Source: CCTV Finance
The Chaoshan area generally refers to the three cities of Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang. These places did not originally produce cattle, but beef balls and beef hot pot can be made into local food business cards. At the same time, Chaoshan cuisine, together with Cantonese cuisine and Dongjiang cuisine, has become the three major genres of Cantonese cuisine. So, where is the chaoshan cuisine?
Hand-beaten beef balls: a true kung fu that has been honed by a thousand hammers
Chaozhou ancient city, the Han River water through the city, linjiang archway street is a good place to visit Chaoshan culture and cuisine. If you visit here, the tour guide or local friends will definitely recommend beef hot pot first, and the must-order is definitely hand-beaten beef balls.
Zhang Zexin, a hand-beaten beef ball master, has been doing this business for eight years. In order to ensure the taste of the beef balls, he must beat the beef sent from the slaughterhouse into beef balls in the shortest possible time, usually no more than 4 hours.
Chaoshan cuisine pays attention to a fresh word, a qualified Chaoshan beef balls, the taste must be both delicate and elastic, bite down to a little burst juice, want to achieve such a taste must choose fresh beef hind leg meat, after removing the fascia with an iron rod repeatedly pounded. These five pounds of beef, he needed to pound repeatedly for more than an hour with the two iron rods in his hand that weighed seven pounds together.
The key to the sauce of beef balls is butter, which needs to be frozen in advance, then ground into a three-millimeter diameter butter filling with a meat grinder, and mixed with the seasoning in the minced meat. These fresh beef balls can be eaten when cooked directly in the pot.
At the beginning of 2020, the epidemic struck, the store lost millions of dollars, the store head decided to go to the network, put beef and beef balls online sales, less than a year of sales time, although the store's previous losses were not earned back, but at least for now can share the store's labor and basic costs.
Wu Zonglin, the head of a beef hot pot restaurant in Shantou, goes to a slaughterhouse 500 meters from his shop every morning to select cattle. Before opening a hot pot restaurant, he worked at this slaughterhouse. His hot pot shop is located in a location that is neither a commercial nor tourist area, and it can also be very popular, the secret is that it is very close to the slaughterhouse.
Wu Zonglin has always demanded that the beef and beef balls in his shop be kept within sixty minutes from slaughter to serving, so that the beef that comes out will have a hint of sweetness. Close to the slaughterhouse, time is guaranteed, and he can pick the best cattle in the first place.
Wu Zonglin, who has been dealing with cattle for many years, can judge the age of cattle based on their physical characteristics. The beef used to make beef hot pot must use three-year-old cattle from Yun, Gui, Sichuan, Gansu, Shaanxi and other places. In the words of Wu Zonglin, Chaoshan people can go a day without eating rice, but they cannot go a day without eating beef.
In the "Guangdong Provincial Food Safety Local Standards Shantou Beef Balls" issued in 2016, it is clearly stipulated that only beef balls with a beef content greater than 90% can be called "Shantou beef balls". In addition to such real materials, Wu Zonglin's Shantou beef balls also have his exclusive secret, that is, boiled with beef bone broth and then sold. Even if the customer buys it back and boils it in water, it can basically guarantee the same original taste as dine-in food.
After the epidemic, Wu Zonglin's hot pot restaurant dine-in business was halved, but because of the excellent quality, the retail sales of semi-finished products did not decrease but increased, and he quickly opened up new channels for online sales. The Chaoshan beef hot pot must-have shacha sauce, chili sauce and red garlic puff pastry were moved to the online store. The popularity of such a complete set of authentic food output far exceeded his initial expectations, and online sales increased fivefold from before.
In Wu Zonglin's view, selling beef balls to all parts of the country is not only a delicacy, but also an export of cattle culture in the Chaoshan region, so he also researched a series of beef products such as beef rolls, sauce beef, beef brisket pot, beef hoof tendons, etc., and moved to online sales.
