The real popularity of Chongqing hot pot, only 30 or 40 years, has formed a stubborn diet memory in its origin city. Contrary to people’s impression, the hot pot here is not loose and casual. Under the taste experience, the city has its own strict hot pot rules.
△ Chongqing "Shuibakuai" hot pot originated in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, and it is an economical and affordable mass catering.
Lao you Lao Lu old flavor
It is probably the easiest to talk about Chongqing hot pot. After all, who hasn’t eaten several hot pots with the word Chongqing in their brands? But as a Chongqing native, I find it difficult to talk about Chongqing hot pot. "What’s the difference between Chongqing hot pot and Chengdu hot pot?" "Where did Chongqing people’s hot pot memories come from?" When I really want to explore such a question, there is no obvious answer for my reference.
Although there are many forms of shabu-shabu in China, a broad consensus is that Chongqing hotpot originated from Buffalo beef omasum hotpot at the beginning of last century. Li Jieren, a Sichuan-born writer, once wrote in "Talking about Chinese’s Food, Clothing, Housing and Transportation" that in the late Qing Dynasty, the shipping of the Chuanjiang River was prosperous, and there were street vendors in Jie Fangbei area on the north bank of the Yangtze River, who were carrying buffalo viscera at one end and coal stoves at the other, cooking and selling now along the street. This form gradually developed and began to take root and set up shops. According to the literature, hot pot restaurants were once popular during the Anti-Japanese War. At that time, there were people in hot pot restaurants who made marinade, managed the fire, set porcelain on the table, used copper pots, and matched porcelain dishes with pots and teas in Phnom Penh, which was not much different from the current hot pot. In 1942, Guo Moruo celebrated his 50th birthday, and once hosted a hot pot banquet for Xia Hu Sheng and the celebrities in the theater at that time.
However, it can’t be concluded that hot pot was popular at that time. With the support of Chongqing Federation of Industry and Commerce, Qiu Zheng, a reporter from chongqing morning post, visited 100 industrial and commercial practitioners before liberation and published a collection of oral history. Because of the hope of restoring the life in the old city of Chongqing, Qiu Zheng and his fellow travelers asked the old people whether they had any impression of hot pot before liberation. As a result, except for two old people who opened stores, only a few old people had an impression of hot pot. This can prove that Chongqing hot pot was popular for a short time during the Republic of China, but it is far from reaching the level of national cuisine today. Then, with the decline of the market economy after the public-private partnership in the 1950s, hot pot once disappeared into the food memory of Chongqing people, and it was not until the 1980s after the reform and opening up that hot pot returned to the commercial catering map of Chongqing.
Like the origin of hot pot, the second revival of hot pot also started from Chaotianmen and spread away. Tuotuo, a veteran hot pot eater born in the 1970s, was born and raised around Jie Fangbei. He remembers that he had to go to Linjiangmen near Jie Fangbei after school when he was a child, and he smelled the smell of Dongzi hot pot and butter hot pot, and he thought it was the most fragrant thing besides automobile exhaust.
Tuotuo became popular with me. In the past, Chongqing hot pot did not charge the bottom of the pot, but "washed the oil" after the soup was used, that is, filtered off the residue, boiled at high temperature, evaporated the water vapor, and left the red old oil for recycling. In the early years, materials were scarce, Chongqing people loved to eat heavy oil, and hot pot was civilian. Using old oil can solve the problem of ordinary people eating hot pot. Tuotuo is also a staunch "old oil pie". I asked him how long he could use the old oil for cooking hot pot at home, and he said all his life. This must be an exaggeration. I am a taxi driver in Lu Yu. I always cook hot pot at home and fry it well. He said that the service life of his old oil in domestic hot pot is generally one year, not because I have doubts about the quality of the oil, but because the ingredients absorb the oil, and the old oil is sucked up after only a few scalds.
