Soybean grinding paste, mixed with boiling water to cook the filter residue, an appropriate amount of sour soup to order the pulp, on the bean box to dry the water, seasoned with salt, take out the dry water and slice, and then dry and dry, wait for the golden brown on both sides, the middle is transparent, and the dried tofu in Jiangkou is made in this way. Chewing slowly, refreshing and refreshing, hard and tough, let many diners who come to Jiangkou never forget.
A piece of dried tofu develops in inheritance
On Huilong Road in Jiangkou County, a humble shop, two steaming ovens, three skilled widows cut the tofu into small pieces, put it on a special large bucket, dry it and put it in the oven, and the fragrance of the dried tofu came out of the oven and floated all over the streets.
Eguchi dried tofu has a long history. In 1907, The Jiangkou people Duan Tailu, Zhang Shengxing and Zhang Shengxian made a living by roasting wine and processing tofu in Chengguan New Street, Jiangkou, and at the beginning they roasted and dried the remaining tofu every day and gave it to drinking guests to drink, and later continuously improved the production process, and the dried tofu baked was golden and shiny. After that, the local people followed suit, and every house set up a large bucket in front of the door, on which were dried pieces of milky white tofu.
Over the past hundred years, dried tofu has occupied an important position in Jiangkou's food culture, and it is a hometown specialty that Jiangkou people must send to visit relatives and friends during the Spring Festival, and it is also the most unforgettable memory of Jiangkou people.
"Almost all of our parents would make dried tofu, and the most common thing that children eat during the New Year's Festival is dried tofu." Li Hexian, the owner of the Fanzhiwei specialty food store, recalled that when she was a child, she helped her grandparents make dried tofu, and in addition to the years of migrant work, she and dried tofu had played "dealings" for nearly thirty years, and were destined to be inseparable from it.
In the early years, the family workshops engaged in the production of dried tofu like Li Hexian were almost all mothers and children, wives and husbands. Like many local specialties that people are accustomed to, Eguchi dried tofu, although it has a great influence in the surrounding areas, has always been a small fight, and it is difficult to become a climate.
In recent years, with the continuous increase of the protection of intangible cultural heritage in Jiangkou County, some traditional projects have been given policy guidance and financial support. Jiangkou dried tofu slowly developed, and there were more and more small family workshops, and the scale was getting bigger and bigger. In 2018, Li Hexian's Jiangkou Li's dried tofu was registered as Jiangkou Fan zhiwei Food Co., Ltd., using Fan Zhiwei as a big signboard.
What has changed is the name of the store and the mode of operation, and what has not changed is the quality and the original intention of inheritance. Li Hexian said: "While ensuring the quality of dried tofu in Jiangkou, we use modern technical means to vacuum package dried tofu to extend the shelf life, so that Dried Tofu in Jiangkou can go further and make a contribution to the development of our hometown." ”
"At present, the number of dried tofu production families in Jiangkou has grown to more than 20 households, but they still cannot meet the needs of customers, and there is less exclusion, more communication and cooperation between our peers." Wu Chuanying, owner of Fanzhiwei Specialty Food Store, introduced, "We must further deepen cooperation and formulate a unified industry standard for Dried Tofu in Jiangkou." Through our joint maintenance of industry standards, control the quality of dried tofu, do large-scale, so that the Jiangkou dried tofu brand is getting louder and louder. ”
A piece of dried tofu connects the nostalgia
"We haven't come to Jiangkou to eat dried tofu for a long time, so we're driving here from Tongren with our friends to eat dried tofu on weekends." Customer Li Xin said that after looking for a long time, he found this shop, and the dried tofu in their family chewed more and more vigorously, and the more they ate, the more they wanted to eat.
"I often participate in some promotion meetings similar to the departure of Qian goods out of the mountains, and often bring some local specialties from Jiangkou to the participants to taste." Wu Chuanying recalled that once he met a Jiangkou man in Suzhou, and after he tried it, he told me that after eating something from his hometown, he felt that he was still in his hometown.
Wu Chuanying respected and cherished the strong homesickness of the participants, and was very grateful for their trust in him. When he met a buyer who wanted to buy folded ear roots and wild vegetables, he asked his wife Li Hexian to ask her old family to go up the mountain to dig, and then he was ready to help them mail it. For Eguchi's ingredients, he is happy that there are people who miss it. He said that the dried tofu in Jiangkou is a must, and the dried tofu in other places must be added to the tofu with gypsum or other coagulants, but the dried tofu in Jiangkou is not used, and it will automatically become oily after drying, and it is more fragrant and refreshing, he is also strange.
