Original Tian yi chi huo institute
It’s Zigong
Yanbang cuisine, by its name, feels like a heavy-flavored cuisine. The fact is true, salt-helped dishes are born of salt, and the characteristics of the cuisine are fragrant, spicy, fresh and heavy.
Yanbang cuisine, also called "Xiaohe cuisine" in the pedigree classification of Sichuan cuisine, takes Zigong in southern Sichuan as the center and also includes Yibin cuisine, Luzhou cuisine and Neijiang cuisine around it.
Zigong fried eel
01
Zigong in Sichuan
/Food nourished by salt resources/
Zigong is a prefecture-level city in Sichuan, and one of its subordinate districts is called ziliujing district. According to the older generation of salt workers, "gravity flow" is not an adjective, but a reality. Brine water is on the surface of the ground, gently cut a hole, and brine "gurgles" like a mountain spring.
Zigong people laughed at themselves: "This palm-sized place", at most, there were more than 10,000 salt wells, which showed that the well salt resources here were rich and the salt merchants’ trade was prosperous.
The salt needs to be boiled after it is beaten.
Under the prosperous trade, the taste of relying on salt to survive has grown: salt workers have to work hard, heavy oil and salt can ensure physical strength and fast meals, and they eat "salt workers’ dishes" with heavy taste.
Salt merchants are rich, paying attention to face and ostentation. They make the dishes carefully crafted by the chefs in your house known as "salt merchants’ dishes". Salt merchants’ dishes abandon some heavy tastes and have a light taste.
The heavy profit of salt drove businessmen from all over the world to gather in Zigong, where they set up provincial guilds, thus giving birth to "guild dishes" that gathered local characteristics and absorbed the practices of various factions.
Hot pork intestines with heavy mouth
Light and tasty chicken tofu pudding
Maybe many people haven’t seen the salt well with their own eyes. It doesn’t have a wide wellhead and water surface visible to the naked eye as most people think. Most of the bittern is buried several hundred meters or even thousands of meters from the ground. People use all kinds of heavy tools to dig the well bit by bit, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 200 meters, 300 meters and 800 meters, until the bittern water is produced, and the wellhead is no bigger than a sea bowl.
To draw bittern is to put a long bamboo tube deep into the bottom of the well, pour bittern and lift it to the ground. Whether drilling wells or extracting brine, you need to rely on ladders, winches and cows up to tens of meters. The work on the well is around the clock, and so are the cows pulling the winch. It takes about 50 turns to draw a bucket of bittern. Because of the excessive labor intensity, many cows will die in less than one year.
Crane of Zigong Ancient Salt Well | Phreakster 1998/ wikipedia
Dead cows can’t be wasted. For salt workers who are also working hard, beef is an excellent energy source. Many traditional beef dishes in Yanbang cuisine were born.
Nowadays, boiled beef, which is common in major Sichuan cuisine restaurants, is one of the representatives of salt industry dishes. The spicy taste is thick, smooth and palatable, and the flavor is strong. The enthusiasm of boiled beef is very similar to that of Sichuan people.
Boiled beef | flickr Liu Milu
02
Authentic yanbangcai
/Not just spicy and spicy/
When I went to Zigong a while ago, I was lucky enough to invite a famous local chef to cook a table of authentic salt dishes for us. The impression that salt dishes are spicy and heavy was greatly subverted, and we can also get a glimpse of the reason why Sichuan cuisine can go out of Sichuan and conquer the world.
■ Boiled beef
Let’s start with boiled beef. Is this dish particularly common? But this time I ate something unusual.
At present, the common practice of boiling beef in water is to fry lettuce tips, bean sprouts and other vegetables first, then put the pickled beef in a pan and lubricate it, and finally put it in the sauce and fry it together, and finally pour oil on the table.
However, in the traditional way of boiling beef, you should first stir-fry the ingredients, then stir-fry the vegetables. The sauce has the smell of vegetables, then use it to cook the beef, and finally put in the knife-edge pepper and serve it with oil.
Traditional boiled beef
Although it is only a small difference in steps, it actually tests the chef’s temperature. Stir-fry vegetables first, then beef. If you don’t master the heat well, it will burn. Therefore, for the convenience of the map and the stability of the product, vegetables and beef are usually cooked separately in general restaurants by default.
In the traditional way, vegetables, beef and sauces are combined, and you have me and I have you, and the hemp, spicy, fresh, fragrant and fragrant are compound and rich in layers-this should be the reason why boiled beef is the first Sichuan dish to catch fire.
■ Fireside beef
Another beef dish, which can be served as a cold dish or as a snack, is fireside beef.
Legend has it that this is also the invention of salt workers. In the old days, salt merchants paid beef as part of their wages to salt workers. The salt workers first soaked large pieces of beef in brine to taste, then cut them into extremely thin, almost light-transmissive slices, salted them, spread them flat on a shelf and dried them, and then smoked them by the fire with cow dung as fuel, from which came the "fireside beef". The dried beef slices are crisp but not cotton, and the entrance is crisp and tough.
Huobianzi beef
According to the chef, the process of this dish is not complicated, but it needs a lot of care and experience, because if the beef is cut thin and then spread flat on the bamboo sticks for air drying and smoking, if the experience or patience are insufficient, the meat slices will not be formed, and it will be impossible to become a dish. Therefore, this is all meticulous work, which is very wasteful.