Chaoshan people are constantly striving for excellence and innovation in beef cooking, so that beef balls, a traditional regional specialty, are stepping out of the gastronomic island. According to Jingdong data, the best-selling Guangdong New Year goods in the 2021 New Year Festival are hand-beaten beef balls, which have become a veritable "Chinese snack".
A brine goose is 1800 yuan, and now it can be bought online shopping
Lion-headed goose, because the head sarcoma increases with age, is famous for its shape like a lion's head. Because of its large size, it has the reputation of "the king of the world's geese". Lionhead goose originates from Raoping County, Guangdong Province, and is now more cultivated in the suburbs of Shantou. Adult lion-headed geese weigh about 10-12 kg in 120 days, while lion-headed goose geese over three years weigh nearly 20 kg.
Li Hengqin has been running a brine goose shop in Shantou for more than 20 years, and he wants to make his shop a century-old shop, so every ingredient must be carefully selected. Li Hengqin's shop usually sells young and middle-aged geese from 120 to 150 days, because such goose meat is delicate and sweet.
Chaoshan brine goose, the requirement must be a goose slaughtered in the early morning of the same day, and the goose body can not have scars except for the neck, so from slaughter to cleaning, the whole process can only be manually operated. Cleaning is not only about the appearance, but also affects the taste, Li Hengqin needs to repeatedly clean the goose's mouth, neck, soles and other parts, after processing clean, the whole goose is bundled with hay, put into the pre-adjusted brine soup for four hours. A goose will sell for about 1800 yuan.
The expensive price of 1800 yuan does not affect the Chaoshan people's love for it, after all, in the local "no goose, no banquet". Different from the spicy sichuan brine, the sweetness of the Su brine, and the saltiness of the Lu brine, the brine of Chaoshan is known for its strong and soft taste, but the taste of each brine goose shop is different, because the recipe of the brine goose is basically passed down from the family or improved on the basis of the ancestral party.
The recipe in Li Hengqin's shop is that he has added more than a dozen flavors of Traditional Chinese medicine according to the ancestral formula, which not only tastes good, but also neutralizes the fire of eating too much meat, and he must taste each pot of brine soup himself to be assured.
The brine goose should be poured with a layer of oil while it is hot, not only the color is good, but also has the effect of adding fragrance, and after a little oil control, it can be sold at the stall. Although Li Hengqin's shop is not large, the business is very hot, and as soon as every swan is taken out, there are many people queuing. If you come late, you won't be able to eat the goose.
Li Hengqin's shop originally could eat goose meat rice, and there were not many customers who came to the store to eat after the epidemic, so he simply removed the original dine-in tables and changed them to stall sales. In this way, there are more customers than before, and they can sell about thirty or fifty a day.
Now Li Hengqin's brine goose is very popular, and many relatives and friends of guests in other places have asked him to give a courier. So he also tried to sell online. Divide and sell foie gras, goose treasure, goose paw, goose wing, and goose meat. Unexpectedly, it was very popular, and more than 30 copies were sent every day just by slicing goose couriers.
【Half-hour observation】How "small and beautiful" opens up a big market
Whether it is beef hot pot or brine goose, it reflects the tolerance and flexibility of Lingnan culture. In addition to its own cultural heritage, catering is the industry that can best perceive the economic rhythm and reflect consumer demand the fastest. Over the years, duck neck, sauerkraut fish, grilled fish, crayfish and other foods with regional characteristics have successively become popular all over the country. Fresh, original and nutritious, Chaoshan cuisine is just in line with people's needs for healthy eating at present.
How to empower through the Internet to bring the "small and beautiful" products that are deeply cultivated in a field and a region to a larger and wider market requires continuous research on new needs and new consumption, provide upgraded products and services, improve the supply chain, and form a "push-pull effect" of supply and demand, so as to leverage the internal cycle. Where there is seawater, there are Chaoshan people, and we also believe that in the new era of consumption, traditional cuisine will go further because of the inheritance and innovation of practitioners.
Source: CCTV Finance "Economic Half Hour"
Reporter: Zhang Xiaoting