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Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

author:Popular Science China

In the blink of an eye, it's already a small year!

As the saying goes, twenty-three, sugar melon sticky. On this day of the new year, people eat Kanto sugar. Kanto sugar is a traditional New Year food. Folk custom holds that on the twenty-third day of the lunar month, the king of the stove will return to the heavenly court to report the affairs of each family, and the Kanto sugar is prepared for the king of the stove, so that he can sweeten his mouth and say more good things, "the heavens say good things, and the lower world is auspicious."

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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Traditional Kanto sugar is made by boiling maltose through complicated steps such as kneading and pulling sugar, some of which are dipped in sesame seeds and some of which are not sticky to sesame.

What is the difference between maltose and the cane sugar we have in our kitchen?

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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01

maltose

Sweet taste originating from China

Our most common, every kitchen has sucrose: cotton-white sugar, white sugar, which is a disaccharide, composed of 1 molecule of glucose and 1 molecule of fructose.

Maltose is also a disaccharide consisting of 2 molecules of glucose. It is a sugar obtained by the action of amylase to obtain the original juice from grain, and then boiled and concentrated. Although the sweetness is less than half of sucrose, it is not as sweet as sucrose, but maltose is a sweet taste that belongs to our Chinese.

More than 3,000 years ago, our ancestors began to enjoy it!

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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This was a very luxurious taste in those days. In the past, there were not many sources of sweetness, except for fruits, almost only honey, and honey is very precious and rare, and the collection of wild honey even risks life.

Maltose syrup is also one of the oldest and most versatile sweeteners.

02

A wide variety of maltose

· Stir the sugar

I hadn't seen it in Beijing before, but I saw it one year when I went to Chongqing to visit a temple fair. An old man with a large bowl of sugar in front of him, and a lot of small sticks next to him. Buy one and you'll get two sticks with a lump of sugar hanging from them. Hold two small sticks to elongate the sugar alternately, and as the air in the sugar thinning increases, the sugar will slowly turn white from the initial amber. You can easily experience the steps of making Kanto candy or dragon beard candy pulling candy.

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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· Dragon's beard sugar

Dragon beard sugar should be counted as the result of the extreme stretching of maltose. The initial sugar is thin, and it is repeatedly stretched and folded until each sugar shredded is as thin as a hair, and then coated with raw materials such as bean noodles, and sometimes stuffed with crushed peanuts, shredded coconut and other flavors. It is the XX specialty dragon whisker crisp that we can see in snack streets in various attractions across the country.

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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· Sugar Blowing Person Picture Painting

Sugar man and sugar painting, also made of maltose.

Sugar paintings are common at temple fairs. You can specify some simple graphics. If you want complex graphics, there is usually a turntable, turn to the dragon to the phoenix all by yourself.

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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· Honeycomb sugar

It's an old-fashioned maltose sugar block that isn't too common either.

The vendor pushes the cart or in front of the stall, there is a bamboo basket, covered with a white quilt, when someone buys, the quilt is lifted, revealing a whole piece of yellow honeycomb candy, the vendor will hold a hammer in one hand, an awl-like tool in the other, how much do you want, point to it, he hammers down, the piece that comes down, weighs, pays, it's yours.

Honeycomb sugar is added to the heated bubbling maltose dilute, and the baking soda releases carbon dioxide to make the sugar thin have many holes caused by gas inside when it cools. Boiling sugar to make sugar is a very important thing, and it has to be honeycomb candy made by experienced masters to be crispy and delicious.

· Sorghum glutton

Caramelized sugar is actually another name for maltose.

From the name, you can know that this sugar is inseparable from food. In fact, it is a gummy containing maltose, and the ingredients include white sugar, starch, maltose syrup, water, sorghum flour, etc. It is very interesting to chew and relieves boredom.

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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· Cantonese crispy water

Crispy water is inseparable from maltose, under the action of high temperature, the sugar water hanging on the outer skin caramelization reaction, not only the color is beautiful, the attractive aroma of caramel has also become a great weapon for food to hook people's hearts.

03

Why can sugar come in so many forms?

Sugar is a good material for carving, after sugar is added with water and heated into syrup, it has strong plasticity and can make candy of various textures, some soft and chewy, some crispy and delicious, and some rock-solid.

Although candies come in different shapes and textures, they are basically made from two main ingredients: sugar and water.

The ratio of sugar to water is controlled in boiling syrup, and the physical arrangement depends on the adjustment of cooling. The temperature at which the syrup is heated, the speed of cooling, and the degree of stirring will all affect the texture.

04

The rest of the world's sugar

In the history of slavery in Africa and the Americas, sugar has played a heavy role, and people have been enslaved to satisfy the European thirst for sweetness. However, with the industrial production of sugar, the cost is reduced, and the amount of sugar added in many foods is increased, and sugar has brought a lot of "wealth disease" to people. Therefore, eat sugar in moderation.

· maple sugar

Among the artificially made sugars, the syrup of arbor is most similar to honey, because it is less refined and processed, and the components in the sap are more completely preserved. People extract the thin sap of plants and then evaporate the excess water to make syrup.

The Indians of North America had made and used maple sugar before the European invasion. They split into the trunk with a tomahawk, knocked in a wooden wedge to open the wound, and then installed pieces of elm bark as a container to collect sap. After that, the low temperature at night is cleverly used to freeze the water into ice, and then remove the ice to obtain a more concentrated sap.

Compared to other tree species, maple has the sweetest sap and the most abundant yield.

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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· Birch syrup

The inhabitants of the Arctic Circle have long used the sap of birch trees to make syrup, because many species of birch are the dominant species in the northerly latitudes.

Worldwide cuisine | Eat Kanto sugar for the New Year! How much do you know about "stove sugar"?

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· Palm sugar

In the tropics, palm is used to make sugar.

If you travel to Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, etc., you can buy palm sugar at souvenir shops.

· Agave syrup

Agave is a native desert plant of the Americas, and its syrup is 70% fructose and 20% glucose, so it tastes sweeter than most.

Author| Carbohydrate Xiaoyuzi

Source: Kafei

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