On another sunny weekend, several members of our Qimen Photography Association drove to a friend's house in Shiqi Village, Likou Town, Qimen County, early in the morning.
A few days ago, I heard a friend say that my parents should refine wild kudzu powder at home on weekends, which is undoubtedly a good opportunity for us photography enthusiasts to capture the lens, which can be easily missed. Besides, refining kudzu powder is already a very distant thing in my memory, when I was a child, I often followed my grandmother up the mountain to cut kudzu roots along the kudzu vine and returned home to make kudzu powder, but the various processes of refining kudzu powder are vividly remembered. Maybe the children who grew up in the city only ate kudzu paste, kudzu balls, etc., but I don't know how many processes there are in kudzu powder? Excavation, breaking, cleaning, cutting, hammering, washing, twisting juice, multiple filtering, precipitation, slag removal, sun drying, etc., are finely formed, it can be seen that every good thing is not easy to come by! It is not uncommon for our children to grow up in the countryside. Today, please follow my lens to understand the refining process of kudzu powder.
Step 1: The raw material of kudzu powder is kudzu, so you have to dig up kudzu from the mountain, dig up the kudzu, use a brush on the faucet to shake off the mud, rinse it, and wash it repeatedly.
Step 2: Place the washed kudzu on a clean stone slab and hammer it with a wooden hammer until the kudzu is scattered and broken, the more broken the better.
Step 3: Put the hammered kudzu into a large clay pot or large wooden barrel, soak it in water, stir it repeatedly, so that the kudzu powder on the kudzu root is slowly precipitated under the baptism of water, and then the kudzu residue is fished out and squeezed dry.
Step 4: Filter the water in the large wooden bucket through gauze, note: Kudzu powder in the water, do not pour the water. Finally, it is filtered through a very fine iron sieve.
Step 5: Let the kudzu powder settle in a large wooden barrel for three or four hours, and then pour out the water in the barrel.
Step 6: Stir vigorously with a spatula and then settle for a while, and then sink under the barrel is the kudzu powder.
Step 7: Use a knife to cut the kudzu powder into chunks, carefully removing the black powder, leaving the white kudzu powder.
Step 8: Put the kudzu powder block in the sun to dry, crush it, and it becomes white and delicate kudzu powder.
If kudzu root is not made into kudzu powder, it can also be cut into small pieces, dried and soaked in water to drink.
The kudzu powder you bought is such a semi-finished product, when eating, scoop a few spoonfuls of dry powder blocks, put it in a bowl and crush it, add some honey or sugar, dissolve it with a little warm water, stir it evenly, stir it quickly while adding boiling water, and become a transparent liquid to eat. Kudzu powder can also be made into rounds, and the taste is very delicate and lubricating.
Finally, quietly tell you that wild kudzu powder is a good thing, it has the effect of clearing heat and reducing fire, nourishing yin and aphrodisiac, quenching thirst, and helping digestion. So the sales price is a bit expensive.
Text: Liao Lihong Photo: Member of Keemun Photography Association