Lianjiang specialties snacks

China is a vast country with different regions and food cultures. Therefore, China's food culture is relatively rich. Different cities have different representative foods. For example, in Lianjiang area, there are foods with good reputation such as beef offal skewers, Lianjiang steamed rice dumplings, and Lianjiang white porridge. Below, I will introduce these special foods in detail!

1. Beef offal skewers

In order to maintain the original flavor of traditional beef offal, Lianjiang's beef offal stew adopts a very primitive production method. It takes many complicated steps to turn a bowl of beef offal into a delicacy: first, wash the offal and other dirt repeatedly; then marinate with salt; then simmer until 90% done; then rinse again until the cleanest; and finally simmer with sauce. It takes about 4 to 5 hours to prepare a set of offal until it is ready for sale. Whether the beef offal pot tastes good or not depends on the ingredients of the pot. After much research, I finally found out the ingredients for the beef offal pot: the main spice for the brine is "Thirteen Spices", including fennel, pepper, star anise, cinnamon, tangerine peel, sand ginger, and cardamom.

2. Lianjiang Steamed Rice Dumplings

Lianjiang wrapped steamed rice dumplings are famous for their smooth taste and moderate softness and hardness. Li Weiku's wrapped steamed rice dumplings on Liancheng East Street are especially popular and customers want two after eating one.

To make zongzi, wash and soak the refined white glutinous rice, then dry it. Then stir-fry it with fresh lard, add barbecued pork or fried pork belly, and put shrimp or crab meat as the filling. Steam and cook at moderate heat. The method of refining ash water is: burn rice straw to get ash and mix it with appropriate amount of clean water, let it stand for a while, pour out the supernatant on the surface, and it will become "ash water"; soak glutinous rice for a proper time, scoop it up and drain it, then wrap the soaked glutinous rice with rice leaves, then boil the ash water in a pot over high heat, put in rice dumplings, and the dumplings will be cooked in about 2 hours.

3. Lianjiang White Porridge

Ancient literati highly praised porridge. Zhang Wenquan of the Northern Song Dynasty wrote "Porridge Notes": "Zhang Anding would eat a big bowl of porridge every morning when he got up. The empty stomach would make the grain gas process, and the nourishment would not be fine. It is also very soft and smooth, which goes well with the intestines and is the best food." Monk Miaoqi said: "It is very beneficial for monks in the mountains to have one bowl of porridge in the morning. If they do not eat, they will feel dry and thirsty in their internal organs all day long. It can promote the flow of stomach qi and produce saliva. Now, if people are advised to eat porridge every day as the key to health preservation, they will laugh. Generally speaking, there is nothing far-reaching and difficult to understand about nourishing life and seeking happiness. It is just between sleeping and eating." In the past, people in Yangjiang had to eat white porridge for every meal, not because they were good at health preservation, but because they were poor and could not afford to eat. Therefore, others say that living in poverty is "living in the world", but we call it "living in porridge". If an old person cannot enjoy his old age, he can only sigh that "he has to eat cold porridge before he gets old".

There is a difference between Lianjiang's raw white porridge and Guangzhou's porridge. In Guangzhou's porridge, the rice is cooked into a paste, which we call "mosquito wings". Lianjiang raw white porridge is made by boiling rice, which is closer to what people call "rice porridge".