Author /Hooper
When you go to buy bubble tea, what is your favorite phrase for ordering? Less sugar, less ice and more pearls?
What sound does it make when you gently suck out the first sip of milk tea in autumn? Is it "hmm"? If you happen to pick up a pearl and chew it in a space full of milk tea, will you still make a "yum ~ yum" sound?
When Pearl Buck, a Nobel Prize in Literature winner, prefaced The Recipe of China, the linguist Zhao Yuanren once pointed out: "To test whether this dish is well done, we should observe the people who eat it. If he makes a nasal sound with his lips and his voice drops slowly, it means that the food is good. If he repeatedly utters yum syllables, it means that this road is very good. " So should bubble tea.
If you find that your friends hear these sounds while drinking bubble tea, there is no doubt that they love bubble tea deeply, especially the pearls inside.
However, it is very likely that people will not be full after drinking only half a cup of milk tea, and sometimes there are too many pearl additives, which makes them feel very plastic. So some people don't like it. In the American drama The Good Doctor, when Claire complained that the straw of the bubble tea she bought was too thin to eat pearls, park geun-hye said to her, "You actually drank that thing, just like adding gummy bears to your drink."
Map/photo network
If you think like Park, I'm afraid you'll miss the delicious cassava soup. Because people who have been to DIY where tea has been soaked probably know that this kind of "pearl" is made of cassava flour. Cassava is the sixth largest food crop in the world and is called "the king of starch". Today, in some underdeveloped countries and regions, this kind of plant with low requirements for soil and easy survival is still the staple food.
The craze for cassava soup only appeared in recent years. When introducing to people, I always suspect that the "soup" inside will be misleading. "If you make soup, there are only salt and plums", that is, you should use salt and vinegar as seasoning when making soup. Times have changed, thousands of years have passed, and dishes like West Lake beef soup, diced chicken and corn soup, shredded chrysanthemum fish soup and three-silk bean curd soup mentioned in Shangshu are not as satisfying as soup and porridge.
Therefore, in this sense, soup is more like a food processing method between soup and porridge-meat or vegetables are used as the main raw materials, mixed with five flavors or spices to make a thin sauce, and finally made into a thick soup. The ingredients of cassava soup are very simple, only cassava, sugar and water. In fact, from the production principle, it is the favorite sugar water for the population of Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian and Taiwan in summer.
The main ingredient of this syrup is bread cassava. The skin of this cassava is yellow-brown and ugly as jade. When making cassava soup, you must first clean up the whole body soil, remove this layer of skin, and expose the slightly thicker yellow skin inside. Pull it for a long time with a knife and peel it slowly. Experienced housewives will hold a knife in one hand and cassava in the other, and turn it over to separate the two layers of skin from cassava meat with the help of the power of the tail of the blade.
The peeled cassava is white, bright and attractive, like ivory treasures in museums. There is no flaw, no fluency, which makes people feel a little unbearable. Unfortunately, such a beautiful "work of art" will eventually be cut into small pieces. Wash the juice under the tap, soak it in cold water for a while, pour it into the pressure cooker, add 1: 1 water and appropriate amount of brown sugar, stew for more than half an hour, and then stew for a while.
Figure /pixabay
Many people like to cook cassava soup in an old-fashioned pressure cooker. Many dessert shops still keep this habit. Some cassava soup stores even take the whole pressure cooker to the latter's shop when distributing it to dealers. For the sake of authenticity, it is not less than one millimeter. There may not be much difference between the old and new styles of pressure cookers. The only difference is probably the word "emotion". Imagine, in the winding alley, in the kitchen of the brightly lit dessert shop, the scattered blue and yellow flames faithfully licked the mottled bottom of the pot, contributing all their light and heat, and the pressure limiting valve hissed and kept spinning, waiting for the moment when the food was cooked like a countdown.
When the food is gradually cooked, the warm breath begins to spread slowly in the air. This "ancient flavor" picture makes people feel lost and moved, and the memories of childhood are being retrieved bit by bit. So I really wish I could move a small stool, sit on my chin and wait for the cover.
Hurriedly lifted the lid, and a white smoke with a mixed smell of plants and sugar rose from the pot. You only think cassava soup has a natural taste, but it's just fresh. When it gets cold, you can already see through it: there are some cassava pieces with different shapes piled up in the sugar water in Huang Chengcheng. This can't help but remind people of the famous sentence describing Wang Xiaoyu's eyes in Travel Notes of Lao Can: there are two black mercury in white water and silver.
