Sōmen


, somyeon, or sùmiàn are very thin noodles made of wheat flour, less than 1.3 mm in diameter. In China, it is also called guàmiàn. 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 noodles style. The difference between sōmen and another thin Japanese noodles hiyamugi 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 in Japanese.

East Asian cuisines

Japan

Sōmen are usually served cold with a light flavored dipping sauce or tsuyu. The tsuyu is usually a katsuobushi-based sauce that can be flavored 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 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.

Korea

In Korean cuisine, somyeon is used in hot and cold noodles soups such as janchi-guksu and kong-guksu, as well as soupless noodle dishes such as bibim-guksu. It is often served with spicy anju such as golbaengi-muchim.

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