The natural environment of spring in all seasons gives Yunnan the opportunity to harvest fresh roses all year round, and also allows Yunnan to have the best flower ingredients.
In the quiet mountain valley of central Yunnan, in the country's largest rose planting base, workers have to finish picking roses before the sun rises, because the relatively low temperature in the morning can lock in the fragrance of roses, and after 9 o'clock as the sun heats up, the aroma of roses will evaporate a large part.
Roses that make rose candy should bloom just right, bloom too much, the petals are too thin, and the flesh of the flowers is thin. If the petals are not open enough, the rose candy is too watery, and the taste is not mellow enough. Add white wine to quickly soak the sugar through the petals, while playing a bactericidal role, the brown sugar and roses are stirred evenly, after half a month of fermentation can become a bottle of sweet and fragrant rose candy.
Rose sugar blocks
Rose sugar lotus powder
Rose candy has also made Dali famous for another specialty food, Xizhou Candy. This is a traditional food that must be handled by hand in every detail. For hundreds of years, the Xizhou people have never changed their practices and craftsmanship. Salty with pork as a filling, pork is the kind of fat sandwich, Xizhou people are never stingy in the use of filling, large balls of meat filling almost half of the entire dough portion. The sweet filling is brown sugar and rose sugar, a thin layer of rose sugar will bring fragrant aroma to the whole rice, under the baking of the fierce oak charcoal fire, the fragrance will immediately spray out of the lid, at this moment the rose sugar stuffed rice dumplings should be separated by a layer of grass paper, because brown sugar is not resistant to baking, easy to be baked paste. Dali people like this two-sided scorched yellow, especially in the cold winter, it can give people a hot, solid feeling.
Hi Chau
The history of flower cake production can be traced back to the Qing Dynasty more than three hundred years ago, when the flower cake was a royal meal of the court. From Kunming in the southwest to Tianjin in the north, there are flower cakes produced, but the place where flower cakes can be produced all year round is Yunnan. The hard-working workers of the rose planting base actually rarely eat the flower cake made from the roses they picked by themselves last time.
Flower cake
Rose cake