Winter is coming, and the symbol of the season becomes the water vapor condensed on the glass windows, the freshly baked sweet potatoes on the street, and the pot of warm soup that grunts on the stove.
Food writer Zhang Jiawei wrote about chicken soup in the countryside in "Nothing More Than Asking for a Bowl of Hot Soup to Drink", "The fire starts in the morning, the pot starts at night, the chicken fat is boiled out, and the soup noodles are golden and rich... The chicken is crispy, and the bone can be scratched open, and a wisp of fragrance is strong in the mouth."
The soup boils in the clay pot, waits for three or five minutes after it is served, and the temperature is just enough to blow in the mouth, and the kind of ironing and slight scalding become one of the few comforts in the cold season.
In those hours of waiting for the fragrance to waft out, the essence of soup is no longer soup at this moment, but the essence of time. Borges said that what made him feel distant was not time, but two or three irreparable things. As for this pot of soup in winter, as long as you wait, it will definitely come.
raw material
300g of pig's trotters, 100g of five-fingered peach, 6 red dates, 2-3 ginseng sticks, 1.5-2L of water, salt to taste
method
1. Cut the pig's feet into large pieces and blanch them in water, cut open and wash the five-fingered peaches and set aside;
2. Blanch the pork knuckles into a casserole dish and add the washed five-fingered peach party to participate in the red dates;
3. Add pure water, cover the pot and bring to a boil over high heat;
4. Reduce heat and simmer for at least an hour;
5. Turn off heat and season with salt and enjoy.
efficacy
Five-fingered peach has the effect of strengthening the spleen and stomach, which in turn helps the operation of qi in the body, thereby playing a role in vaporizing wetness and promoting appetite.
What many people may not know is that soup exists in Chinese dining culture in a form of cooking, which has a history of more than 3,000 years, starting from the pre-Qin Dynasty, which is a common daily dish on the dinner table.
This is not a historical accident, but the timing of the time provided the indispensable fire, container and food for the production of soup. A large part of the reason for this can be attributed to the fact that the soup method is very primitive and simple, and the ancients often used "cooking" to summarize it, which is explained in the "Collection rhyme" as, "cooking, cooking also". At that time, due to the development of cooking utensils, most of people's staple foods were also made by steaming, no matter what the ingredients, as long as more water was added, ignited and cooked.
At least in the late Neolithic period, soup was already made from a cooker called pottery, and gradually transitioned from primitive pottery to bronze. Until the Han Dynasty, kettles, dings, bristles and pots that were mainly used for cooking were the mainstream, which also showed from the side that the emergence of soup products should not be later than the emergence of these cooking utensils.
■ Pottery bristles
In fact, it is also true, as early as 605 BC, when the Spring and Autumn Period was fighting for hegemony, Zheng Linggong and Gongzi Song had killed each other because of a pot of soup. It is recorded in the "Four Years of Zuo Chuan Xuangong" that when giving the soup (turtle soup) to the doctor, Zheng Linggong asked Gongzi Song to enter the table but did not give him soup, and the Zigong was very angry, put his finger into the Ding, tasted a mouthful and left leisurely. This is also the source of the allusion to the later well-known "dyeing on Ding".
Not only turtle soup, but also the originator of today's stewed fish soup mentioned in "Ruling a Big Country and Cooking Small Fresh". According to the annotations of the Han Dynasty River Shanggong, fresh is also a fish, "cooking small fish, not going to the intestines, not going to scales, not daring to scratch, afraid of its chyme", this statement is originally a metaphor, but the original meaning is that when stewing fish soup, do not go to the internal organs and do not scale, nor should it be flipped casually, so that the fish meat will not fall away, from which we can see the "wisdom" of the ancient soup.
Although the word "soup" is widely accepted today, it is tacitly accepted to refer to the bowl of delicious soup. But in the beginning, the ancients called soup "soup", called boiling water "soup", soup is used for bathing, soup is used to eat and drink. The classic example is the classic line that Liu Bang said to Xiang Yu when Chu and Han were fighting for the throne, "If you want to cook and Weng, you will be lucky to share a piece of my pie." The "soup" in this refers to the broth.
As for when the soup became today's soup, the earliest can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty, when the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Jian wrote in the "New Bride's Words": "Three days into the kitchen, wash your hands to make soup", which is the first time to compare soup with soup. To this day, people are accustomed to calling the thinner ones soups and the thicker ones called soups, collectively referred to as soups or soups. In the slightly boiling soup, it can tolerate the commonality of freshness and the difference between freshness, and has become an indispensable and important role in the tables of the north and south.
