Linzhi, Tibet, where the Indian Ocean blows in a warm and humid monsoon, plants are growing like crazy, and it's the busiest season for Baima Zhandu. Tianma and ganoderma lucidum are important economic sources, but in a month's time, they will disappear without a trace. From canyons to snow-capped mountains, the 7,000-meter difference in altitude makes Linzhi the richest region in the world for alpine flora. When his younger brother graduated from high school, Baima had to quickly earn enough money to pay for his college education, and before that, he prepared a special gift for his brother. Eighty percent of Tibet's forests are concentrated here, and Baima Zhandu carefully searches the beehive he found a few days ago. Now he has to find a way to reach the top of the tree, where honey is a valuable nutrient in the eyes of the locals and worth risking his life for. It sounds unbelievable, but this custom has been going on for centuries. Whitehorse chooses a cane to connect himself to the tree, and from now on, it's a matter of life and death. It seems to be going well, and after an hour has passed, the white horse has climbed high, but there is still a longer distance to go. His father, relieved, hurried over. Chandu is no longer afraid to use both hands to cut down the tree, and his speed has slowed considerably. three hours later, Hakuba is nearing the canopy, and now he's ready to get rid of the rattan. at 40 meters high and unprotected, it's a perilous walk. Wild bees are not afraid of people, and Hakuba has learned from his elders to light smoke to force the bees to give up their resistance, and to cut through the holes in the trees where they hide to get the sweetest honey.
Sweets are rare in the isolated forest, and honey is the most precious gift that White Horse can bring to his family. Sweetness is man's simplest and most initial culinary experience. Eighty percent of honey is composed of fructose and glucose, and as early man's only sweet tooth, honey was vital to our ancestors for its ability to quickly generate calories to replenish energy. Unlike artificially refined sucrose, the sugar in honey is absorbed directly into the body without being hydrolyzed. In the Chinese kitchen, whether cooking dishes or making desserts, honey is irreplaceable by other sugars. Of course, the Baima family's favorite is ghee honey. Obtaining the honey involves a ten-story climb for Tibetan lads and a grueling trek of tens of thousands of kilometers for others.
The oilseed rape has just blossomed and Tan Guangshu is ready to depart. Lao Tan is a professional beekeeper and has relied on the job for more than two decades to raise a pair of children. Every year during the Qingming Festival, Tan and his wife, Wu Junying, embark on a journey to chase the flowers. In one day and night, the beehives are already 500 kilometers away in the Qinling Mountains. The taste of the flowers determines the taste of the honey, which is completely different from region to region, which is what makes honey so amazing as a delicacy. The Qinling Mountains produce China's top acacia honey, but Lao Tan's heart is not easy, after all, raising peaks is a business that relies on the weather. The weather changed suddenly in mid-April, with high winds accompanied by rain, and the flowering season ended early. No one knew how long the bad weather would last. More than twenty years ago, Lao Tan promised his fiancée that he would take her into a sweet business. When people traveled long distances in times of limited transportation, they would carry food that could be preserved for a long time, and they were commonly known as road vegetables. Road vegetables are not only used to eat, but also the taste of home that the owner is used to. The seemingly lonely road trip becomes lively because of the presence of the Sichuan woman. The wife will even use simple tools to make dou hua'er, which is the simplest and most appetizing food in Sichuan and Chongqing. By heating the brine so that the protein molecules are connected into a mesh structure, the soya bean flower is actually a gel of reassembled soya bean proteins. Changes in the strength of the water squeezed out will determine the texture of the bean flower. Inside the humble tent, a spectacle begins to unfold. It's condiment time, with refreshing cilantro, cool mint, crunchy fried peanuts, and spicy, refreshing kimchi, all enough to make one forget the exhaustion of the long journey. A hearty meal marks the beginning of another journey. The entire family, weighing more than ten tons, must be loaded into the truck two hours before dark, because of the work, each beekeeper goes away for up to eleven months a year. The parents' travels provide a secure life for their two children who are studying. More than twenty years, wind and rain, the reason why not feel lonely, in addition to the stoic husband, hard-working wife, mutual help and all the way accompanied by the taste of home. Beekeeper Lao Tan and his wife carry bees all the way to migrate, while another migratory birds of the crowd but lightly loaded, only with their hands.
