Sōmen

Sōmen

Alternative names	Somyeon sùmiàn
Type	Noodles
Place of origin	China, Korea, or Japan
Main ingredients	Wheat flour
Media: Sōmen

Regional names
Historical name
Chinese	索麵
Literal meaning	rope noodle
Transcriptions Middle Chinese Middle Chinese /sɑk̚.menH/
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	素麵
Simplified Chinese	素面
Literal meaning	white noodle
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin sùmiàn Wade–Giles su4-mien4
Korean name
Hangul	소면
Hanja	素麵
Transcriptions Revised Romanization somyeon McCune–Reischauer somyŏn
Japanese name
Kanji	素麺
Kana	そうめん
Transcriptions Revised Hepburn sōmen

Sōmen (Japanese: 素麺), somyeon (Template:Lang-ko), or sùmiàn (simplified Chinese: 素面; traditional Chinese: 素麵) are very thin noodles made of wheat flour, less than 1.3 mm in diameter. In China, it is also called guàmiàn (simplified Chinese: 挂面; traditional Chinese: 掛麵). It is used extensively throughout East Asian cuisines. The most common example is Japanese sōmen and the noodles are usually served cold with soy sauce and dashi dipping sauce, similar to mori-soba (盛り蕎麦) noodles style. The difference between sōmen and another thin Japanese noodles hiyamugi (冷麦) are, hiyamugi is sliced by a knife to make them thin noodles but sōmen noodles are thinned by stretching the dough. The dough is stretched with the help of vegetable oil to make very thin strips and then air dried. When served warm in soup, usually in winter, they are called nyūmen (煮麺) in Japanese. Sōmen is typically high in sodium.

East Asian cuisines

Japan

Sōmen are usually served cold with a light flavoured dipping sauce or tsuyu. The tsuyu is usually a katsuobushi-based sauce that can be flavoured with Japanese bunching onion, ginger, or myoga. In the summer, sōmen chilled with ice is a popular meal to help stay cool.

Sōmen served in hot soup is usually called nyūmen and eaten in the winter, much as soba or udon are.

Some restaurants offer nagashi-sōmen (流しそうめん flowing noodles) in the summer. The noodles are placed in a long flume of bamboo across the length of the restaurant. The flume carries clear, ice-cold water. As the sōmen pass by, diners pluck them out with their chopsticks and dip them in tsuyu. Catching the noodles requires a fair amount of dexterity, but the noodles that are not caught by the time they get to the end usually are not eaten, so diners are pressured to catch as much as they can. A few luxury establishments put their sōmen in real streams so that diners can enjoy their meal in a beautiful garden setting. Machines have been designed to simulate this experience at home.

• 
  Sōmen (in large white bowl at upper-right) with assorted toppings
• 
  Nagashi-sōmen

South Korea

In Korean cuisine, somyeon is used in hot and cold noodles soups such as janchi-guksu (banquet noodles) and kong-guksu (noodles in cold soybean soup), as well as soupless noodle dishes such as bibim-guksu (mixed noodles). It is often served with spicy anju (food that accompanies alcoholic drink) such as golbaengi-muchim (moon snail salad).

• 
  Janchi-guksu
• 
  Kong-guksu
• 
  Bibim-guksu
• 
  Golbaengi-muchim served with boiled somyeon

Gallery

• 
  Five-colour somyeon
• 
  Boiled somyeon

See also

• Hiyashi chūka
• Sōmen salad
• Capellini - pasta with similar thinness

External links

• Media related to Somen at Wikimedia Commons