1/2 old hen, 30g of ginseng, 30g of astragalus, 25g of red dates, 15g of guiyuan, a little ginger slices, a little salt, 1.5L of water
1. Wash the chicken and chop it into pieces (if the pot is big enough, you can also put it whole or half in it);
2. Bring the chicken nuggets to a boil in a pot of cold water, then remove them and drain them;
3. Rinse the dates and cinnamon balls with water. Soak the ginseng and astragalus in water for 3-5 minutes, then remove and rinse and drain;
4. Put all the ingredients into the inner tank of the voltage pot and inject 1.5 liters of water;
5. Select the "Soup" file. Season with salt before serving.
Party ginseng has the ability to tonify the middle and benefit the qi, cure the weakness of the spleen and stomach, and lose both qi and blood. Astragalus is sweet and slightly warm, and has the effect of anti-sweating and water-relieving, detoxifying and generating muscle.
Speaking of soup, many people's first reaction will be to think that life is inseparable from the soup and water of the old Guang. Indeed, south of the Yangtze River, Guangdong Province became the center of the soup world, radiating outward and weaving a web of flavorful soups.
In Guangdong, there is herbal tea in summer and beautiful soup in winter. From papaya to coconut on the seabed, from pork bones to crucian carp, it has become a tacit consensus that everything can be boiled in soup.
Cantonese people call drinking soup "drinking soup", giving birth to a sense of déjà vu that you have to drink tea idly. Unlike the northerners, most of the old Canton are accustomed to drinking soup before meals, and they firmly believe that this can enhance appetite, cleanse the intestines and appetize, so there is a saying of "eating first and drinking soup".
In the hearts of many diners, the representative of Cantonese-style soup is also an old fire soup, different ingredients are slowly boiled in the clay pot, and the aroma comes after opening the lid. However, together with Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi and other places are also popular in the practice of stewing soup.
The logic of stew and soup is very different, the latter is the ingredients in a small stew cup heated through water, even if the same ingredients are made in different ways, the taste and taste are also very different.
■ Guangdong beautiful soup
Many Jiangxi people start their mornings with a bowl of flour and meatloaf soup, and a small stew cup is neatly stacked in a steamer, with basic egg meatloaf, peeled egg patties, and advanced versions of ribs or large intestines. The soup stewed through the water is clear and rich, and the two entrances together are like a match made in heaven.
As for the stew soup of the Fujian people, it is necessary to pay attention to the use of herbs into the soup, which is a little heavier. Not far from Fuzhou, Gutian County, there is a deeply loved grass soup of Fujian people, said to be grass, in fact, it is a synonym for various types of herbal medicines, the locals will bring back a bag of grass roots from the grass stall, boil half a pot of soup, and meat together with the bowl to slowly stew in the water, firmly believe that any headache brain heat can rely on this bowl of soup, known as the herbal tea of the soup.
Most southerners love soup and like the freshness of ingredients that penetrate into the soup, but in Sichuan in the southwest and Hubei in the central and southern regions, there is a delicate balance between the ingredients and soup.
Sichuan's Jianyang sheep soup can be called the light of the southern winter, and every winter solstice is a mouthful of nostalgia for Sichuanese. Local chefs often start boiling from the early morning, using the big-eared sheep native to Jianyang to separate the bone and meat, bone soup, lamb stir-fry, before the table the two are slightly stewed, the soup is milky white, the meat is tender.
Further north, Hubei, known as the "Province of a Thousand Lakes", is rich in lotus roots, using nine holes of Honghu lotus root, boiled with ribs, simmered for several hours, and so on the ribs are soft and rotten, lotus root stewed out of the meat pink, lotus root is soft, pork ribs tender, sweet and fragrant, "the best bowl of lotus soup is always made by their own family", which is the recognized truth of Wuhan rib root soup.
Looking at the vast north in a blink of an eye, the status of the soup began to change, as if this gentle bowl was incompatible with the rough feeling of the north, and instead became a marginal existence. For the north, people prefer to see and feel the reality, and soup has become a supporting role in the "slip and sew" after meal or a solid staple food, and it is rarely carried out alone.