The old oil used in hot pot is the helplessness of material shortage, but because of repeated cooking, it has unexpectedly gained a heavy feeling and become a source of flavor. Tan Tinggang, the owner of the hot pot restaurant, entered the hot pot industry in the 1990s. He was an apprentice at the Dan Dan hot pot stall near Chaotianmen. He remembered that in his early years, he not only used old oil in the hot pot, but also left a spoonful of the soup base the day before and added a new pot, just like the old marinade of the marinated vegetables. Senior diners will also emphasize with pride that old oil is not waste oil. For them, no matter how well the disposable pot bottom is made, it only has fragrance and lacks heavy feeling, just like perfume lacks hierarchy, only the front tone, not the middle tone and the back tone.
△ The chef is often the highest-paid employee of Chongqing Hot Pot Restaurant.
Thick beef oil pan
Chongqing hot pot is an art of combination. Generally speaking, there are two factors that determine whether a store’s hot pot is good or not: soup base and ingredients. The soup base determines whether a hot pot is an old hot pot or a new hot pot. The old hot pot is the absolute mainstream of the local market in Chongqing, and most of the chain brands familiar to foreigners belong to the new school. What is a hot pot? In the past, it used to refer to hot pot with old oil. The ingredient of old oil is butter, but now it is not emphasized, but butter can never be changed.
The animal fat used in Chongqing’s home cooking is usually lard, which is fine and smooth, while butter has large fat particles, rough taste, special fragrance and smell, and is rarely used in traditional Sichuan cuisine. However, compared with lard, the melting point of butter is as high as 40℃ ~ 46℃, which is very easy to solidify, so it has strong adhesion and is easy to stick to ingredients. It tastes rich and heavy, but it has become a natural spicy hot pot soup. In Chongqing, the one who dares to play the signboard of the old hot pot, the bottom of a pot of soup, usually has a butter content of 5 ~ 6 kg, which is equivalent to the proportion of broth in the bottom of the pot. Butter has a high degree of fusion, so even if the soup base rolls away, the grease will not all swing on the surface of the water, but will be mixed with water, clear and dense, and the taste will be heavy without hemp, and the ingredients with fierce regeneration will be able to withstand the rolling, giving people satisfaction. In the old Chongqing hotpot, there was only one kind of butter as the base material. However, in the process of improvement, some hotpot restaurants will add a small amount of rapeseed oil and lard, one is to slow down the solidification speed of the pot bottom, and the other is to make the soup bottom smoother, but the rapeseed oil and lard can’t exceed 20% at most, and any more will be scarce. Of course, this is the standard of Chongqing. In other places, even the most authentic Chongqing old hot pot restaurant, generally speaking, the butter content at the bottom of a pot is at most 2 ~ 3 kg, or even as little as 1 kg. In the words of Chongqing people, it is called floating oil, just to get some butter flavor.
For Chongqing hotpot, a good choice of butter is half the battle. In the past, most owners of hot pot restaurants bought beef fat and went home to refine oil, but with the development of hot pot industry in Chongqing, most old hot pot restaurants bought finished butter. In order to meet the production standards, industrialized butter will choose to lose some of its flavor, and with the shortage of products, the impurities mixed in butter will also increase. Therefore, in recent years, a few hot pot restaurant owners have chosen to buy fresh beef fat and go home to refine their own oil. Du Jian, the owner of Shapingba No.2 Hot Pot, is one of them. He told me that to refine more pure and moist butter, we should choose the fat with the hind legs close to the buttocks. Butter refining takes a lot of effort. If it is too old, it will lose its unique butter flavor. If it is too raw, it will smell too strong, and it will also produce a lot of bubbles at the bottom of the hot pot. At present, it is Du Jian’s mother who has mastered this technique.
When an old Chongqing person walks to the door of a hot pot restaurant, he can smell the color of a hot pot, while people who are used to eating butter pot bottoms will always feel airy and empty when they eat other pot bottoms. It is precisely because butter is too "real" for neighboring Chengdu people to accept, so the bottom of Chengdu hot pot is generally made of clear oil, that is, rapeseed oil, plus various spices. It looks like a red pot, but it tastes completely different and tastes full of plant fragrance. That aroma is easy to get on clothes, which is the source of "hot pot flavor" in many hot pot restaurants.
