Oil cake is an early variety of Xi'an people, it and oil cake, koshi cake can be called "three sisters", which is the old Xi'an people speaking old Xi'an dialect to reflect the breakfast situation in Xi'an fifty or sixty years ago. Of course, there were many flower samples in the early morning, such as twist oil tea, lamb steamed buns, meatball paste spicy soup, etc., which will not be repeated here.
Oil cake, also known as "red oil cake", is named because of the jujube red skin. Oil Cake has a twin brother called "Glutinous Rice Oil Cake" (Xi'an Muslims call it Jiang Rice Cake). The two kinds of oil cakes are only made of different ingredients, red oil cakes with wheat flour; glutinous rice oil cakes with rice flour or glutinous rice flour, rice produced in the south mostly with rice flour to make oil cakes; and wheat in the north to make oil cakes with flour. The annual Dragon Boat Festival is to commemorate Qu Yuan (the Chu people of the Warring States period, the earliest great poet in China, a patriot, an official to the Three Lu Doctors, who later became more and more dissatisfied with the dark reality due to the political corruption of the Chu State, and the Chu State perished, so he threw himself into the Miluo River and died. On this day, people eat oil cakes and rice dumplings, drink male yellow wine, row dragon boats in the south, and step on stilts in the north to commemorate this great patriot and loyal subject. In fact, the Dragon Boat Festival is a festival that carries forward the spirit of patriotism and commemorates Qu Yuan. It is also the oldest "food festival" in China. Just like the Oktoberfest in the southern German city of Munich; the Cider Festival in the small town of Normandy, France (On June 6, 1944, late in World War II, American and British troops landed in the Normandy region of northwestern France to launch an offensive against the German army, with the United States and Britain putting in forty-five divisions and the German defense of the area with about fifteen divisions. From then on, Hitler began to die. This is the famous Normandy landing).
Red Oil Cake also has a younger sister, because of its special posture and win-win appearance, the chef gave it a name called "Bubble Oil Cake" or "Bubble Oil Cake".
Pao'er oil cake is a unique variety of pastry products in Shaanxi (specifically created in Sanyuan County), and has not been found in the recipe books of other provinces and cities so far. It seems that there will be no dispute over the registration right and intellectual property rights of this variety. (Du Kangjiu has always been in dispute, as early as the early 1980s in Shaanxi and Henan have been written lawsuits.) ）
If we use anthropomorphic techniques to introduce Pao'er Oil Cake, she is a beautiful woman in Shaanxi noodle products. Her graceful posture, sheep fat jade-like but with a beige appearance, soft and fine glutinous inner matter, osmanthus fragrant sweet spleen filling, won the praise of customers. In particular, the oval, mesh-like transparent bubbles that bulge on the surface are just like the crystal clear eye bubbles of the dragon's eye goldfish, and they are as thin and open as the cicada wings, which are eye-catching and intriguing.
To know how the bubbles of the bubble oil cake are formed, you must first understand its production process and the difference from ordinary oil cake (red oil cake).
Ingredients: 2 kg of Fuqiang (special) powder, 1.8 kg of water when blanching and mixing noodles, 5 pairs of cooked lard, appropriate amount of osmanthus assorted sugar filling, peanut oil
Method:
1, add 1.8 kg of water to the pot to boil, first scoop out 3 pairs, add cooked lard 5 two and stir with a rod to make the water and oil "melt", and then pour in the flour and stir into a hot dough.
2: Shovel the hot noodles out of the pot and put them on the board, knead them once while hot to eliminate the small bumps in the dough, and then mix the cold boiling water 3 into the kneading well to make it a softer dough. Then knead and pull the agent, wrap in sugar filling, seal, gently press into a flat circle, that is, into the oil cake embryo.
3, peanut oil poured into the pan, the pot is 1.5 degrees obliquely sitting on the fire, when the oil is hot 100 to 130 ° C, the oil cake blank under the deep oil, depending on the layer immediately turned over, goodbye to the surface of the cake after a large bubble, spread to the shallow oil and fry, after fishing out the drainage oil, that is, into a bubble oil cake.
