Four buns: a warm and rustic taste

Foreign tourists relish tasting four buns This newspaper reporter Yang Kuan took photos

There are many "fine" foods in this world, which make people stunned and stunned, but what impresses us is often those ordinary "warm" foods. They seem to come with time, with memories, with stories, like the craftsmanship of relatives, like the taste of the deceased, like those who want to rise and sink, haunting the past.

Shijo buns are such "warm" food. In the 1980s and 1990s, anyone who ate four buns could immediately be recognized: "You are full of buns!" There's still oil on your mouth! ”

At about two o'clock in the winter afternoon, the reporter walked into the four bun shops located on the south street of the ancient city of Shanhaiguan. The eaves of the roof decorated with flowers and grasses, the wooden tables and chairs full of ancient meaning, and the courtyard with flowers, trees and fish are decorated with the elegant temperament of the old brand. Although it was time for dinner, the guests still filled the main hall. A foreign man with a high nose and blue eyes is holding up chopsticks in the hot air, exploring the inside of the bun. The girl opposite him, Zhou Xiaochang, is a Qinhuangdao native who is studying in the UK, and she specially brought her boyfriend here to taste her favorite Babao rice.

The reporter interviewed The four bun shops in 1999 and 2006 and is familiar with its history. The Shijo Bun Shop, which opened in 1958, is a subsidiary unit of shanhaiguan catering service company, together with the hachijo hotel and the Muslim hotel. Buns are only one kind of pork filling, but they make a big name. The four buns, which are mellow in taste, fat but not greasy, and hot food with juice, have won the recognition of laoshan customs people who are quite particular about diet. Whoever came to the house, bought a few plates of fragrant, oily four buns, both affordable and decent. In the early 1990s, the small shop could sell more than 200 pounds of buns a day, and this pound was measured according to the old method of counting flour without counting the filling.

In 1998, Shanhaiguan Catering Service Company carried out enterprise restructuring, and Shen Peihua, an employee who came to the store as a teenager, and Chen Tao, the manager of the original cooperative hotel, each contributed 150,000 yuan to jointly buy out the property rights of the four bun shops and retain the original team. In 2001, The four buns won the title of "Top Ten Flavors and Famous Foods" in Qinhuangdao City, and then won many honors such as "Qinhuangdao's First Tourist Famous Food", "Hebei Famous Food Gold Award", "Hebei Famous Food Golden Tripod Award" and so on.

At the beginning of this century, the four bun shops were temporarily relocated to Xinglong Street outside the city due to the protection and development of the ancient city. On April 1, 2011, it was relocated to the south street of the ancient city. Shen Peihua said: "The old taste still has to be in the old place." "Yes, the ancient city is like a time capsule, carrying a thousand years of history. Listen to the past of jingo iron horses and beacon smoke, count the annual rings carved on the city wall for a few years, taste a variety of folk customs with ancient customs and charms, talk about the old prosperity of South Avenue, and eat a different taste of buns.

Today's four buns still have only one filling. Ouyang Yingji, a gourmand who loves stuffing the most, said: "Although it is important to be pleasing on the outside, the connotation of the stuffing is the most real and the most popular." "The filling of the four buns is all quarantined whole pig body meat, there is no messy corner meat, and the meat should be twisted into diced meat and pieces of meat, not pureed meat. Feeding standards have been the same as the old method for decades, and are not moved by trends and prices.

"If there is any trick, it may be counted as 'half hair noodles'." Shen Peihua said, "We never use baking powder, we use noodle fat and fresh noodles to make noodles, fermentation does not wait for full hair, so that the noodles can hold the soup juice, the soup of the whole hair noodles is soaked into the noodles, and the filling is not fragrant." ”

In the neat and bright back kitchen, the women in white and white hats and blue masks are sitting around the wide wooden table wrapping buns, and their techniques are so dexterous and fast that they are dazzling to watch. The steaming bun came out of the steaming box, and the round and chubby brake was gratifying. "The bun must be eaten while it is hot!" Shen Peihua said with some helplessness: "Many guests are a little more than ten or twenty pounds, and some are directly taken away." Our shopping guide will explain in advance that a pound of four buns is calculated according to dry flour, and 30 pounds are basically enough for 3 people to eat. The guest said that it was difficult to queue up for half a day, and how to buy more. Just as when you meet the right person, you should watch a movie at the right time and don't wait until you are spoiled, when the bun comes with the aroma, you seize the best time, bite open, break it, pick it up, knock it open, cut it, and sip the wrapped soup to appreciate the true taste.

The eight treasure rice in the four bun shops is also a rare delicacy. Shen Peihua's father, Shen Tiecheng, was originally the director of the reservation restaurant, a first-class chef, and a well-known celebrity chef in Shanhaiguan, and Shen Peihua learned this famous point from his father. Liang Shiqiu said in "Yashe Talks About Eating": "A beet eight treasure rice at the end of the table is usually popular, but it is rare to be standard enough. In fact, the method is simple, there is only one secret - no matter how hard it is. Shen Peihua obviously knows this well: "The ratio of glutinous rice and white sugar must be 1 to 1, the softness and hardness of steamed rice is very exquisite, and the preserved fruit should be selected of high quality." "Honey is poured on the fully soft and swollen Babao rice while it is hot, and the fragrance is sweet and the glutinous one comes to a bite, which is really full of happiness!" (Reporter Lu Hongmei)