Guangdong cuisine is the world, huizhou naturally can not be an exception.
Before going to Huizhou, when it comes to food, the first thing that comes to mind is Su Dongpo's plum dish button meat, but when you leave Huizhou, the most memorable thing is Hakka stuffed tofu.
At my first meal in Huizhou, when the waiter served tofu with minced meat in the middle, I was immediately attracted.
I've never seen such tofu, fried into a golden tofu, boxy, hollowed out in the middle, stuffed with meat filling. Meat filling is the filling we make dumplings, the main body is pork, mixed with crushed shiitake mushrooms, onion ginger garlic minced, clip one into the mouth, tofu fine sticky, fluffy, meat stuffing, fragrant, indescribable delicious.
I was told that this was Hakka stuffed tofu.
Brewing, which is said to be in Hakka, means to sandwich and stuff stuffing into something.
After that, in a few days in Huizhou, no matter where to eat, the shop saw that it was a foreigner, and would recommend Hakka brewed tofu.
This kind of "brewing" method is very curious to me, I soon found that in Huizhou, the ingredients embedded in the meat filling is a common practice, not only tofu, eggplant, bitter melon, pepper can be brewed meat, respectively, called stuffed eggplant, stuffed bitter melon and tiger skin pepper stuffed meat, some restaurants in order to let guests eat a variety of brewed dishes at a time, directly launched the "brewed three treasures", that is, a plate, while spelling stuffed tofu, stuffed eggplant and stuffed bitter melon.
The most memorable meal of Hakka-made tofu is not in a large restaurant or a high-end restaurant, but on Luofu Mountain.
At noon that day, I climbed the mountain to the middle of the mountain, came to the dining area, casually found an open-air table by the railing, and began to order food, of course, hakka brewed tofu.
When the tofu comes up, the first bite you find its difference, the meat filling is salty, but the soup is sweet, and when you eat it, you feel that your taste buds are going to explode. I have eaten a lot of stuffed tofu in Huizhou, but I have always remembered the stuffed tofu of Luofu Mountain.
I found that in Guangdong, the tofu used as an ingredient is all southern tofu, and the unique Hakka brewed tofu is northern tofu, which is the kind of brine tofu. It is said that in Guangdong, brine point tofu is only possible by Hakka people, because they inherit the Central Plains custom.
That's right, the Hakka are from the Central Plains. It is generally believed that a large number of Central Plains people moved south in the last year of the Northern Song Dynasty, to avoid the chaos of the Jin Dynasty, but it is also said that from the Rebellion of the Eight Kings of the Western Jin Dynasty and the Wuhu Rebellion, the Central Plains people began to move south.
They settled in Hunan, Fujian, Gannan and Lingnan, and some continued to migrate far away, crossing the strait and going to Taiwan and Nanyang.
I wondered if the Hakka were from the Central Plains, the stuffed tofu must be related to the Central Plains, so I wanted to verify whether there was stuffed tofu or close relatives in today's Central Plains.
When I traveled to the Central Plains, I paid special attention to the search for stuffed tofu, from Luoyang in western Henan to Kaifeng in eastern Henan, from Zhengzhou in northern Henan to Nanyang in southern Henan, and even in the Song dynasty where Zhao Kuangyin and Zhao Zhao started their homes - Shangqiu, I did not find the existence of stuffed tofu, nor did I find any special tofu famous food.
It seems that stuffed tofu has nothing to do with today's Central Plains. I suspect that it may be related to the war in the Central Plains, the war in the Central Plains, the red land for thousands of miles, the desert is uninhabited, so there is a saying that the large locust tree in Hongdong, Shanxi, in the early Ming Dynasty, is gone, people are gone, of course, food and customs are gone.
At the same time, I have a discovery, no matter the north and south of the world, as long as it is Hakka, it speaks the same language, it is said that S.H.E's Ella in a documentary in Hakka dialect, Guangdong Hakka can fully understand, but in today's Central Plains, that language is extinct, is that not, the Central Plains food customs and languages of that year, with the demise and migration of the Central Plains population disappeared?
I didn't have a dead heart, I thought of the words and novels of that year, where there may be records.
I rummaged through "Tokyo Dream" and "Water Margin", and the text describing the life of the Song people was delicate enough, but I still couldn't find the special tofu, or even the stuffed tofu. Nor is it in the famous "Qingming River Map".
Later, a master of food told me that the relationship between Hakka tofu and the Central Plains is actually not related to tofu, but to the form of brewing - meat filling.
Central Plains people love dumplings, to the south, but rare to see flour, the Spring Festival can not eat dumplings of the Hakka, must scratch their ears and scratch their cheeks, so they are poor and think of change (poor, is the meaning of exhaustion, really no rut), the brine tofu passed down from the Central Plains hollowed out, put on the meat filling, the right to fill the dumplings, so there is stuffed tofu. Later, according to the prescription, there was stuffed eggplant, stuffed bitter melon and stuffed pepper. After that, rotten bamboo, eggs, taro, garlic... It has formed a Hakka brewed food culture that cannot be brewed without vegetables.
Some research says that the brewed dishes in the eight major cuisines today also come from Hakka.
In the Tokyo Dream Record, there is no record of stuffed tofu, but there is a record of dumplings. It records the feast of the court as follows: "Where the royal feast reaches the third lamp, there is wine and meat, salted soy sauce, and fried meat, and both hump horns." "Hump horns are hump meat dumplings. Humps, said to be ancient delicacies, are extremely expensive!
Hakka stuffed tofu originated from dumplings, but it is no longer limited to dumplings, jumping out of the category of dumplings and becoming an independent food series, which not only has dishes, but also desserts.
Outside the gate of Luofu Mountain, the street shop is full of tofu desserts of various brands and flavors, which are green and green, which makes people a little dizzy for a while.
Unlike Hakka stuffed tofu, dessert tofu is more like nan tofu, also called tofu flower. There are soybean tofu flowers, there are also red bean tofu flowers, and then subdivided, there are rock sugar tofu flowers, kidney bean rock sugar tofu flowers, and even tofu flowers double skin milk.
The most famous dessert tofu is Shanshui Tofu and Hakka Po Tofu. And the most memorable dessert tofu I ate was iced tofu.
The day I went to Luofu Mountain, it was the summer heat, I wanted a box of ice tofu, a spoonful down, tender tofu, ice sweet and smooth, sweet silk, smooth and greasy, eat a bite, sweet and cool feeling straight to the heart. Compared to ice cream, it is low in calories and nutritious.
Stuffed tofu is the Hakka family's nostalgia for the Central Plains in the way of eating, and it is the children and grandchildren who constantly worry about the ancestral homeland.
Behind the cuisine is the bitterness of the thousand-year migration of an ethnic group.
Stuffed tofu is delicious, but the history of stuffed tofu is very vicissitudes.
I think that about eating in Huizhou, in the future, I will forget everything, I will never forget to brew tofu, and I will always tell those who want to go to Huizhou that Huizhou not only has Daya Bay and Luofu Mountain, but also Hakka stuffed tofu.