When soaking oil cake, when scalding noodles, you must add an appropriate amount of cooked lard to the water, which is essentially different from ordinary oil cakes (red oil cakes) that do not bubble. This is also the reason why ordinary oil cakes do not foam.
Why does the oil cake foam after adding oil in the water? Because after the water is boiled and stirred, the nature of the water changes, and the original water becomes "emulsion". Emulsion is a special liquid that is a prerequisite for the formation of bubbles.
Aren't oil and water incompatible? yes. However, we added a large amount of emulsifier to the emulsion - flour. In this way, the oil and water will be evenly distributed and cannot be separated. In addition, the starch in the flour is gelatinized in boiling water to form a sol, which also gives the whole dough a colloidal nature. Coupled with the vigorous agitation when blanching the dough and the hard kneading when kneading the dough, the gluten (protein) in the flour forms a good mesh structure, which plays a supporting role in the fixation of the bubble.
Flour not only stabilizes the emulsion, but also forms a tough "membrane" in the dough. (This theory can be explained by the phenomenon of pastin, discussed separately, the author notes) These countless membranes are evenly distributed in the dough, so that the whole dough is surrounded by countless invisible layers of omentum. In this way, the structure of the bubble is basically complete, just waiting for the gas to support it.
It is common for children to blow soap bubbles, but soap bubbles will burst and disappear on their own shortly after the formation of soap bubbles, that is because soap bubbles do not have more stabilizers and lack of support film "skeleton" compared with oil cake bubbles. The skeleton is the starch that can be dissolved in hot water to branch the branching of the network of amylopectin and gluten, and these interlaced meshes become the "skeleton" of the membrane, which plays a supporting role, so that the bubble of the oil cake can be maintained for a long time.
When we fry the stuffed cake embryos in hot oil, the surface of the cake first solidifies, so that the water vapor generated inside the cake is not easy to release due to the solidification of the surface layer (which plays a sealing role). As the heating time increases, the internal water vapor gradually increases and the expansion force increases, at which time the layers of membranes will bulge, forming a large and thin semi-circular bubble before solidifying. The bubbles were fried and solidified, so the bubbles of the bubble cream cake were fixed.
Why do bubbles always form on top of the cake blanks?
Because the bottom of the cake blank is close to the bottom of the pot, its own weight makes it impossible for the steam with little expansion force to bulge the membrane at the bottom. The reason why the pastry is not easy to bulge around is that the hot air always rises, and its force must be upward (the atmospheric movement in the sky is so circulating), and the cake is soaked in oil around the cake, and the pressure of the liquid oil on the surroundings of the cake must be greater than the surface, just like the deeper the submarine dives, the greater the pressure on the bottom and surrounding areas. Therefore, the bubbles of the bubble oil cake are always formed on the surface of the cake blank.
In short, the key to the foaming of the bubble oil cake lies in the formation of a "membrane". The formation of the bubble has a lot to do with the proportion of water and oil when scalding the noodles, the degree of softness and hardness of the dough, the kneading method when mixing water, the oil temperature when frying, and the skill of the operator. We explain the reason for the foaming of bubble oil cake, the purpose is to enable the maker to get inspiration from it, learn and master this traditional technology, so that Shaanxi's bubble oil cake to the whole country. At the same time, according to these scientific principles, we will produce more, more beautiful, more novel and unique products.
Finally, the author praises the ancestors who invented the bubble oil cake, praises their ingenuity, and sings that they have created this noodle variety for Shaanxi. At the same time, I also advise young chefs to work hard and strive to make Shaanxi cuisine squeeze into the top eight (referring to the eight major cuisines) in your generation and go to the world.
(This article was published in the 1982 issue of China Food magazine, and this time it was revised and supplemented.) ）
Shaanxi cuisine Q&A Xu Chang'an Studio honor production Chief Writer: Xu Chang'an Deputy Chief Writer: Zhang Minmin Consultant: Liu Yong'an Director: Liu Junling Column consultation telephone: 13892892860 or 029-86162431
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