△ In the wholesale market, a vendor is handling duck intestines, which is one of the most sold ingredients in Chongqing hot pot industry.
The contest between oil dish and bottom soup
Before I returned to Chongqing, someone told me that dipping is also one of the criteria for observing whether a Chongqing old hot pot is authentic. When I was waiting in line at the store of Erchafang, I chatted with a local and used the word "taste dish" when talking about this topic. The result was repeated three times, and the other party was still confused. It was not until I wrote it that he suddenly realized, "You said oil dish!" Later, I learned that for Chongqing people, dipping sauce has no seasoning function, so they don’t have the concept of "taste dish"
The standard dipping sauce of Chongqing old hotpot is oil dish, which mainly uses sesame oil. Some stores will serve it on the table, and some stores will put a vat directly at the door of the store with a faucet for customers to pick up. Some foreigners can’t react and think it is tea. In addition to sesame oil, some stores also provide rapeseed oil, which is mixed with a small amount of garlic to cool down, smooth and enhance fragrance. Some people add vinegar to the oil dish in order to reduce the spicy degree, which is tolerable, but oyster sauce is not. Oyster sauce originated in Chengdu, which is too fresh for Chongqing people and has a heavy sweet taste, and it is easy to spoil the taste of hot pot soup. One theory is that the soup base of Chongqing hotpot can be used to soak rice directly, but no one does it now, but there are still many people who directly put a few spoonfuls of soup in a bowl for dipping without using an oil dish. In the eyes of these people, the hotpot that needs dipping seasoning is definitely a failure.
Chongqing people’s grasp of spicy taste is very subtle, even in order to retain the fragrance of pepper and pepper itself, they firmly rejected any spices. This, of course, came out after repeated trials and choices. Zhang Zhengxiong, president of Chongqing Catering Association, remembers that in the early days of reform and opening up, the bottom material of Chongqing hot pot was watercress, which contained starch, was highly dependent, and the ingredients were easy to taste. There was also a unique flavor of watercress, and the soup contained crystal sugar mash, so the hot pot at that time was very mellow and sweet, which was not considered as spicy marijuana. But then, in order to pursue a more extreme taste experience, Chongqing people abandoned douban and turned the main ingredient into Zanba sea pepper. Ciba sea pepper refers to removing the pedicels of fresh peppers, washing them clean, adding condiments such as ginger and garlic cloves and crushing them into balls, which looks like Ciba, and its characteristics are clear, dry and spicy. In Zhang Zhengxiong’s view, this is a wrong expression of ingredients. Therefore, watercress returned to the bottom material of hot pot. Now, the bottom material of Chongqing old hot pot often uses watercress and Ciba sea pepper at the same time, and finally forms a basic flavor that takes into account the spicy and strong flavor of hemp.
The strength and aggressiveness of spicy taste itself can easily make people think that they are rude and monotonous, and then think that they can easily enter the hot pot industry. This illusion may be effective for areas outside Chongqing, and hot pot is indeed the most easily standardized catering industry under the condition of low requirements for flavor itself. Little Swan is the first brand in Chongqing to join the chain nationwide and realize the automation of hot pot bottom material production, but its general manager Liu Qing told me that there must be a difference between an automated factory and a hand-fried bottom material, because a good frying master will adjust the frying time, duration and intensity according to the temperature and humidity of the environment, and the frying equipment is not so intelligent.
△ Chongqing diners eat hot pot in a hot pot restaurant transformed from a bomb shelter.