At this time, the original white posture of cassava has been dyed golden yellow by yellow sugar, which should be described by another famous saying-such as countless "gems" in the bright Yellow River. The water is bright and the topaz is dazzling. The more you look at it, the cuter it is. They seem to be divided, but in fact they absorb a lot of juice, and the fiber lines in the round body swell up to form beautiful cracks, and even a small hole appears in the center of cassava.
Figure /pixabay
After the first bite, the aroma floating into the nose is clear and faint, as if awakened from a deep sleep in the afternoon, and only slightly chewy chewing gum and some plant fibers can be felt between the lips and teeth, which is not impressive food. When I tasted it for the second time, I began to feel that it was a bit unfair to use the word "gum" to summarize cassava soup. It really tastes q-bomb, and it seems too much to describe it as eating QQ candy.
But compared with the latter, it is still a little soft, a little ... Well, you stir the cassava pieces with a spoon and look carefully, and suddenly you find that some cassava pieces are extremely smooth in the center. If you look at it longer, oranges will flow out continuously. You try to send it to your mouth quickly. Teeth are surrounded by a piece of softness, as if when I was a child, I ran to a big bed with a thick mattress and jumped deeply into it, surrounded by a stable sense of security and warmth. Hey, what about this QQ candy? Slippery, bouncing in the mouth, is a close relative of cheese yolk!
Then there is sweet soup, slightly sticky sugar water, which is really worthy of high-grade "soup". Cassava soup is really fresh, fresh and refined. It doesn't have the colorful and rich aroma of Hong Kong-style desserts, but it has conquered countless tongues that have been tossed by thick oil red sauce and hot and sour!
Figure /pixabay
Because the method is simple, many people will buy bread and cassava to cook, but it is more difficult to make it as soft as in the store. I once asked a familiar shopkeeper for tips, but the shopkeeper didn't play Tai Chi like the small shopkeeper in Xinyuan Zhai written by Mr. Liang Shiqiu. "Please come and have a drink. Don't bother yourself." The store is just a little proud to say that the practice in the store is not much different from your own. The key is raw materials. There are thousands of varieties we use, and all cassava is planted by employees themselves, from sowing to harvesting, not by others. Quality is guaranteed.
As if to prove the truth, every time we open the circle of friends of customer service in the store when cassava soup is closed, there will be many pictures of employees working in the field.
Maybe cassava soup is fresh and delicate, so it can stand out among sugary desserts. Specialty stores with the signboard of "cassava soup" have blossomed everywhere in Guangxi, and there are countless shops, large and small. With the popularity of snail powder, cassava soup, as a friendly partner of snail powder, appears in snail powder shops all over the country as a signature snack and is known by more people. At the beginning, who would have expected that a small bowl of cassava soup could start a sweet career?
I think the older generation probably didn't eat much cassava soup and gave it to them as a treasure. The elders took a few bites and felt good, saying that they had seen such a practice in Fujian, Guangdong.
My mother said with a little resentment that it was still salty and delicious. I just remembered that nearly twenty years ago, whenever we entered late autumn, there would be a fried cassava on the table at home. The raw material is cassava. Mother often cooks with lard, minced garlic and garlic seedlings. The fried potato chips are pale yellow, translucent like wax, and the edges are fried brown. Take a bite, which contains both mellow oil and the fresh smell of wood. Rich in fiber, not greasy but not dull.
Figure /pixabay
At that time, a simple plate of fried cassava, when used as a common meal, was not only a sharp weapon to satisfy hunger, but also a warm comfort to supplement physical strength at the midnight snack stand and wine tasting and chatting at the food stalls in autumn and winter. Dating back to the childhood of the elderly, cassava was something they were afraid of during the famine. If they are not careful, they may get "drunk" because of improper handling of cassava.
As a result, after the living conditions were greatly improved, cassava disappeared from the food market and catering industry, and the dish of fried cassava disappeared from my dining table, leaving me with memories of cassava in the autumn wind.
But the fate between food and people will never end. People are afraid of losing local cassava, but non-toxic bread cassava has been produced. When we have great courage to try cassava, a food that can produce toxins when eaten raw, we have begun to transform it infinitely. There is no delicious food in the world. If more people try, there will be delicious food. It's just an attempt at pork, just like gourmets treat puffer fish.
The words in The Count of Monte Cristo are worth remembering. "Please never forget that until the day when God promises to reveal the future for mankind, all the wisdom of mankind is contained in these five words: wait and hope!" Waiting for cassava may be to turn into cassava soup and make a bowl of sweet moments.