Flat, wide rice noodles (similar to Vietnamese bánh phở) served in a mild, lightly seasoned pork or chicken broth, topped with a sauce of minced pork cooked with turmeric, tomato, garlic, and sesame oil, garnished with pickled mustard greens and fried shallots. Shan noodles are the cuisine of the Shan plateau — a large highland region of eastern Burma that shares cultural connections with northern Thailand and Yunnan — and they reflect the lighter, less assertively seasoned character of highland Shan cooking relative to the more intensely flavoured lowland Burman cuisine.
**The Shan pork sauce:** Ground pork cooked with turmeric (fresh or dried), tomato (fresh, chopped), garlic, fish sauce, and sesame oil to a thick, slightly dry, fragrant sauce. The turmeric provides the characteristic yellow colour and earthy depth that distinguishes Shan noodles from all other Southeast Asian noodle toppings. **The sesame oil:** Burmese cuisine uses sesame oil (locally produced, slightly darker and more strongly flavoured than the Chinese variety) in large quantities — particularly in the Shan tradition. It is not a finishing drizzle but a cooking fat used throughout. **Assembly:** Blanched noodles in a bowl. A ladle of clear pork or chicken broth. The pork sauce spooned over the noodles. Garnishes: pickled mustard greens (similar to Chinese ya cai), fried shallots, fresh coriander.
Naomi Duguid & Jeffrey Alford, *Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia* (2000); Naomi Duguid, *Burma: Rivers of Flavor* (2012)