Bai Jia Bai Wei hotpot Jianghu
In order to bring out a unique soup base, a good hot pot owner needs to know the characteristics of pepper and sea pepper like the palm of his hand. Du Jian, the owner of the second hot pot, used to go to the market to taste pepper and pepper when he was free. He told me that pepper is relatively simple, and the most important thing is to see if there are impurities, that is, whether the black seeds are cleaned. If they are not cleaned, the boiled soup will be bitter. In contrast, the functions and types of peppers are extremely rich. At least three types of peppers are needed for the most mediocre Chongqing old hotpot soup base, one is the main spicy, the other is the fragrance, and the other is the color enhancement. In each different type of pepper, the variety and quality are very different, and the combination depends entirely on the master’s own collocation, which is why some hot pots look full of peppers, but they are not spicy at all, while some hot pots can make their mouths spicy, but their stomachs are intimate and won’t upset.
At Shuang Fu International Farmers Market in jiangjin district, Chongqing, Xiao Cong, who wholesales peppers, told me that there are nearly 20 kinds of peppers wholesale in his shop, and the output, quality and price of peppers are different every year, so it is necessary for the master to check it himself. The customers of hot pot restaurants that Xiao Cong has seen are one after another. Some bosses are excited at first, buying ingredients and studying the flavor, but they are soon defeated, falling to the bottom material of standardized production, and then casually adding peppers with different characteristics and scribbling them on the table. This kind of hot pot restaurant often won’t last long.
Those old hot pot restaurants that can catch fire must have personalized tastes, such as Er Hot Pot in Du Jian, which is extremely spicy and spicy, and young people like it very much. The first time I went to his house to eat hot pot, I just felt that the dishes were soft and delicious at first, but after eating for 10 minutes, as soon as a mouthful of duck blood was put into my mouth, the pungent taste exploded in my mouth, and I almost swallowed the duck blood in pain. Immediately, sweat suddenly started from my forehead, and raindrops dripped down and never stopped. But after careful understanding, there is no too hot feeling in the stomach, and the feeling after eating is carefree.
Du Jian is actually less than 30 years old. When he was a child, he owned a Sichuan restaurant at home. He felt that the chef was not doing well. He cooked for himself in his teens, and later he cooked hot pot himself. Later, he simply opened a hot pot restaurant himself. The shop is in my home, the family area of the closed state-owned cotton mill in Shapingba. At first, only a few tables were set up, and with repeat customers, it slowly expanded to both sides, and rented several residents in the surrounding lanes, so that the scale of 33 tables was achieved today. A large pot was set up outside the store every day, and the raw materials and ingredients were fried now. Like many Chongqing hot pot restaurants, he only cooks this meal at night, opens at 4 pm, and stays out for fitness and playing ball during the day.
Unlike Du Jian’s extreme spicy food for young people, Tan Tinggang’s "Guaner Hotpot" is a more traditional flavor. On the day I went to interview him, a guest came into the store and shouted, "Yuanyang pot, the old taste is a little worse!" " Listening to the voice, Tan Tinggang knew that he was a regular customer and shouted back loudly: "You can’t get used to the old taste." There shouted, "Take foreign guests to have a taste." After that, he disappeared into the lobby, and Tan Tinggang returned: "That’s even worse." Without waiting for an answer, he called to the waiter himself, "Give them a mandarin duck pot to lighten the old taste."
The old flavor in the mouths of guests and Tan Tinggang refers to the unique paste flavor in Guaner Hotpot Restaurant. Spicy paste is a long-standing and fixed flavor in Sichuan cuisine, which comes from the flavor emitted by pepper segments and peppers when they are fried to near zoom, and its representative dish is kung pao chicken. Tan Tinggang had studied Sichuan cuisine before, and he said that Mao Xuewang in restaurants around Chaotianmen before liberation was also that kind of fragrant paste. Tan Tinggang wants to make this flavor, which is related to his experience in opening a shop. He opened a hot pot restaurant in Chengdu more than ten years ago, and his business was extremely hot at first. However, because of his lack of characteristics, after the number of competitors increased, he could not do it soon and had to close down. When he first returned to Chongqing to make a comeback, he wanted to make pickled peppers, but he found that it had been made by another hot pot restaurant, so he had to turn to the paste incense he is making now. First, he could catch the guests in the fifties and sixties, and second, he wanted to find a differentiated route in the hot pot rivers and lakes of Chongqing in blood shed.
