This super-hot pepperloaf shop uses the rough aroma of charcoal to close the hearts of countless passers-by
In Japanese alleys or restaurants, I often see the four Kanji characters of "Fire Intention", and at first I didn't understand the meaning, guessing that the Japanese are really so powerful? Even controlling the fire is always reminded. Later, I learned that it meant to be careful of the fire candle.
On that day, I was a street away from the shop, and the aroma of charcoal fire, flour, sesame, green onions and gravy came straight to the door. It is said that when the pepperloaf comes out, it can convey the aroma of penetrating power, so I followed the strong curiosity, reversed the old bicycle at 180 degrees, and found the "heart of the fire", and because of this intention, the aroma closed the hearts of many passers-by.
Girls like me, who are not fond of fatty meat, based on a kind of deep-rooted herd spirit of conformity, should have pointed their fingers, and followed the crowd to the end of the "pork belly".
Approaching the age of 30, I have often found myself in a party or topic that I am not so interested in recently. A little carelessness, has once again fallen into the baggage of conformity. I took the pie and remembered what a community college classmate had to say, which is called "purslane."
As soon as I saw the pedestrian number on the second section of Yanping North Road turn green, I was ashamed to use the fastest pace into the warm car.
Shudderingly pushed the pie out. Probably affected by the events just now, the cake in my hand seems to mark the failure of my protest against kitsch, and the pepperloaf itself is connected to my past life, but it is just a relay station for rushing from high school to catch up with the cram school at six o'clock. His role is very clear – used to quench hunger, and I don't feel any expectation of taste.
After a bite, the gravy in the cake almost didn't flow out (in fact, it had already flowed out, and the place happened in someone else's car). It was strange, although it was the pork belly that I hated, the mouth full of elastic crispness rushed out lively. I hardly felt my mouth stuffed with fat. It really refreshed my memory of pork belly.
Chewing on the crust further down, the charcoal-fired flour tasted very rough, and there was the same not very Sven meat hidden in it, and I thought of the old food friend who highly recommended the pork belly flavor, squinting his eyes to describe how he rode outside the street outline of the cake shop, smelled the incense, and then brought it back the same way to buy a cake. A bite of the pie, accompanied by the image of his thin iron bicycle turning, is particularly exciting.
After turning a few corners, I came across another pepperloaf shop, and I decided to do an experiment—I needed a "normal" or "average" pepperloaf to figure out if any friend in my mouth really described it as such a good one. I must balance my conformist spirit today.
Deeply afraid of angering the head family, I carried the cake bag with the inscription "Ancestral Bridge Head Century-old Shop" on my back of my coat. Get the pie, bite through, mouth full of air. I was not discouraged, thinking of giving the next bite of the opportunity to identify the friend, let him eat meat first. The friend followed the moon-shaped bite mark that I had already attacked, and then added a bite, which was embarrassing, did not touch the meat at all, and saw it immediately.
A few days later, I went back to the store and bought my second cake, pork belly flavor.
Fluorescent lamps and large shallots are sprinkled on a white iron workbench, and in order for the overly greedy filling to be completely wrapped in the crust, a small piece of excess dough must be pinched from the tip of the pepperloaf for each ball of pepperloaf. Small chunks of dough balls are pinched like clay in the upper right corner of the table.
Suspicious by nature, I was particularly curious about where the fate of these "leftover" doughs would go. The owner said the zero-sized dough was no longer working. They accumulate into bags and give them to neighbors to make gnocchi or fried shallot oil cakes. Others left an old noodle, and what he left behind was the human touch of the old city.
Later I stayed on site and finished eating the pie.
It's not a small shop with a lot of thoughtful service. After all, the whole bakery and the owner of the shop are fluorescent lamps, not aphrodisiac yellow lights or exquisite LED lights, not candles, or innocent fluorescent lamps. What fascinated me was the small society under the colonnade.
10 chairs are neatly pressed against the wall. There are a mixture of rattan chairs with backrests, rattan chairs without backrests, computer chairs and plastic chairs. One of them, a carved one, sits a 72-year-old grandmother, wearing New Balance shoes on her feet, a trendy curly hair, a gorgeous lipstick, and a loud voice.
Grandma went to Taipei at the age of 18, often patronized the pepper cake shop, often married, but the story behind it is not as happy as the colorful peacock painted on the column hanging. That year, the husband could not escape the car, so Grandma alone supported the vegetative husband and the 6 children behind her until the husband died.
The pepperloaf was kneaded, and the 6 children were so kneaded, and a few chairs on the street corner kneaded the whole neighborhood together.
The neighbors spit out by the vegetable market on the opposite street, saw the empty chairs, the feet were moled, and once the god returned, he had already sat and chatted with Grandma in a complete circle, the foreign caretaker who was responsible for going to the market to buy a bag of chicken butts, seeing the popularity of the riding downstairs, and also lively around the display of the pink nail clippers that he had just bought.
And those who have no time to sit down, just walk around and take a few words unwillingly. Wen Kai, the owner of the shop, said that everyone pushed Grandma to choose the chief. "If there is a difficulty, it means that it is still alive, and there must be a solution", one of the pillars is pasted with meditation and the four corners are slightly tilted.
The street corridor at the corner is arranged affectionately, and people are like leaves rolled up by the traffic of Yanping North Road, blown apart and recombined, day after day, happily in this game called the wind blowing, briefly finding their own comfortable position. Until the bell rang 12 times in a row, he reluctantly jumped off the train and lived a serious life.
"The hissing of the stove is fascinating." Wen Kai squinted his eyes and recalled that when he was a child, he was put in the shop by his mother after school, and the brothers' greatest pleasure was to take water to extinguish the flames in the furnace.
Grandma's health has deteriorated in recent years, no one in her mother's generation has taken over, and the pepperloaf shop used to put it away for a whole year. Now it opens again, shouldered by Vin kai, who was once fascinated by "turning off the fire". I am reminded of the teaching of Old Master Gong to Ip Man in the movie "A Generation of Grandmasters", "With one breath, light a lamp, and know that there will be an echo in your thoughts." If there is a lamp, there are people, which is also a fate.
I stared at his wrist, almost twice as thick as mine, wondering if it was a natural advantage or if it was polished day and night by the bakery. When I asked Vinkai, what should the pepperloaf look like in your mind? "Thin skin and a lot of filling, crispy taste" is Wen Kai's answer (I expected it to be a more pretentious answer).
The answer he gave was also like a fluorescent lamp, ugly and cute, and after a few more words, he found that Vinkai was more like the pepper cake in his stove, hot and warm.
On this day, the cold came, and I was breathing in moderation, careful not to let my nose pour too much cold into Taipei. It wasn't until I left the shop and was about to breathe that I found that the scarf was full of the smell of charcoal-burned flour, like a circle of cake hanging around my neck, ready to quench my hunger. Caramelized incense, reluctant to wash.
The pork belly flavor is stimulated, and the grease layer is baked, and it is almost impossible to feel that the mouth is stuffed with fat.
When it first comes out of the oven, eat it hot, and be careful with the soup. My boss told me that the secret to the thin-skinned and crispy texture is that each cake is wrapped in an extra layer of hidden secrets.
Buy an extra cup of carambola juice and sit on a chair in the arcade while chatting and eating.
—End of full text—
Taste-seeking TIPS
Shop name: Ohashitou pepper cake
Address: Datong District Yanping North Road section 272 lane
✎┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈
Written by 丨 craftsman
Shooting 丨 Penk
Artist 丨 Chen Yin, Tingzi
Thank you for reading this, and if you're interested in our content, give us an encouragement: favorite, like, share, or follow. Explore the unknown with us with food.