ChineseCookingDemystified

Early Look: Crispy Pork Noodles (脆哨面)

Added 2025-05-02 03:02:38 +0000 UTC

These are crispy pork noodles, from the Guizhou province. At some level, I probably don’t need to elaborate any more here: if you like spicy noodles, and if you like crispy pork, jump straight into the recipe above. It’s not difficult, and can be whipped up pretty quick.

The dish originally hails from the city of Bijie, a town about a two hour drive west into the hills from the provincial capital of Guiyang. The city is very… Guizhou. It’s surprisingly dense for a city its size, as the mountainous terrain forced people to build upwards. It’s got a certain charming grit to it — I mean, where else would grilled potato stands have little cup-holders for your baijiu liquor? There’s a lively open air market right at the city center, people cap off their nights with booze-soaked grill pots, and of course… the food is absolutely fantastic.

And like much of Guizhou, ubiquitous to the food scene is an ingredient called cuishao — Guizhou crispy pork. Walk the streets of a Guizhou city, and you’re probably not too far from a cuishao shop: the ingredient is featured everywhere from the province’s ‘freestyle’ fried rice, to homestyle cuishao fried fermented soybean, to their ever-ubiquitous breakfast sticky rice. The stuff is made by by slowly rendering out the lard from a vat of fatty pork until the whole thing’s more or less deep-frying in its own oil, and fried until absurdly crunchy.

But this dish? This dish is… a little different than the ones above. And that’s because at its heart this noodle is an answer to a problem. A problem core to the nature cuishao production — what on earth to do with the leftover lard?

In this recipe, we've simplified the process a bit for weeknight snack-ability, but obviously if you'd like to make cuishao itself... the recipe will also work :)