The secret of burning incense is to fry the pepper until it is slightly burnt. If it is not burnt, it will be tasteless, but if it is too burnt, it will be bitter, so the degree of burning depends on his experience. Tan Tinggang learned this flavor from another hot pot restaurant, but made a little improvement. Pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds were parched, ground into powder, fragrant, added to the bottom of the pot, and mixed with the burnt aroma of pepper to make it just right. Tan Tinggang is quite proud of this model. "I may be the only one in Chongqing."
On the public comment website, the rating of Guaner Hotpot is not high, but his passenger flow is stable. During the interview, he showed me which tables were acquaintances and which tables had been eaten by him for ten years. When he was pointing it out to me, a table of guests rushed over and said, "The aftertaste in the pot is too heavy and sweet. What’s the matter?" Tan Tinggang quickly asked the waiter to feed. He said that it was because the proportion of the Yuanyang pot was different, the waiter was inexperienced, and there was too much mash and rock sugar on the side of the spicy pot. In this case, you can’t add water, you can only add spicy materials, add raw oil, and suppress the sweetness.
One saying is that in the hot pot market in Chongqing, the taste of all hot pots can reach the passing line, but if the passing line goes up, it will become very difficult to climb. In addition to different tastes of different people, there are also some strange situations. For example, some time ago, Tan Tinggang found that the bottom of his own pot would burn white and yellow foam, while the normal foam should be yellow and red, and it would disappear when the water boiled. Tan Tinggang didn’t know what was going on, so he had to pull out seven or eight pots, put the same materials, and made a control experiment to find out the problem. Finally, he found that the newly changed chicken essence was not suitable. This slight difference affects the taste, but it is so small that not every guest can find it. If the boss can’t find it himself, the life of the pot of soup will slowly wither away.
Chongqing people choose hot pot, and in turn, hot pot is reshaping the taste experience of Chongqing people. Zhang Zhengxiong said that Chongqing Sichuan cuisine used to be slightly spicy, while hot pot was extremely spicy. In the late 1980s, he worked in Beijing for a period of time. When communicating with others, the representatives of Sichuan cuisine mentioned were shredded pork with fish flavor, Mapo tofu, kung pao chicken and Sichuan style pork. But more than a decade ago, when he went to Beijing again to communicate with people, the representatives of Sichuan cuisine had become authentic Jianghu dishes such as Maoxuewang, boiled fish and greedy frog. The same spicy flavor makes Jianghu dishes and hot pot known as brother dishes and sister dishes. According to Zhang Zhengxiong’s observation, it is the rise of hot pot that reshapes the taste experience and memory of Chongqing people and promotes the popularization and development of Jianghu dishes.
Hairy belly praise
Chongqing people don’t eat hot pot, but say hot, hot pot must be hot and fresh hairy belly. Hot pot tastes heavy, and Chongqing people’s requirements for fresh ingredients and original taste are relatively low, and hairy belly is a rare counterexample. Beef tripe is beef stomach, and cattle are ruminants. There are four stomachs, namely rumen, reticulate stomach, flap stomach and abomasum. Among them, flap stomach is the scientific name of beef tripe, which is leaf-shaped and does not secrete gastric juice. Its function in cattle is to absorb water and acid produced by fermentation of forage during rumination.
Melaleuca tripe usually sold in hot pot restaurants in other places is not fresh beef tripe, but a processed product of beef tripe after high-temperature autoclaving. Similarly, there is beef tripe, which is also a dry beef tripe soaked in alkaline water or a liquid with a specific biological enzyme to make it swell again. When scalding, the thousand-layer belly and hairy belly do not shrink, and they are not old for a long time, and the taste is delicate and crisp enough, which is very popular in other places. However, these two ingredients are simply not found on the menu of most Chongqing old hot pot.
