Another way is rinsing the noodle with soup and then mixing it with the seasoning. And mixing everything together is yet another way to devour this delight.

From creation to consumption, this dish delights a gourmet's taste buds.

But I was most impressed by the sour soup, which must be the soul of this specialty. There is something quite unique about the vinegar that gives the soup such a mellow, sour and sweet character.

My guess was soon proven correct with a dish called cu fen (vinegar noodle, see picture on top), which is prepared using the leftovers from making vinegar. For a mother-to-be who craves sour food, this humble brownish noodle would seem heaven-sent.

A favorite joke among locals is about a pregnant woman from Beijing who took a famous restaurant's challenge and successfully cancelled her bill by devouring 88 bowls of noodles in one sitting.

That restaurant was jam-packed when we arrived. Many pictures on the walls showcased the long history of jiaotang mian (pouring-soup noodle), which originated in Qianzhou, today's Qianxian county. The county is better known for the mausoleums of Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) Empress Wu Zetian and her husband Emperor Xuanzong.

The waitress scraped some noodle off a pan, mixed in Chinese onions, chives, fried eggs and other seasonings, and then poured in some soup that had been boiling over a stove beside our table.

The noodle is also called hanshui mian (saliva noodle) because in the past, farmers in Qianzhou couldn't afford to add fresh water to cook more noodles, so they poured the soup left in their bowls back to the pot.

But the dish's nickname could be better translated as "mouth-watering noodle". If we hadn't ordered too many dishes, I might also have won the challenge, like the pregnant woman in the local joke. The noodle bowl was smaller than my fist, and the accompanying sour soup was so helpful for digestion.

Sometimes, accidental discoveries become the best part of a trip.