In the summer, I always want to eat transparent, cool snacks, and when I was a child, I would choose to go to the supermarket to buy sweet jelly and freeze it up to eat. The sweet jelly of summer, how delicious, sweet and sour. When I grew up, I looked at the ingredient list and the sugar, and obediently gave up. It seems that after twenty years of age, people are not embarrassed to eat jelly again.
By chance, I went to Chaoshan to play. I found that in the local summer eclipse list, there is a kind of "deep sea jelly", which is like a Q bomb like a jelly, but it is colorless and tasteless, and all kinds of sugar water are versatile. Put it in the silver ear soup, put it in the four-fruit soup, it's all excellent. It can also be transformed into winter melon sugar water.
And this "jelly" is called sea stone flower. Although it is not a flower, it is comparable to a flower in the summer, and girls and boys like it.
As early as the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, Nie Huang's "Sea Fault Map" mentioned three kinds of algae that can be used as stone flower jelly: stone flowers, frozen vegetables, and staghorns.
On the stone rocks of the outer sea of stone peanuts, there are oyster chips, sediment and tides pushing together. Minzhong is also known as "cabbage", and it is not produced in the inland sea. Its shape is flat and red, bright and soft. I am boiling more for frozen vegetables for fasting, and the taste of food is good. Zhang Hanyi: There are three kinds of dishes in Zhejiang, all of which can be frozen. There are two kinds of frozen vegetables from stone flowers and oyster shells, and the large staghorn can also be frozen. The sea is frugal and simple, and it is often tormented by the hair of the oyster shell, so it has the name of the frozen dish.
It is a coral-like creature on the seabed, growing in the open sea with little impact from fresh water, from the tide line to the water depth of 6-10 meters on the seabed rock, like a flower blooming on the seabed rock.
The sea stone flowers are very delicate, and the stones should be clean and not have mud. It is a reddish brown algae that grows very slowly, usually red, and tends to be pale yellow in light-harvested sea areas. When the rain is abundant, the rain washes the stones clean, and the sea stone flowers grow well.
It is distributed in all parts of China's southern coast, especially in the Chaoshan coast, and those of us who live inland are rare to be able to eat. This seaweed can be harvested throughout the year, mostly in summer. Rich in calcium, phosphorus, minerals, collagen and multivitamins, it has the reputation of "deep sea jelly".
Fresh seastone flowers are dried first, washed with fresh water after exposure, and then continued to be exposed to the sun, repeated 5-6 times, until the seastone flowers turn golden brown. The sun-dried seaweed flowers are called "dried seaweed".
Before sweet jelly appeared in China, the island already had this "natural" jelly in the summer. Islanders have been enjoying natural jelly made of stone flowers and grasses for generations, and although it does not have a sweet taste, it comes with a cool taste that is enough to give people happiness in the hot summer.
The mountain spring water is cold and sweet, and the stone flowers and herbs have their own cool marine taste, these two pure natural ingredients from the ocean and the valley are fused, the original taste, as long as it is accompanied by some simple fruits and sweet soups, you can exert this rustic taste to the extreme.
The islanders cherish this simple taste because it belongs to summer. Also in the coastal area of Zhoushan, Zhejiang, there is such a sentence "thunderstorm three tides, stone flowers poured out", which means that stone flowers and grasses are cool food to relieve the heat, after the thunderstorm three tides, the temperature drops, stone flowers and grasses have no great edible value,
Once you miss it, you have to wait for three seasons, so ah, from time to time, it is the pleasure of eating.
Most diners know that during the Southern Song Dynasty, Lin Hong wrote a book about light and elegant food, "Mountain Offerings for Clear Food". Inside, "vegetarian wine ice" is recorded:
Soak the qiongzhi vegetables with "rice swill." Exposure to the day. Stir frequently, wash white, mash. Cook and remove, cast a dozen plum blossom petals. Waiting for freezing, ginger and orange for the fish" is said to be the production process of boiling the sea stone flowers until they melt, and then condensing them into a crystal clear "decanting ice".
The use of the natural characteristics of sea stone flowers, supplemented by the cold plums, ginger and oranges of the "vegetarian wine ice", is not only beautiful, but also reflects the pursuit of the spiritual world of the ancients.
Nearly a thousand years later, the sea stone flower accompanied the islanders and returned to a simple appearance.
Every summer, fishermen carry sharp tools and extract the seastone flowers rooted in the reef from the cracks.