Chongqing people’s choice is fresh beef tripe. Compared with thousand layers of beef tripe and hairy tripe, fresh beef tripe has a unique flavor of beef stomach, which is crisp and slag-melting. Among the beef tripe varieties in the market at present, it is a general consensus that the quality of beef tripe in buffalo is better than that of beef tripe in cattle. However, buffalo beef is rough and sour, which is not a beef breed and has less slaughter, so the supply is in short supply.
The color and shape of beef omasum and beef omasum are almost the same, and there are only three differences. First, the top of the protruding thorn on beef omasum is sharp, while the top of the protruding thorn on beef omasum is round, but the length of the protruding thorn is only three or four millimeters, so it is difficult to distinguish it without rich experience. Second, the stomach wall of buffalo beef omasum is thicker, which is also the reason why buffalo beef omasum tastes fuller, but the thickness of beef omasum meat is related to the growth cycle of cattle itself, not only to the variety; Third, the fresh buffalo hairy belly is stiff like a collar, while the ox hairy belly is as soft as a towel. These differences are logical to say, but it is difficult to apply them in practice. Guo Jianguo, who has been doing beef omasum business in Chongqing for decades, told me that in fact, in the fresh goods market, many hot pot restaurant owners can’t tell the difference between beef omasum with water and beef omasum with cattle.
It is still unknown whether you can get a good fresh hairy belly. Fresh beef omasum requires extremely high timeliness, so beef omasum workers need to take out the abdominal cavity of the cow in the fastest time when the cow is slaughtered, clean it up, dry it slightly, and immediately wrap it with ice cubes. The flap stomach of cattle is actually extremely difficult to handle. The leaf-like stomach pages are arranged in the spherical stomach wall, like a dense seaweed, which is uneven and full of semi-digested products of cattle. When Guo Jianguo was young, he cooperated with slaughterhouses in Chongqing, and all the beef tripes in the slaughterhouse were covered in years. His business was able to grow because he handled beef tripes quickly, and he could handle a flap stomach in three or four minutes at the earliest. If you are unhappy, the stomach page will easily rot, and the layer of meat thorn will fall off as soon as you rub it. It can only be used to make a dry hairy belly or a thousand layers of belly. Sometimes, after the cattle are slaughtered, if the slaughterhouse workers don’t gut their stomachs in time, the quality of beef omasum will drop rapidly, and the wholesale price of beef omasum will be 2-3 times worse than that of beef omasum in a few minutes.
In recent years, Guo Jianguo handed over his business to his daughter and son-in-law, and he drove to Jie Fangbei to play mahjong every day. His daughter told me that now their hairy bellies come from Xinjiang as far away as possible, and the workers are sent from Chongqing by themselves, so they work in the local slaughterhouse, get the hairy bellies, treat them, and send them back to Chongqing by shipping immediately. The fastest time is only 4 hours. Sometimes, these hairy bellies will return to the starting city after a tour of the fresh goods market in Chongqing, because it is difficult for other cities to find suitable workers who can handle fresh hairy bellies so perfectly like Chongqing people. In fact, most of the fresh hairy bellies used in hot pot in China now come from Chongqing. Local hot pot restaurants in Chongqing are more demanding. After dealing with beef omasum wholesalers, they often take the whole stomach flap directly from the slaughterhouse and put it in the store for refrigeration. When there are few guests at noon, the guests will tear it now, and when there are many guests at night, they will tear it one or two hours in advance and put it on a plate for refrigeration. Tearing here refers to tearing the hairy belly off the stomach wall by hand. This is also different from the past. In the past, it was cut with a knife and put together with the stomach wall. However, the time when the stomach wall and stomach leaves became brittle was out of sync, and now it has been abandoned by many hot pot restaurants.
