"Where river crabs are produced, people are bursting with more creativity in using this ingredient. The Jingjiang crab yellow soup bun that has been circulating for a hundred years is one of the classics..." In 2012, the documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue" turned the camera to Jingjiang, Jiangsu Province. Since then, the crab yellow soup bun with thin skin soup has been known to more and more people and has become a special food that people must taste when they come to Jingjiang.
In Jingjiang, the morning soup bun restaurant is extremely lively. Locals would gather in pairs to eat soup buns, drink bowls of rice porridge, and then start the day's work.
"September is the time to eat Jingjiang soup buns, until December the crabs are very fat, and by January when you want to eat soup buns, they will be gone." The soup buns have not yet been served, and the teacher who has been making soup buns for thirty years introduces them to us.
Photo: Wang Mu
A soup bag with a skin as thin as paper and a rich soup juice can only be made through more than 30 processes. Whether the taste is authentic depends on the most complex and important step of this – boiling the soup, which is the filling that makes the soup buns. To prepare the soup, first of all, the thick skin of the pig's trotters is finely cut, simmer in the chicken soup for nearly three hours with a low heat, let the pork skin completely dissolve into the soup, turn off the heat to cool to form a transparent jelly. Then use the hand-removed seasonal crab meat and stir well with chicken broth, ginger and garlic and jelly.
Don't underestimate the stuffing in it, and the master carefully understands it, only to know some of the little secrets. First of all, the "soup" in the crab yellow soup bun is frozen from the cooled skin. When wrapping the filling, the jelly-like texture of the jelly allows crab meat and crab yellow to be wrapped in the dough, and after the drawer, the skin jelly is turned into a umami soup when it is hot, which is also the source of the "soup" in the crab yellow soup bag. In addition, the "crab yellow" in the crab yellow soup bun is not available every month. In the season when crab yellow is not fat enough, many restaurants that make soup buns simply do not put crab yellow, only crab meat. If you want to eat the crab yellow soup bun with excellent taste, you have to come around the tenth month of the lunar calendar every year, when the local crab is fat, the crab yellow is the fullest, and the soup bun tastes the most delicious. When we arrived in Jingjiang, it was the same season, which was a great blessing.
The filling is adjusted, followed by the dough. The skin is not made well, the meat filling cannot be stopped, and the soup is useless no matter how fragrant it is.
The master said that the soup buns they made were made with high-gluten noodles from Zhangjiagang on the other side, which was different from the medium gluten noodles commonly used in making dim sum in the north. In the north, steamed buns and steamed buns are made of medium gluten noodles, compared to high gluten noodles, the former's protein content and moisture are relatively lower, and the flexibility is also poor. Therefore, the commonly used gluten flour in the north cannot make such a large soup bun. In order to demonstrate the toughness of the dough, the soup bun master encloses the dough into a pocket, reaches to the mouth and gently exhales inside, and in the blink of an eye, the dough is bulging like a balloon. He played the "dough balloon", with pride, "only such flexibility can wrap nearly three or two fillings without breaking."
In addition to the raw materials, the key to the tough taste of the soup bun depends on the rolling skin and the filling.
The master who makes the soup foreskin uses two pointed rolling sticks, and when the force is exerted, the outer weight is light and the inner weight is light, and a piece of thick dough skin around the middle can be quickly rolled out. Listening to the masters, rolling the dough skin seems to be the simplest part of the whole soup bun making, but it is actually very skilled, slight deviation, and it is easy to break when steaming.
After the skin is rolled out, it is the last step - the soup bun, which is the most test of the master's skills. An authentic crab yellow soup bun is almost three or two, and if you want to lock it firmly with a thin layer of dough, this circle of fine dough folds is very critical. The pleats are light, soft and uniform, and the pleats on each bun should be controlled between 28-35 lanes. There are fewer pleats, which will leak juice; there are more pleats, and the gnocchi in the middle is too thick to cook. A series of delicate and uniform folds are born under the hands of the masters, and each master can wrap a bulging, elastic soup bag in almost 3-5 seconds. After steaming for a few minutes, the crab yellow soup bun, which the Jingjiang people jokingly called "a grandfather clock on the plate, clipped to the chopsticks like a lantern", was ready.