In the childhood memories of many northerners, soup is an emergency dish for parents to make up "four dishes and one soup" when they are invited, and the ingredients are mostly simple and direct, and the laver cakes that have been placed in the cabinet for a long time, the excess tomatoes in the refrigerator, or the cabbage piled in the corner of the wall for the winter can be turned into a pot of soup with a straight heart.
If it is placed at breakfast time, people will also make a pot of gnocchi before making soup, and when cooking the soup, it will flutter into the pot and become a bowl of full knotty soup. Here I can't help but think of the more niche breakfast soup in the Yimeng Mountains, the grits (sá), which is more like a meat porridge than a soup, adding wheat rice to chicken soup or beef soup, boiling hot broth to open the egg blossoms, and then generously sprinkling a handful of pepper noodles, fragrant and long.
■Knotty soup
Of course, the above is not the same, in addition to the homely and grounded soup, the northern soup has a more secret and great role, is to hang the soup.
"Ma Lianliang's cavity, the soup of Shandong Pavilion", the folk chef cultivated by each Lu cuisine jurisdiction, even the cabbage boiled shrimp must be added to a spoonful of hanging soup. For example, in the eastern coastal area of Jiaodong, the birthplace of Lu cuisine, shrimp, dried scallops, and dried shiitake mushrooms will be used, and they will be riveted and boiled, no worse than meat broth.
Northern cuisine is rustic, but in retrospect, vegetarian dishes with no meat flavor such as Chinese cabbage stewed tofu are not dull because of the hanging soup.
500g pork bones, 350g watercress, 6 oyster sauce, 1-2 slices of ginger, a handful of goji berries, 3 dates, salt, 2L water
1. Wash the watercress and chop the pig bones into large pieces;
2. Soak the oyster sauce in water for a while to wash away the sand;
3. Put the bones into the pot with cold water, turn on the heat, blanch the blood stains, wash and set aside;
4. Add pork bones, ginger slices, oyster sauce and pure water to the pot and bring to a boil over high heat;
5. Reduce the heat to a boil for about an hour, add goji berries and watercress, and continue to simmer for 30-40 minutes;
6. Add salt to taste before serving.
Ribs have the effect of nourishing yin and moisturizing, improving sperm and replenishing blood, maintaining bone health, and watercress can clear heat and cough, dry and moisturize lungs, and dissolve phlegm and cough.
Soup cooking is a technical job, not a simple combination of ingredients and water, but a test of the philosopher's stone of cooking sincerity. At the moment when soup treasure and instant soup are popular, the taste can be found and restored, but the time people pour into a bowl of soup and the expectation of waiting for it to emit aroma are not as simple as a pinch of condiments.
Literally, soup is a matter of process and result, relying on the cooking of "fire" on the one hand, and the final presentation in "water" on the other hand. Soup is the noodles, the pot is the inside, and all the ingredients are properly controlled under the right heat, thus giving the food a profound meaning. The exquisite soup lies in the raw materials, in the heat, in the cooking utensils, in the seasoning, all of which are indispensable.
Choosing the right ingredients is the key to making a good pot of soup. "No chicken is fragrant, no duck is not fresh, no skin is not thick, no belly is not white", ingredients can make a soup to create blood vessels and bones, so that the taste of it has its own advantages, plump and perfect.
Meat can be seen as the torso in the soup, determining its most important flavor. Common ingredients such as chicken, duck, fish, pig lean meat, and coel bone ham plate duck, these protein-rich animal raw materials are also the main source of umami in soups, which are the umami amino acids found in the ingredients. The different flavors created by different ingredients depend on the different sweet amino acids between each other.
In order to make the final finished product color clear, the freshness of the ingredients is also particularly important, fresh is better than ice, better than in the freezer has been forgotten for some time chicken, duck and fish meat, so that the soup made, in order to have a small odor, less blood stains, and maintain the unique deliciousness of meat, taste a spoonful when boiling soup, immediately can't help but sigh "fresh to the eyebrows are going to fall off."
Heat and cooking utensils
The heat of the soup is different, which determines whether the soup is finally full of water or fresh and mellow.
The trick is that first boil with a high heat, and then simmer slowly with a low heat, the fire can accelerate the decomposition rate of proteins, so that the flavor substances in the ingredients are precipitated to the greatest extent and dissolved in water; and only by simmering slowly for a long time with a small fire can the extract dissolve more, both clear and rich.
Like the general home-cooked chicken soup or lean broth, when entering the pot, you should add enough water at one time, boil over high heat, skim off the foam and blood stains, and use the simmer to maintain a slightly boiling state for 2-3 hours.