The production process of sea stone flowers is particularly long. Fresh purple stone flowers, first wash the sand and stone on the top, leaving stems and leaves, and then in the sun during the day, and then collected in the water at night, such a process sometimes has to be repeated ten times or even dozens of times, until the stone flowers become pale yellow, can not be used.
Next, put the "dried seaweed" in a mesh bag and put it in a pot, about half of the pot of water. Cook for half an hour on high heat, add white vinegar, add vinegar to remove fishy, so that "dried seaweed" is easier to boil. Scoop up the seastone flowers and filter out the residue of the seastone flowers.
The boiled seastone flower liquid is golden brown, and after sitting and cooling naturally for three to four hours, it can solidify into a gelatinous state, and it is better to refrigerate it in the refrigerator.
Finally, the solidified sea stone flower jelly is planed into filaments/cut into chunks, which can be mixed according to personal preference.
Twenty years ago, in the Chaoshan area, the way to eat sea stone flowers was still very simple, it was really just filament, ice cold and sour plum soup. But since ten years ago, this single way of eating has gradually been enriched by fruits, such as adding mixed fruits, coconut milk, etc., and then drizzling with honey water; or making sea stone pollen strips and sprinkling a few spoonfuls of osmanthus brown sugar.
In the eyes of the people of Raoping County, Chaozhou, a bowl of sea stone flowers, if you do not add more than 5 kinds of fruits, can not be called a real sea stone flower.
Fruits are to be at the bottom, mangoes, watermelons, pineapples, coconuts, wood... Top it with grains: pearl fruit, pudding, qingxin pills, double skin milk, red beans, taro puree, and add quail eggs, and finally drizzle with a layer of sea stone flower water. As for the soup base, there are fragrant milk tea bases, fragrant coconut milk bases, sweet honey bottoms...
In addition, the way to eat Nan'ao Island is to add mineral water after silk, sprinkled with powdered sugar, quite can eat the original taste, that is, more monotonous; because the dried stone cauliflower resembles dog hair, Shanwei people call it "dog hair grass", and the well-made sea stone flowers are called "dog hair paste", cut into blocks with a knife, drizzled with honey or condensed milk.
The Japanese use the agar from the sea stone flowers to make water shiny cakes, brew them with salted cherry blossoms, and eat them with bean flour.
Chenghai people are popular in the hot month to eat ice (shaved ice), half a bowl of ice flowers, half a bowl of sea stone flowers, other ingredients such as red beans, umi, barley, green watercress, ground bean bran, quail eggs, carambola and so on free collocation.
In the eyes of Qingdao people, sea stone flowers can not only become green leaves to embellish sugar water, but also become wonderful salty appetizers. They made sea stone flowers into sea cool powder, scraped them with a special spatula a few times, and they became one by one. After scraping, add the appropriate amount of red pepper, minced garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, sesame oil, pepper oil and sesame paste, sprinkle with cucumber shreds and coriander, and the appetizer will be there.
From the sea lotus to the gelatin, from the reef to the pot, the wisdom of mankind has given the sea stone flower another life.
And into the big world of the ocean, seaweed is an indispensable creature, it is one of the oldest creatures on the earth, for billions of years, it has stabilized the ecological balance of the earth, while also providing oxygen.
Professor Ole G. Mouritsen, a biologist from the University of Southern Denmark, said the nutrients needed to transition from primitive ancestors to modern Homo sapiens could be obtained in seaweed (and still are). Large amounts of seaweed can be found on the coast, and in order to survive, the coastal environment will be an important source of these nutrients.
One study suggests that ancient human ancestors may have fed on seaweed and obtained the nutrients necessary to evolve Homo sapiens from it.
That said, marine algae have also endowed human intelligence, propelling us to become intelligent, discover the wonderful taste of sea stone flowers, find ways to eat them, and finally evolve more possibilities based on region.
This overlapping fate and mutual influence relationship is still quite wonderful.
With the development of technology, it is not difficult for people living inland today to buy a sea stone flower online.
It's just that we can't know what kind of accidental overlap, people will find this deep seaweed, after cooking, can have a transparent gelatinous shape, and at the same time can be combined with sugar water, mixed with a good taste.
It is important that we have a grateful heart, thanks to the efforts of our ancestors, to make today's table a little richer, so that the way to eat it becomes romantic and wonderful.