Photography: Ryoma
The steamed soup buns were finally served, and they were placed one by one in a high bowl made of ceramics and handed to us. The soup bun in the bowl is crystal clear, the skin is as thin as paper, almost transparent, and if you touch it slightly, you can see the soup inside gently shaking. Before eating, Tao Jinliang also specially told us a secret: "To eat our Jingjiang soup buns, we must gently lift, slowly move, open the window first, and drink the soup later." As he spoke, he shook the tall bowl in front of him.
I moved the tall bowl of the soup bun to my mouth and gently took a small bite behind the soup bun's ass, which is "opening the skylight". The soup buns that have opened their mouths, the freshness of the crab meat, the aroma of the pork, and the alcohol of the soup juice all gush along this "skylight" at this time, which is really mouth-watering. I carefully put my mouth up and began to suck on the soup little by little.
The soup is very hot, but the crab meat and crab yellow in the soup are sucked into the mouth together, and the taste is particularly fresh. The photographer sitting next to me laughed as he ate the soup bun, "It's like eating a bowl of seafood porridge."
Along with the soup buns, in addition to ginger shreds, vinegar, and a large bowl of crab yellow soup buns are an excellent companion - rice porridge. The Jingjiang people also gave this light brown porridge an alias, called "Jingjiang Coffee".
Before coming to Jingjiang, we had never heard of the word "dumplings". The master told us that "rice dumplings" refer to a gray-white powder made of yuan wheat, a variant of barley, which looks like flour. It turned out that the terrain in the Lao'an area of Jingjiang was higher, and there were more yuan wheat than rice, and almost every household ate porridge boiled with rice, just like the Jingjiang nursery rhyme said, "Gardenia blossoms with six petals, Jingjiang sun feet are too head, get up early to burn some rice porridge, and burn some hairy taro at noon." It is also easy to make the rice porridge, first bring the rice or rice to a boil with water, and then pour the rice into a paste with cold water into the pot and stir well. When it boils again, the porridge is ready.
Just as he was about to drink the whole soup bun, the master spoke again. He told me that because the dough was extremely thin and tough, after drinking the soup, the bun skin could be blown up again. At the instigation of my companions, I blew air into the soup bun with my bite open, and sure enough, the soup bun bulged like a balloon, causing everyone to exclaim.
Crab yellow soup buns are actually not unique to Jingjiang. Professor Qiu Pangtong of the Culinary College of Yangzhou University mentioned in his article "Miscellaneous Talks on Soup Buns in Jingjiang": "20 years ago, if you mentioned soup buns, the first thing that came to mind was the soup buns of Huai'an, Yangzhou and Zhenjiang, because the soup buns in these three places were famous in the Qing Dynasty. "And the emergence of Jingjiang soup buns is more than thirty years ago."
Photography: Qi Jicheng
How Jingjiang soup bun was born is now difficult to verify, and we can only glimpse its shadow from the change of Jingjiang's belonging.
During the Eastern Han Dynasty, the only land exposed on the surface of the Jingjiang River was the Lone Mountain, and as the main stream of the Yangtze River moved south, the sediment carried in the river was deposited around the Lone Mountain, gradually forming the current Jing River. Before the Yuan Dynasty, the land formed by the Jingjiang River was connected with the Wu language area in the south, which was under the jurisdiction of Jiangyin County, and the language and diet were greatly influenced by the Wudi culture. Later, the north and south land were connected, and the Jingjiang River began to be influenced by the Jianghuai culture on the north bank of the Yangtze River. After the Qing Dynasty, it was successively administered by ChangzhouFu and Yangzhou. Jingjiang, which has become a territory of Taizhou today, also has a Mixture of Huaiyang flavor in its diet, and Jianghuai's soup buns belong to one of them. In addition, the city is born along the river, which is rich in river fresh, and can produce nearly 1 million kilograms of crabs every year. From this point of view, on the basis of Huaiyang soup buns, the Jingjiang people added river crab meat, carried forward the characteristics of Huaiyang cuisine "harmony, refinement, purity, and newness", and it seems reasonable to improve into the current crab yellow soup buns.
In the past 30 or 40 years, on the basis of retaining the original flavor, crab yellow soup buns have been continuously upgraded and improved in the hands of Jingjiang people, and gradually become a delicacy for Jingjiang people to feast on relatives and friends, and have also become one of their most recognized taste symbols.