People who have traveled to Xiamen should have seen a jelly made of "bamboo shoots" in the streets and alleys, called soil shoot jelly.
I went three times and still didn't dare try. But I couldn't help but be curious about dark cuisine, so I went to visit the expert who made the earthen shoot jelly, Master Guo of minnan
The new year is approaching, and Master Guo's small factory has reached the busiest time of the year.
The yard is full of "earth shoots", and a smell of fishy and mixed earth lingers in it, making outsiders feel some discomfort. Some of the treated earthen shoots were piled up at the entrance of the factory, and the "live bamboo shoots" were placed in large wooden basins filled with water, placed in the outer place, and the women of the same village came to the factory after breakfast, sat next to the wooden basins with muddy water, and prepared to start handling these writhing and struggling living creatures with their bare hands.
The new year is approaching, and Master Guo's small factory has reached the busiest time of the year. The yard is full of "earth shoots", and a smell of fishy and mixed earth lingers in it, making outsiders feel some discomfort. Some of the treated earthen shoots were piled up at the entrance of the factory, and the "bamboo shoots" were placed in large wooden pots filled with water, placed in the outer place, and the women of the same village came to the factory for breakfast and sat next to the wooden basins with muddy water, ready to start handling these writhing and struggling living creatures with their bare hands.
Photography | Zheng Yayu
▼Remove intestines and remove mud
Handling earth shoots is a somewhat dirty and smelly job. First, they are left to rest for a day or two, allowing the live star worms to excrete a portion of the sediment on their own, and then rinse them repeatedly with seawater or salt water, and finally the step being completed in the yard: clearing the intestines. The women cut off the hard kisses of the star worms, squeezed out the internal organs and mud in their abdominal cavity, and washed them with clean water. The main organ in the abdomen of the star worm is a digestive intestine, which communicates with the mouth and anus at the tip of the snout, so people with skilled techniques can grasp the strength when they cut off the worm's kiss, pull out the intestine intact, and avoid residue to the greatest extent.
Photography | Zhang Lutang
▼Blanched water
After cleaning and changing clothes, Master Guo walked into the operation room, which was actually a kitchen with a large pot. To make the clay shoot jelly, you only need this pot.
First boil water to boil the soup. Waiting for the cauldron to bubble up, Master Guo looked at the right time to add salt and sugar. In the past, only these two spices were needed to make bamboo shoot jelly, but now out of the pursuit of richer taste, some MSG and chicken essence will also be appropriately put in.
While the water in the cauldron was still bubbling, Master Guo used this free time to fish out a handful of earthen shoots and put them into another pot to blanch the water. Long-term experience makes him very accurate - because a pot of earthen shoot jelly will be fixed in 40 small boxes, so the ratio of water and bamboo shoots is a rough standard, the raw materials are less flavorful and not enough to box, and more will increase the cost. After entering the water, the skin sac of the suddenly hot earthen shoots contracted sharply, and began to roll up a little due to the different contractions of the heated parts, and the room was faintly filled with the smell of flesh emitted when the protein was heated and deteriorated. It was only scalded once, and soon fished out again, a bit like the hairy belly in the old Beijing popcorn or the Chongqing hot pot. Master Guo pointed to some black waste residue at the bottom of the pot and said, "No matter how meticulous the pre-treatment is, it is difficult to ensure that there is no soil residue in the soil shoots." I myself added the step of boiling water to the traditional method, just to remove the mud again at the end. ”
After the mud removal is completed, it is the most critical step in the whole process. Master Guo poured the blanched earthen shoots into the boiling soup and patiently boiled them while slowly stirring. These soups will later become refreshing and tender "frozen" in patient boiling and refrigeration, how can soups without any unnatural additives become frozen? The key lies in the earth shoots, which are the collagen that is abundant in the body of the star worm. In the high temperature soup water, the gelatin precipitates the flesh little by little and seeps into the soup, and the person in charge of the spoon should stir gently without hurry, both to maintain a certain speed to avoid the worm meat sticking to each other, nor to break it too fast.
▼ Remove the worm meat and divide it into bowls
After boiling, Master Guo first fished out the worm meat, and then poured the soup in the pot into 40 small bowls that had been laid out, no more, no less, just right. Finally, divide the worm meat evenly into each small bowl and refrigerate it in a freezer for 12 hours.
Good clay shoot jelly body crystal is not dirty, the taste is like jelly, the taste is light and gentle, and there is a kind of umami flavor unique to sea bread. When eating, vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, mustard and other heavy ingredients are supplemented with thick sesame paste, which is both fresh and stimulates the taste nerves. In the hot summer of southern Fujian, the cold and refreshing soil shoot jelly has the effect of cooling the heat and calming the spirit. In addition to the rich colloidal properties, recent studies have also pointed out that the proteins in the body (accounting for 65% of the dry weight) have a strong antioxidant function of the star insect peptides, which not only have a certain antioxidant effect on the human body, but also are important raw materials for some drugs.
It is not a large meal dish, but a healthy snack to accompany leisure or drinking, so the demand soars every New Year's Festival or the hot summer season, while spring and autumn are relatively off-season.
When I visited Master Guo again, the factory building had become clean, and the scene of mud and sludge when the large-scale treatment of the earth shoots a few months ago seemed to take place in another world. He still sat in the old place and enjoyed the tea break after breakfast, only this time he changed to a better Wuyi rock tea, and the tea tasting was slower and more relaxed. The frozen shelf life of the bamboo shoots is very short, can not be made in large quantities and then put on the shelf sales, off-season may not start every day, if someone calls to order, and then according to the order situation to buy bamboo shoots from farmers, and then make.
There are some differences between the floating palace-style clay shoot jelly produced by Master Guo and the Anhai or Haicang soil shoot jelly popular in Xiamen and Quanzhou: a layer of black cortex on the cooked insect body (in fact, it is the aforementioned papilloma-like skin muscle sac) is not removed, but remains intact and floats in the frozen body. This kind of appearance may seem unclean, but in fact, it can be assured that those black slags are the tissues of the star worms, locking in their nutrients, and the insects are more sticky to eat.
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- Article | "Chinese Chronicle of Wind and Things"
- Pictures | Some of the image sources are networked