Jiangkou dried tofu not only has a unique taste, but also the unique nostalgia of Jiangkou people - a big bucket with a roof sticking out of the eaves on the street, a grandmother humming a small song and slices, a mature man who goes back and forth to Longjing Spring to get water, a young mother shaking the filter residue of a tofu rack, a child with a chin on the stove, an old street full of the smell of dried tofu... Those people, those things, and those scenes are the imprints of the times that have been burned into the hearts of the people of Jiangkou, and they are the stories of the small town that have been passed down from generation to generation.
Such a mark, Li Hexian also has. She remembered that when she was a child, she was not yet high on the stove, and her grandmother was steaming rice, and she helped throw firewood, which she went to the mountains and forests to collect. The flames steamed, and the dustpan containing rice was covered with a layer of white gauze, and slowly a strange smell of rice came out. She still remembers that when she was a child, her father liked to eat dried tofu made by her grandparents, and when her father returned to school, he would always bring some past to his colleagues, sometimes taking more, and putting it in the cabinet for a long time would give birth to worms, but his father was still reluctant to throw it away, because his father knew that every piece of dried tofu was soaked with the hardships of his grandparents.
There are also rice tofu, cotton rake, sauerkraut... Later, these became nostalgia, entangled in Li Hexian's nearly ten years of away from home. "I can understand those compatriots who miss their hometown and are far away," said Li Hexian, who has long since returned to her hometown and is still working in a foreign land.
In May this year, Fan Jing Shanbao WeChat Mini Program was also groping to open, Li Hexian sold dried tofu on it, and also sold oil peppers, dried beef, spicy tofu shreds...
A piece of dried tofu is a thriving industry
Dried tofu is happy, and the industrial chain is happy. The development of The dried tofu industry in Jiangkou has enriched Jiangkou's tourism products, driven the development of upstream and downstream industries such as diet, mechanism charcoal, soybean planting and distribution, and helped the high-quality development of the county economy.
In order to form brand influence, enhance product visibility, and further expand the sales market, Wu Chuanying seized the opportunity of poverty alleviation and cooperation between the east and the west, making full use of the eastern market, in 2019, Jiangkou Fanzhiwei Food Co., Ltd. and Suzhou Futian International Agricultural Products Exhibition and Sales Center Co., Ltd. carried out production and marketing docking cooperation, since then, Jiangkou dried tofu has crossed the mountains and entered the metropolis, so that more people from other places can understand different Jiangkou. And the order sales make the Fan Zhiwei dried tofu products no longer worry about sales.
In recent years, Jiangkou County attaches great importance to the development of the dried tofu industry, and has explored a new way of industrial development of "focusing on small specials, doing excellent small workshops, and creating large industries", and initially formed a development trend of traditional craftsmanship refining and modern industrial standardization production going hand in hand.
"Jiangkou dried tofu has a mass base of thousands of households, is the most direct and effective industry for the masses to increase employment and income, as a mountain county with rich tourism resources, by playing the 'tofu dry card', it will add icing on the cake for the development of Jiangkou tourism industrialization, and at the same time rely on the development of tourism to promote the large-scale operation of dried tofu and drive the steady development of the dried tofu industry." Long Chao, director of the Global Tourism Center of the Jiangkou County Bureau of Culture, Sports, Radio, Film and Television Tourism, said.
With the continuous improvement of the construction of Tofu Street in Jiangkou Fanjing Small Town, Wu Chuanying and his wife rented three facades in Tofu Street in one go and signed a six-year contract. They look forward to the huge flow of people brought by the "Fanjing Small Town" tourist distribution center created by Jiangkou's "Jingcheng Integration", so that Jiangkou dried tofu can cross the mountains and ride on the "fast lane" of high-quality development.
"Not long ago, a tourist from Kaili came to our place to buy dried tofu and said: Dried tofu on the bucket - dry on the top." Wu Chuanying recalled, "I reacted for a long time, it turned out that he created a post-break language based on the drying process of Jiangkou tofu, which was particularly interesting, and now I think about it carefully to discover and excavate the regional story and cultural connotation of the current Jiangkou dried tofu, which is also the direction of our future development." ”
(Zhang Lang, Luo Liqin, Jiang Zineng)