"White as snow, thin as paper, soft around the fingers, shaking into pieces, melting in the mouth"
"The clouds are drifting for thousands of miles, and the snow is flying all over the sky"
"This cake is sent to the peach meeting, and the gods take the cake and do not take the peach"
The description of the delicious color, the poetry of myths and legends, and the people of Liucheng mention the cloud slice cake, and the tone is full of pride.
As a prestigious specialty of Liucheng County, cloud cake has been famous throughout the country since the Ming Dynasty, and flourished in the city during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, developing into a famous brand of liucheng cake and becoming a tribute to Beijing, until before and after the founding of the People's Republic of China, it was still made in the style of a family workshop, which has a history of more than 200 years.
In the 1960s, Liucheng Yunpai Cake began to have joint venture manufacturers, and a state-owned "Liucheng County Yunpan Cake Factory" was established in Tai Po Town, the new county town, with "Gong Lantern" as a registered trademark. Soon after the establishment of the factory, in 1959, when the new China Ten Years celebrated, the factory made cloud cakes and sent them to Beijing, and its reputation was greatly shaken. After being transported down to Guangzhou by water and sold to all parts of the country by land and train, Liucheng cloud cake has become one of the specialties that many tourists must bring to Guangxi.
In people's traditional impression, there seems to always be some "earthy atmosphere" in the "old" local specialties such as cloud cake. In order to re-recognize the cloud cake, I visited the "Shunxing" cloud cake factory in Fengshan Town, Liucheng County.
"Shunxing" Cloud Cake Factory was founded by Huang Zhiying, the representative inheritor of the Liuzhou Intangible Cultural Heritage Project (Liucheng Cloud Cake Making Technique). I thought it was Huang Zhiying who received me, but I didn't expect it to be a young boy, Liao Hehui. Can he make a cloud cake?
In the face of my doubts, Master Liao explained to me while personally demonstrating the skills of making cloud cakes.
The main ingredients for the production of cloud cake are selected glutinous rice flour, sugar, lard, tangerine peel, osmanthus flowers, sesame seeds and so on. Each selection and production has to go through seven steps: processing glutinous rice, making wet sugar, refining pork plate oil, mixing, molding, slicing, and packaging. Each process seems simple and easy to learn, but it is very exquisite. Just by looking at the processing of glutinous rice, you can see the delicacy of its production.
First wash the glutinous rice with warm water, then use hot water (60 ° C) to fish once, stack and cover for about 1 hour, then spread out, after 20 hours of drying, sieved, select large grains of glutinous rice.
Sieve the river sand through a fine sieve and rinse it so that it does not contain mud. After that, the rice is fried and sieved with 4 times the coarse sand to separate the sand grains, and then the fried glutinous rice is stone ground and ground into powder.
Ground glutinous rice flour should be spread on the indoor floor spread out on the large white cloth, in order to absorb the ground gas, while maintaining regular turnover, this is the glutinous rice flour aging process, it takes a long time, mainly by the weather conditions to determine the length of time, determine the quality of aging.
After aging, the glutinous rice flour is spread on a large white cloth, covered, which is called "running powder", which also takes a few days of work, and the moistened powder is re-fried once over a low heat, so that it is puffed, ground, and sieved, and the moisture is absorbed.
Glutinous rice flour, which has undergone so many steps, is the base material used to make cloud cake.
Mr. Cai Lan, a food critic, has always believed that lard is the supreme delicacy. And Liucheng cloud cake also uses lard as a raw material, and a little lard can make the cloud cake full of fragrance.
Generally, the plate oil of the earth pig that has been raised for more than two years is selected, cut into pieces and put into a hot iron pot to be refined, the sound of nourishment, transparent grease oozing out, and the air is filled with a strong meat aroma. The resulting lard is like gelatin, which does not liquefy in the middle of summer...
In addition to the treatment of glutinous rice flour and lard, the remaining major steps also have to go through special processes.
