"Where river crabs are produced, people are bursting with more creativity in using this ingredient. The Jingjiang crab yellow soup bun that has been circulating for a hundred years is one of the classics..."
In 2012, the documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue" turned the camera to Jingjiang, Jiangsu Province. Since then, the crab yellow soup bun with thin skin soup has been known to more and more people and has become a special food that people must taste when they come to Jingjiang.
▼Soup buns, buns for drinking
Jingjiang, the morning soup bun restaurant is extremely lively. Locals would gather in pairs to eat soup buns, drink bowls of porridge, and then start the day's work.
"September is the time to eat Jingjiang soup buns, until December the crabs are very fat, and by January when you want to eat soup buns, they will be gone." The soup bun has not yet been served, and Tao Jinliang, a teacher who has been making soup buns for thirty years, introduced it to us.
Photography | Wang Mu
He told me that a soup bag with a thin skin as thin as paper and a rich soup juice can be made through more than thirty processes.
Whether the taste is authentic depends on the most complex and important step of this – boiling the soup, which is the filling that makes the soup buns. To prepare the soup, first of all, the thick skin of the pig's trotters is finely cut, simmer in the chicken soup for nearly three hours with a low heat, let the pork skin completely dissolve into the soup, turn off the heat to cool to form a transparent jelly. Then use the hand-removed seasonal crab meat and stir well with chicken broth, ginger and garlic and jelly.
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Don't underestimate the stuffing in it, and master Tao carefully understand it, only to know some of the little secrets.
First of all, the "soup" in the crab yellow soup bun is frozen from the cooled skin. When wrapping the filling, the jelly-like texture of the jelly allows crab meat and crab yellow to be wrapped in the dough, and after the drawer, the skin jelly is turned into a umami soup when it is hot, which is also the source of the "soup" in the crab yellow soup bag.
In addition, the "crab yellow" in the crab yellow soup bun is not available every month. In the season when crab yellow is not fat enough, many restaurants that make soup buns simply do not put crab yellow, only crab meat. If you want to eat the crab yellow soup bun with excellent taste, you have to come around the tenth month of the lunar calendar every year, when the local crab is fat, the crab yellow is the fullest, and the soup bun tastes the most delicious.
Photography | Wang Mu and Ryoma
In addition to the raw materials, the key to the tough taste of the soup bun depends on the rolling skin and the filling.
The master who makes the soup foreskin uses two pointed rolling sticks, and when the force is exerted, the outer weight is light and the inner weight is light, and a piece of thick dough skin around the middle can be quickly rolled out. Listening to the masters, rolling the dough skin seems to be the simplest part of the whole soup bun making, but it is actually very skilled, slight deviation, and it is easy to break when steaming.
After the skin is rolled out, it is the last step - the soup bun, which is the most test of the master's skills.
An authentic crab yellow soup bun is almost three or two, and if you want to lock it firmly with a thin layer of dough, this circle of fine dough folds is very critical. The pleats are light, soft and uniform, and the pleats on each bun should be controlled between 28-35 lanes. There are fewer pleats, which will leak juice; there are more pleats, and the gnocchi in the middle is too thick to cook.
A series of delicate and uniform folds are born under the hands of the masters, and each master can wrap a bulging, elastic soup bun in almost 3-5 seconds. After steaming for a few minutes, the crab yellow soup bun, which the Jingjiang people jokingly called "a grandfather clock on the plate, clipped to the chopsticks like a lantern", was ready.
The soup bun in the bowl is crystal clear, the skin is as thin as paper, almost transparent, and if you touch it slightly, you can see the soup inside gently shaking. Before eating, Tao Jinliang also specially told us a secret: "To eat our Jingjiang soup buns, we must gently lift, slowly move, open the window first, and drink the soup later." As he spoke, he shook the tall bowl in front of him.
The soup buns that have opened their mouths, the freshness of the crab meat, the aroma of the pork, and the alcohol of the soup juice all gush along this "skylight" at this time, which is really mouth-watering. The soup is very hot, but the crab meat and crab yellow in the soup are sucked into the mouth together, and the taste is particularly fresh. The photographer sitting next to me laughed as he ate the soup bun, "It's like eating a bowl of seafood porridge."
Along with the soup buns, in addition to ginger shreds, vinegar, and a large bowl of crab yellow soup buns are an excellent companion - rice porridge. The Jingjiang people also gave this light brown porridge an alias, called "Jingjiang Coffee".
Before coming to Jingjiang, we had never heard of the word "dumplings". Master Tao told us that "fins" refers to a gray-white powder made of yuan wheat, a variant of barley, which looks like flour. It turned out that the terrain in the Lao'an area of Jingjiang was higher, and there were more yuan wheat than rice, and almost every household ate porridge boiled with rice, just like the Jingjiang nursery rhyme said, "Gardenia blossoms with six petals, Jingjiang sun feet are too head, get up early to burn some rice porridge, and burn some hairy taro at noon."
It is also easy to make the rice porridge, first bring the rice or rice to a boil with water, and then pour the rice into a paste with cold water into the pot and stir well. When it boils again, the porridge is ready.
Just as he was about to drink the whole soup bun, Master Tao spoke again. He told me that because the dough was extremely thin and tough, after drinking the soup, the bun skin could be blown up again. At the instigation of my companions, I blew air into the soup bun with my bite open, and sure enough, the soup bun bulged like a balloon, causing everyone to exclaim.
Crab yellow soup buns have gone from being a niche delicacy that could only be "limited to purchase" in the past, to now going out of Jingjiang and making a name for themselves in Yangzhou, Nanjing, and even Hong Kong. In the past 30 or 40 years, on the basis of retaining the original flavor, crab yellow soup buns have been continuously upgraded and improved in the hands of Jingjiang people, and gradually become a delicacy for Jingjiang people to feast on relatives and friends, and have also become one of their most recognized taste symbols.
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- Article | "Wind and Objects in China"
- Edit | Authentic
- Pictures | Some of the pictures come from the web