Sichuan has always been one of the places where beef is eaten the most and can be eaten in a variety of ways. Hot yellow throat, hot hairy belly and other dishes made by cattle in the water are also the favorite of salt workers. While salt workers were boiling, frying and baking, chefs working for wealthy businessmen and nobles began to disassemble and cook cows in more detail.
■ Yipin Niutoufang
Yipin Niutoufang is considered as a typical official dish of Shanghe Gang in Sichuan cuisine, and it can also be found in the guild dishes of Yanbang.
Niutoufang is made by burning the skin at the top of the cow’s head to remove the rough epidermis and hairy roots. After a long time, the meat is thick and soft, the gum is elastic and tough, and the aroma is solid and rich. Niutoufang is by no means a stunning taste, but a thick and delicious food in a silent place. Now there are only a handful of chefs who can produce this dish.
Yipin niutoufang
This delicate idea has also been used in other dishes-liver cake soup, a famous and almost lost old dish.
■ Liver cake soup
Liver cake soup is one of the three clear soup dishes in Sichuan cuisine. It is made of liver, clear as water and mellow in taste. Luo Chengji, a scholar of Zigong literature and history, once mentioned "mushroom liver ointment soup" in his works. If it is not difficult for many professional chefs to cook clear soup like water, then making "liver cream" is not the secret that everyone can master.
Liver cake soup
This time, in the hands of Zigong famous chefs, we are also fortunate to taste it. For this dish, the chef began to cook soup from 9: 00 in the morning, with old chicken, ribs, chicken feet, lean meat and ham as the base materials, and kept it boiling for 7 hours with minimal fire.
And the other protagonist: liver, the traditional practice is to use pig liver, and modern chefs will choose a more delicate foie gras. The method of making liver cake was gently taken by the chef, and it was "steamed". In fact, there are secrets in seasoning and modulation. Of course, the cooking skill is still the key. If you don’t master the cooking well, the liver cake is too tender or too rough, and you can’t form a delicate and dense taste.
When the broth has been boiled for enough time, add chicken breast meat and pork meat to absorb blood foam impurities, and then filter for several times until the soup is clear as water and yellowish in color. Then put the shaped and flavored liver cake into the clear soup and steam it in the cage for several minutes before the liver cake soup is ready.
In this dish, the taste of soup is very light, and all the delicious ingredients have been melted into the soup. The elephant is invisible, as elusive as a shadow, and people can’t help but want to catch up and take another look. The entrance of liver cake is delicate and mellow, which is in contrast with the lightness of soup.
However, in the eyes of local people, the dish that can best get through the upper and lower classes in Zigong is the rabbit.
Tutu is so cute, it must be delicious.
There are too many ways for rabbits to eat in salt dishes, such as cold rabbit, double pepper rabbit, dried pepper rabbit, dry pot rabbit, soaked rabbit, scalded rabbit …
Dried pepper rabbit
There were two rabbits in the chef’s banquet: fresh pot rabbit and scalded skin rabbit.
■ Fresh pot rabbit
Fresh pot rabbit, strictly speaking, belongs to the new school of salt-help dishes, which evolved from the traditional double pepper rabbit. No Zigong chef is not perfect in cooking rabbits.
Double pepper rabbit
Fresh pot rabbit is seasoned with fresh pepper, and the soup is used as the base. It is hot and spicy, heavy oil and heavy salt, and it must be served with two bowls of white rice, which is really enjoyable. Diners joked: it’s really a salt-helped dish, so I’m too willing to put salt in it, so I have to use a big bowl of rice to match it. This combination means that I have to do something.
Xianguotu
■ Scalded rabbit
The scalded rabbit is a typical traditional salt merchant dish. "Hot" is actually boiled. The beauty of the word "hot" is that the rabbit meat is delicate. After a short period of boiling, the rabbit meat with a little oil is smoother. It is slightly salty and tender when eaten directly, and the taste is progressive step by step when dipped in water, which is enough to satisfy the guests from all walks of life.
Scalded rabbit
In addition, because of the Tuojiang River, Minjiang River and Fuxi River, in the eyes of the salt chef, fresh river and waterfowl can also have ever-changing tricks.
Salt helps a duck. Take an old duck, remove its bones, stuff it into pork belly, ham and dried bamboo shoots, steam it, and scoop it with a spoon when eating it. It is unusually soft and delicious. Eat loach cold, fry fresh loach first and then fry, let it cool before eating, crispy with glutinous rice, heat and seasoning are indispensable; The young ginger frog, which Zigong people think is small and flexible, is fresher than the bullfrog with thick meat. After the young ginger is fried with the frog, its position is not only an auxiliary material, but often robbed by everyone with the frog …
Young ginger frog
Only after eating this meal did I know that the folk saying that "a salt merchant has a dish and a salt worker has food for half a year" is not empty talk, but it does not mean how valuable ingredients salt merchants like.
Just like the "eggplant" that surprised granny Liu, eggplant and old hen are nothing but ordinary things, even if abalone has wings and belly, it is not rare. What is really rare is to find someone who is willing to spend time and effort to cook ordinary food to amazement. That is the gorgeous chapter seen in the ordinary.
Burning white
* Thanks to Zigong Museum (Ji Chengjing), Zigong Food and Beverage Association, China cooking master Wang Guangkai, China cooking master Zhang Liquan, and famous chef Tonge of Yanbang cuisine for their support to this article.
* This article does not indicate that the source images are from Duoduo and Lamian Noodles.
I can eat a bowl of white rice with this article!
Original title: "Sichuan pilgrimage site, two words-of course not Chengdu! 》
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