Looking at Liao Hehui's calm and capable temperament, he made the appearance of cloud slice cake and tasted his craftsmanship: Master Liao's cloud cake was as white as clouds, soft cake, glutinous rice mixed with the aroma of lard, with a faint orange fragrance, lips and teeth left fragrant, sweet but not greasy.
I believed that he was also a "teacher" who made cloud cakes. Liao Hehui said: "My mother Huang Zhiying personally taught the skills to our brothers early in order not to let the skills of cloud cake making be lost, and I am now the fourth generation of our family to make cloud cakes." ”
While eating the freshly baked cloud cake, he listened to Liao Hehui tell his family's "cloud cake love affair".
Huang Zhiying is a liucheng shechong person, she grew up snacking cloud cake. When he was a child, Huang Zhiying often watched his grandmother make cloud cakes in his hometown. As an adult, Huang Zhiying began to make cloud cakes with his family in Fengshan Street, and sold them in Fengshan and surrounding township markets to subsidize his family.
In Fengshan Street, there are many workshops that make cloud cakes, and due to the difference in processing technology, the taste and texture of each product are not the same. In the past, Huang Zhiying began to make cloud cakes with the skills passed down from generation to generation, but because the process was not in place, there were often problems such as the texture of cloud cakes was not delicate enough, the taste was not soft enough, and the toughness was insufficient.
In order to make up for the lack of processing and production details, Huang Zhiying constantly learned from the teacher fu in Fengshan Town. To this end, she has eaten closed doors, walked through detours, and has not given up the pursuit of improving the skills of cloud cake. In addition to the use of manual production, it also replaces the processing processes such as mixing, slicing, packaging and other processing processes with machinery, improving production efficiency, and the annual production scale of cloud cake reaches more than 60 tons, and the output value reaches more than 1.2 million yuan, so that the cloud cake sells well throughout the country.
Today, Huang Zhiying is already a grandmother-level figure, and the cloud cake factory is managed by his son. As a non-hereditary heir, she actively promotes the inheritance skills of Liucheng Cloud Cake, often entering the campus and community to promote the food culture of Cloud Cake.
The baton for the production of cloud cake was handed over to Liao Hehui, who cherished the honor brought by his mother and led the master in the factory to upgrade the production technology of cloud cake to a new level.
Traditional cloud cake is handmade, pursuing original taste, no preservatives added, so the shelf life is very short. Some people have also joked that if you don't eat the factory of the day, it will become hard the next day.
Liao Hehui has continuously improved the moisturizing and soft moisturizing technology of cloud cake, and now the cloud cake is placed normally, and the taste at the factory can be guaranteed within three days, and the taste is retained by 70% within one week, and 50% can be retained within fifteen days. He also taught reporters a recipe for keeping freshness:
After purchasing the cloud cake, if you do not taste it immediately, then within two to three days, place the cloud cake in the freezer layer of the refrigerator for preservation. This can delay the best tasting period of cloud cake by 60 days to half a year. When you want to eat, take it out of the refrigerator and thaw it naturally, still retaining the smoothness and delicacy of the cloud cake.
In the conversation with Master Liao, I found that he always had a love for cloud cake in his eyes. He said that in addition to his family's brand, there are a total of 13 self-employed people in Fengshan Town, Liucheng County, who operate cloud slice cakes. Under the active promotion of the county government, these former family workshops have applied for brand trademarks, standardized the production links, and opened up sales channels.
Today, as the promoter of Fengshan Cloud Cake, Liao Hehui actively connects with the county government and provides suggestions for Liucheng County to build a cloud cake industrial park. In the future, tourists will come to Fengshan Town, not only to taste the cloud cake, but also to personally participate in the production process of the cloud cake, feel the local food culture, and truly appreciate the new experience and new taste brought by the traditional specialties of Liucheng.
Liucheng County Party Committee Propaganda Department Director Liucheng County Rong Media Center produced
Text: Zhou Yixiang