabbage (Qianlong Baicai, 乾隆白菜), Xueci’s Sichuan Beef With Tangerine Peel (Chenpi Niurou, 陈皮牛肉), Kathy’s Wood Ear Salad ft. Pickled Chili (Liangban Mu’er, 凉拌木耳) and Taylor’s Heartbreak Jelly Noodles (Shangxin Liangfen, 伤心凉粉).