But for diners, a good dish of hairy belly is served, and the adventure has just begun. Many foreign guests have heard of the saying that scalding a hairy belly requires "seven ups and eight downs", and Zhang Zhengxiong does not agree with this statement. He told me that different people scald their hairy bellies differently. Some people fly up and down, some people dangle from side to side, and some people think that chopsticks are caught in a fixed position, which affects the uniform heating of their hairy bellies. They will use chopsticks to turn around the pot with a piece of hairy bellies, which is as flexible as dancing with their heads covered. Old diners never rely on time to iron their hairy bellies, but rely on their eyesight to see that all the hairy bellies in the pot are stiff and slightly curly, and when they swing elastically, they can’t cook any more. But to be honest, even after eating eight hot pots in Chongqing and listening to different people’s experiences in scalding their stomachs, I still dare not say anything about this skill.
Among the hot pot ingredients in Chongqing, the only one that can be compared with beef omasum is duck intestines and goose intestines. Zhang Zhengxiong told me that duck intestines, as ingredients, appeared in the hot pot in Chongqing during the Republic of China, but at that time they were mainly cooked and scalded. The store cooked the duck intestines first, served them on the table, and diners just rinsed them in the pot when eating. Now it’s hot now, and it’s also fresh and crisp.
In fact, following this taste, Chongqing people have developed their ability to dig up ingredients to the extreme and found many tricky ingredients such as yellow throat, waist slices, beef liver and pig root. The yellow throat is the main artery of animals, also known as the heart tube. It existed in Chongqing hot pot during the Republic of China, but it is thicker than the pig’s yellow throat and tastes better. However, if it is not handled well, it is easy to get old and can’t be bitten. Zhang Zhengxiong told me that it is because yellow throat is difficult to deal with. In the past, the level of a chef in a restaurant was determined by how well he did yellow throat. Waist slices and beef liver are relatively popular ingredients, but the thinner they are cut, the more brittle they will be when they are scalded. Because the waist slices are well handled, there is also a chain hotpot restaurant in Chongqing that puts "broadsword waist slices" into the store name. Root was added to hot pot only after the 1980s. Root needs to be cooked for a long time, and its taste is a little strange. But it still ranks among the menus of old hot pot restaurants for a long time because of its crispness.
Most crisp foods are tasteless, which means that the taste of the base soup can only adhere to the surface of the ingredients, which requires dry dishes. A dry dish is actually a dish of dried Chili noodles, with pepper noodles and salt, chicken essence monosodium glutamate and so on. Among them, dried Chili must be coarse-grained, which is not only spicy but also crisp when eaten in the mouth. Dry dishes can be used with almost all ingredients that are not tasty, especially loin slices, except hairy belly, because dry dishes will mask the aroma of hairy belly itself.
△ Chongqing people love to eat Jiugongge, and Gege hot dishes are different and have their own rules.
Jiugongge: Order and Freedom
A standard Chongqing hotpot should have a grid and a nine-square grid. Jiugongge originated from assembling tables, and Li Jieren recorded in detail the hot pot compartmentalization during the Republic of China: "At first, it was a general peddler who bought buffalo viscera … a mud stove was placed on the bear’s head, and a compartmentalized ocean iron basin was placed on the stove. A spicy, hemp and salty marinade was boiled upside down in the basin, so the friends by the river and at the bridge, who generally sold labor, and beggars who got a few articles and wanted meat, etc. Everyone thinks that a grid of marinade juice is hot and eaten. Eating a few pieces and counting some money is not only economical, but also can increase calories. "
There is the same record in the book of oral history "Industry and Commerce in Yuzhong". In the book, an old man named Xie Yumei recalled that in the Republic of China, she and her mother set up a table to sell hot pot outside the shack where they lived and took the civilian route. "Generally, in the morning, I will go to Chaotianmen to guard the vegetable boat. The vegetable boat will throw some bad dishes on the river. When we pick them up, we will wash them on the river and carry them back. The cut vegetables are divided into ingredients, and they are cooked in one pot. Each dish is eaten, and there is no oil dish. The rice is casually scooped. " Until the second revival of hot pot in the 1980s, many Chongqing people still had the experience of eating hot pot together.
