Read an article about the 1st sweet soup of our ancient eating culture and this dessert was said to be the first sweet soup invented. Historically this red bean sweet was boiled with some mini cobble stones (石春) and it has a nice stone aroma to go with the red bean and at that time the red bean might not be that rich as the one we have nowadays. So the red bean and the stone weren't eaten but just more like a sweet tea for the people to drink. Later on when the sweet was boiled for a long time, the bean could be mashed into the water and became sand-like. On and on, our ancestors in Canton province put the aged dried tangerine peel to make it as such a nice sweet soup!
So the key to this sweet is to have some refined aged dried tangerine peel. You don't need to put much if it's an aged peel. Just one or two leaves are good enough. Another key is not to have the bean be sticky on the bottom of the boiling pot. So you should put the bean when the water is boiling and stir it until it boils again. Besides, I would put a very small amount of rice to get the rice flavour in it. Just only 1.5 to 3 teaspoons is enough. Occasionally I would put some raw lotus seeds 湘蓮 to give it a deeper seed-taste flavour.
Then you need to watch it and not to boil it at high heat as the bean and water would spill over the pot. You can't even boil it at too low heat as the bottom would get sticky. Patience is required. So I would use the vacuum "heat off" boiling pot 真空煲. However, using this kind of vacuum pot requires an interval of 15-20 minute for putting the pot back to the stove for boiling again. So this way the temperature would be kept at least around 90 to 98 degree for boiling inside. This way it will also make the bean get softened faster as the 90 to 95 degree boiling is a subtle boiling 暗焗.
So this process of subtle boiling would take at least 2 hours. Then put cane sugar for 1/3 portion and rock sugar for 2/3. Cane sugar would make the sweet more aromatic but too much cane sugar would overwhelm the red bean aroma. Rock sugar has a refreshing sweetness.
1. If possible, try to have the inside parts of the pot be a bit burnt slightly so that it has a nice aroma in the sweet. 2. This is almost 80% done. I would stir it more to make the bean more pasty. So stirring is also required when it's almost done.
3. Done.
4 comments:
wow this is one of mom favorite dessert cooked for us
You seem to like mix not only soy sauce but sugar too. thanks for the tips.
Yes this was our mom's favorite and also mine.
I still like this dessert if it is not too sweet.
I don't like any dessert to be too sweet. Ice Cream is the sweetest dessert I can take. But I do like dessert.:)
This one is on an everlasting no. 1 on my family dessert chart. We had more than 1,000 times of putting this or that in this sweet, even putting a fresh orange peel (as advised by my cousin who was once a chef in a Cantonese restaurant).
Yes, I often take kitchen is another lab. of mine, working on my experiments. So far no casualties.. :)
Post a Comment