As for the choice of utensils, experienced people will tell you to prefer a casserole or clay pot, which is not unreasonable, after high temperature firing into clay utensils, with good air permeability and adsorption, heat transfer evenly, heat dissipation is slow, which means that when cooking soup, heat can be continuously and stably transmitted to the ingredients in the pot, especially after a long period of stewing, the taste is fresh and mellow, and the ingredients are crisp.
Water to taste
The careful selection of ingredients is the key to ensuring the production of soup, and the credit for the heat is beyond doubt, but often the water and the final seasoning, so the most inconspicuous two steps will destroy the hard-earned soup.
The water used in the soup can be seen as a bridge to carry the ingredients, in which the difference in water quality, the change in water temperature, and the amount of water have a direct impact on the flavor of the soup.
Generally speaking, the amount of water used when boiling soup should be about 3 times the weight of the ingredients, cold water and ingredients together under the pot, no need to add water in the middle, and the effect of using mineral water is better than directly connecting tap water, one is to exclude the influence of bleach, and the other is that the minerals in it can add a unique texture to the soup.
In addition, there is also attention to the amount of seasoning and the order of addition, when boiling the soup does not have to put salt first, otherwise it is easy to make the moisture in the ingredients prematurely eliminated, not only the meat quality will become old, the umami taste is also insufficient.
Wait until a pot of soup is cooked well, is the best time to add condiments, a pot of soup with good color and flavor, only need a little salt to season and freshen, such as soy sauce oyster sauce and other seasoning, added to the soup but noisy, lost the original taste.
Yam 150g, pigeon 250g, poria 100g, ginger slices 3-4 tablets, water 1.5L
1. Wash and peel the yam, cook it in cold water and set aside;
2. Put oil in the pot, put ginger slices and sauté;
3. When the ginger slices are fried to make the aroma, the pigeons are fried for incense;
3, put water, poria on high heat to boil, turn the heat to low and slow boil;
4. After one hour, remove the yam pot until fully cooked.
Pigeon meat strengthens the kidneys, reduces blood pressure, nourishes the face and beauty, and the skin is white and tender. Poria can adjust the urine unfavorably, the water is swollen and full.
Gu Zhihui
Founder and Executive Chef of Beijing Kitchen
COSMO: As a professional Cantonese chef, how do you judge the quality of a soup?
Gu Zhihui: The quality of a soup should look at the ingredients used to make the soup, the soup color after cooking should be clear and rich, and the last taste is the main taste.
COSMO: What is the most satisfying or impressive soup you've ever cooked or tasted?
Gu Zhihui: The most satisfying thing I have ever made is the broth, which is stewed with fire fat old chicken and pork, which is salty and fresh.
COSMO: From a chef's point of view, what do you think is the relationship between soup and vegetables in Cantonese cuisine? Balance each other or add to each other?
Gu Zhihui: There are differences in the diet between the north and the south, the soup in Cantonese restaurants is the first soul, and customers have confidence in the soup to drive the sales of other dishes.
COSMO: Soup is a whole-body thing, in your opinion, which part of it is more important?
Gu Zhihui: In fact, the most important thing in the soup is the freshness of the ingredients, the ingredients and the time of the fire throat and the boiling time.
COSMO: Cantonese stews and soups have their own loyal clusters, can you tell us about the characteristics of each of them?
Gu Zhihui: First of all, the soup is boiled directly with raw materials and water on the fire, the stew soup is to put the material into the stew soup cup, steam out the taste through the water, the soup is fragrant, the soup is rich, the soup soup is clear, and what raw materials have the soup color.
COSMO: In the home cooking scene, there may be no way to buy a variety of ingredients and herbs for Cantonese soups, do you have any suggestions for cooking at home?
Gu Zhihui: Family soup chooses fresh and seasonal raw materials to make, as for the use of medicinal materials to cook soup, it is necessary to pay attention to the need to use some medicinal materials throughout the year to know how to use, can not be used indiscriminately.
Source: Fashion COSMO, January issue
Editor: Wang Yimin
Text: Lin loves meat
Photo: Chen Huizhou
Vision: Bian Yuqing
Special guest: Chef Gu Zhihui of Beijing Kitchen SKP
Cuisine: Beijing Kitchen SKP Shop Chef Ma
Image source
Fashion COSMO / Visual China
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