I remember when I was a child, every year after the harvest of sweet potatoes in late autumn, my parents would always rush to make sweet potato flour when the weather was good, and at that time, every household in our mountainous countryside made sweet potato flour, and making sweet potato flour was like the rice we used to grow, which was a "homework" that must be done every year.
So how exactly is sweet potato flour made?
Fresh sweet potatoes harvested in autumn, washed clean, not a little sand can be left, the cleaner the better.
When I was a child, there was a machine in the countryside that specialized in crushing sweet potatoes, similar to the machine for grinding soy milk, that is, using this machine to break sweet potatoes, beating like okara, these dregs contain a lot of sweet potato starch.
Although the sweet potato residue contains a lot of starch, but it needs a special device to extract, we rural people generally use "package list", that is, something similar to a kind of gauze, can be used to filter, we in the mountains will also use it when making tofu. The method of filtration is also very simple, just like the filtration we learned in chemistry, put the broken sweet potato residue into the package list, add water while shaking, and filter out the water starch, this process is what we rural people often say about washing sweet potato powder.
Sweet potato starch filtration
Filter out the starchy slurry for precipitation
These water starches contain a lot of sweet potato starch, which needs to be precipitated overnight to get real sweet potato flour. After the precipitation is good, you will find that the bottom layer is white sweet potato powder, on which is a slightly yellow liquid, pour the liquid, and the sweet potato starch is left.
Sweet potato starch
Finally, the sweet potato starch was dug out and put into the dust to dry and we got the sweet potato flour we ate.
The whole sweet potato flour is so simple, not as complicated as everyone thinks, but like farmers growing grain, this is also a more time-consuming process, unlike when we go to a restaurant to eat, people can prepare a table of delicious food in half an hour. In my own words, many delicious ingredients need to go through a long process to get them.
Today when we go to the countryside again, you will find that there are very few people who make sweet potato starch, many people say that making sweet potato starch is too troublesome, in fact, this is really not a troublesome thing, but today for our rural people, many agricultural products do not need to be done by themselves, spend money to buy, take the rice we eat, a few cents a pound, buy a thousand pounds of only more than 1,000 yuan, at the same time you will find that spending more than half a year of effort, from breeding, to planting, to harvesting It is so hard that no one has yet gone out to work for a month to earn more money to buy more grain, so for today's rural people, a lot of the labor that used to be taken for granted has become a trouble in their eyes.
But for me, my favorite thing to eat is the sweet potato flour made by hand, because you have experienced it yourself, so you will understand that food is not easy to come by, and you will cherish it more!