On the basis of patchwork, the early chafing dish was taboo, and the ingredients with heavy chlorophyll and high starch content could not be put into the pot, because chlorophyll would make the soup black, and starch would easily precipitate and stick to the pot, which would make it paste and bitter, all of which were bad soup and bad water. With the disposable use of base soup, the taboo of ingredients has long been broken, and the inclusiveness of Chongqing hot pot to ingredients is highlighted. Instead of leaving the market, the grid of hot pot born of practicality has developed a unique vitality of food, which comes from the fact that different grids of base soup have different heating areas, different temperatures and different foods that can be boiled.
In the hot pot culture exhibition hall on the first floor of Hongyadong, there is a nine-square-grid heat map, from which we can see that the center grid with the highest heat is the one with the highest temperature, and most of the scalding ingredients with crisp taste finish gorgeous transformation in this grid; The temperature of the four corners is the second, and it is generally used for cooking ingredients that can only be eaten for ten minutes, such as spicy beef, old meat slices, fat intestines, dried liver, potatoes, etc. Cross-grid pot bottom has the smallest heating area, and it will not boil almost all the time. It is suitable for scalding food, such as brain flower, bean curd and blood curd, which can be thrown into these grids, stewed with slow fire, taken out when leaving the table, and feasted.
At first, my understanding of Chongqing hot pot ingredients only came from scalding, but Tan Tinggang told me that people who really eat old hot pot pay special attention to the process of "simmering" in addition to scalding. Only the ingredients simmered slowly can fully absorb the flavor of the bottom soup. Therefore, Chongqing locals eat old hot pot and never order fat beef and sheep rolls of unknown origin. Instead, they love old sliced meat and spicy beef. Tan Tinggang explained to me that the old sliced meat is also called eyebrow meat, which comes from the upper shoulder blades of pigs. It is a muscle that pigs often use during exercise. It weighs about five or six kilograms and is about 20 centimeters long. It is crosscut, and there are several white fat interlaced in the middle. It looks like plum blossom, also called plum blossom meat. Old meat slices must be cut thick, 5 ~ 10 mm is the best, and placed in four corners, it will be more tender and delicious. Unlike the old meat slices that emphasize specific parts, the focus of spicy beef is "spicy". The cut beef will be marinated in advance, wrapped in a layer of Chili noodles, and then thrown into the pot for stew. Well-made spicy beef, the seasoning coded in advance will not fall off when taking out the pot, but the hot pot soup will stimulate the taste buds together.
In Chongqing, no hot pot restaurant dares to claim that its ingredients are perfect, but each one always has its own special ingredients. Tan Tinggang is proud of two kinds of ingredients, one is tiger skin chicken feet, and the other is pure duck blood. Tiger skin chicken feet are cooked first, then fried, finally soaked in cold water, and then served in a pot to cook. The inspiration is obviously from Cantonese chicken feet with soy sauce. Pure duck blood is also a special ingredient of Chongqing hot pot. Hot pots in other places often use fresh duck blood. The so-called fresh duck blood is actually blended with duck blood, and it is jelly-like and tender when cooked. Pure duck blood is 100% duck blood boiled in water first, and then picked up and cut into pieces for later use. This kind of duck blood is full of pores, which can’t be boiled in the pot, and its taste is soft and full of soup, which is completely different from the flavor of fresh duck blood.
Du Jian’s recommended dish on the menu is rake beef, which means close to softness, a kind of softness that melts when it is close to the entrance. This ingredient was inspired by him from braised beef noodles, but he improved it. The braised beef pieces are bigger, close to half a fist, and softer. They are cooked at the back end and served on the table, then stewed in the pot for ten minutes, fished up the oil dish and sent to the mouth, which is a rich color.
Reporter Wang Haiyan Photography Yu Chuzhong
This article was published in the 27th issue of Sanlian Life Weekly in 2019.
Original title: Chongqing hotpot, rich layers in spicy food
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