Many people know this famous Chaoshan snack through CCTV's China on the Tip of the Tongue.
Sugar onion: long strip with many through holes in the middle, sticking together side by side like many onion holes. If the color is scallion, it tastes loose and crisp, melts in the mouth and does not stick to the teeth. It's delicious. But when eating, sugar residue will always fall off, and it is inevitable that a person will be too sweet and greasy to eat. Paired with pancakes, it can highlight the taste of sugar onions. The salty taste of pancakes sets off the sweetness of sugar onions. So there is a way to eat pancakes and sugar onions.
When it comes to pancakes, perhaps many people will think of the kind of pancakes used for stuffing when eating Beijing roast duck. However, the pancakes in Chaoshan are relatively thin, about a dozen of which are equivalent to the thickness of a pancake in Beijing.
The pancakes in Chaoshan are really thin. It only takes 20 seconds to bake the pancake skin. The pancake master holds a thin dough in one hand and wipes the bottom of the tempered pot in the other. A thin layer that sticks to the pan and then solidifies into a cake. The other hand immediately lifted the pancake and put it aside. Wipe and collect, expose and release quickly.
It takes 13 processes to make seemingly unremarkable sugar onions, and it takes years of experience to make qualified sugar onions.
The processing of sugar onions can be said to be an art of controlling temperature. First, pour the sugar into a large pot and boil it. In the process of cooking, it depends on the color of sugar to judge whether to stop the fire and start the pot, and occasionally stir it in the middle.
After boiling the syrup, you need to pour the syrup into another ridge, then put the ridge filled with syrup on a pot filled with cold water and cool it into a block, turn it over to turn the sugar, and finally pour the sugar residue and stir it evenly. After the syrup cools and solidifies, the process of boiling sugar is completed.
Take out the sugar. It's time to throw it away. Keep pumping, stretching, pumping and stretching. The action of pulling sugar is very similar to pulling maltose in the north. Sugar is very tough and needs a fixed end to borrow money.
When I was a child, I used nails nailed to wooden poles. Every time I hang a candy bar between my nails, after stretching, the two strands are hung together. Repeatedly beating in this way, the sugar constantly contains air, and the waxy syrup eventually becomes a milky white hollow rectangular candy bar.
Remove the fallen sugar, bake it on a charcoal fire until soft, and then cut it into pieces. This is the most important hole for making sugar onions. The number of closing holes is also very particular, it must be 8 times, not more than once or less than once.
The hole in the sugar onion is ingenious and delicate, because air enters when the sugar is closed.
Each standard sugar onion has 16 large holes, and there are 16 small holes around each large hole, up to 256. The number of holes is fixed and cannot be less. This is a rule handed down from generation to generation. It is because of these holes that the sugar onions are crisp but not hard.
In the past, many stalls selling sugar onion pancakes could be seen on many streets in Chaoshan area. Pancakes are freshly made, and the sugar onions are fresh. They taste crispy inside and tough outside.
Sugar onion pancakes are often used as gift boxes, generally bought as holiday gifts, and are also a good "tea match" in Chaoshan area. In the early years, villagers in Futan began to use a new kind of packaging, which adopted the practice of sealing pancakes and sugar onions separately. Putting them in the same box can preserve the sugar onions for a long time, and can also bring the sugar onion pancakes to the market.
Now this kind of food has gradually lost its consumer groups in the local area, which may be more common in towns and villages, and it is said that it is relatively rare in urban areas.
Indeed, sugar onion pancakes are not as ubiquitous as other traditional Chaoshan snacks, but this is not because of its complicated manufacturing process.
With the development of modern society, the choice of candy has increased dramatically, and people who pursue compound tastes have been constantly updating their oral desires. With the popularization of mechanization, more and more new candy products have appeared. Gradually, the old flavor of this traditional handmade food has been forgotten, and fewer people are doing this business.