In the northern foothills of the Qinling Mountains, wheat is ripe for harvesting, and the popularity of mechanical harvesting doesn't prevent competitors. Maikers, China's ancient professional wheat cutters, step to the rhythm of wheat ripening and challenge the machinery with their hands. Wheat, a crop that once changed the course of human civilization, has the most extensive cultivation area in the world. From the most everyday steamed buns, pot helmets, noodles to meat buns, mutton dumplings to a wide variety of snacks, **** with the same laid the foundation stone of the pasta kingdom of Shaanxi is hard to shake. However, the only way to get a taste of the most primitive and ancient noodle aroma is to wait until the wheat harvest season. Wheat is rich in starch and protein, and freshly harvested wheat is the sweetest. The Shaanxi people used to make the noodles 3 centimeters wide, and it was this width, combined with the right heat, that brought out the strong texture and fresh flavor of the new wheat. The old lady knows better than anyone the secrets of noodle making, and the big firewood in the bellows and the high fire in the stove are the best way to make the noodles stand out. The toppings of fungus, carrots, and tender tofu are called "bashfulness" in Shaanxi. The colorful oil spices are the faithful partner of the noodles. Treating the makkas well is an ancestral tradition, with plenty of carbohydrates to sustain the glycosides necessary for the body after heavy labor. Nowadays, hand-cutting wheat has no advantage, narrow hillside plots are the last stand, ten hours of labor a day, each person cut more than 1 acre of land, the most income of 200 yuan. This time out ten days, income is less than 1000 yuan, in the face of efficiency, the wheat people already do not belong to this era, Ma Wanquan line may be China's last professional wheat cutter. Ancient professions and long-standing legends are being harvested by machinery.
The food in front of us may have come from distant seas and mountains. Long ago, man's survival habits had changed from hunting to gathering, with one exception, the ocean, man's last hunting ground. Some scientists predict that within 50 years, all the fish in the sea will be eaten up, and Zhejiang fisherman Yang Shilu believes that the days of living off the sea can only last for another 10 years. 3 months after the fishing moratorium, the East China Sea ushered in the first day of fishing. This small boat is called husband and wife boat, it is the fishermen's feet, 4 hours traveling 60 nautical miles, husband and wife cast the first net. Sanmen Bay is located on the east coast of Zhejiang, where fish resources were once extremely rich. Approaching the fifteenth day of the Lunar Calendar, the tide will come, the wife is physically weak, began to seasickness. But whenever you go out to sea, in addition to fishing, cooking and other chores are done by the husband, which is the tacit understanding of the two for more than 20 years. White crabs are fried, water is boiled and noodles are put in, a simple dinner will be followed by 6 hours of heavy work. This is the first net after the fishing moratorium, and it's crucial. Anchor up, reel in the net, which has been lying dormant underwater for 20 hours, and pull it out of the water... a disappointing sight, finally a pompano is found, but it breaks free of the net. 6 hours later, the fish are not caught, but fortunately there are other seafood. Once again, the sea has shown its generosity, and 50 kilograms of seafood is the reward for a long day and night, and within 10 hours, the crabs will be in the restaurants of the big cities.
The same rule of hard work and patience that governs the acquisition of ingredients also applies to Oyama. The search takes more than half a day, and Rao Changqing still finds nothing. The old man has been waiting for more than eight months for a special kind of fungus, and now it's finally in season. At his feet, deep in the Qingfeng Fracture Zone, moisture coalesces at an altitude of 2,400 meters, giving birth to a precious ingredient, the small flower mushroom, a fungus that resides on dead trees, the king of shiitake mushrooms. Nowadays, the shiitake mushroom has been cultivated artificially and is of excellent quality. But the old man knows very well that those cultivated shiitake mushrooms are not the finest delicacies. In low temperatures, the shiitake grows very slowly, but its flesh is plump, and the drastic temperature difference between day and night causes the cap to crack and blossom. The small-flowered mushroom was born from the coincidence of heaven and earth. Fresh mushrooms are 90 percent water, and the drying process is a mysterious one. Inside the charcoal-fired oven are artificially cultivated shiitake mushrooms. In fact, fresh shiitake mushrooms are far less flavorful than dried shiitake mushrooms, and the secret lies in the fact that shiitake mushrooms automatically convert a large amount of guanosinolates, which have a strong freshness, during the dehydration process. Therefore, only after drying does this mushroom truly qualify as a shiitake. As for the drying of wild flower drums, Lao Han prefers the most natural method. With the help of sunlight and wind, the fat wild flower mushrooms, slowly dissipate moisture, and the fresh flavor coalesces little by little. Compared with cultivated mushrooms, wild flower mushrooms are untidy in appearance and hard to sell for a price, and these rare delicacies, Rao Changqing intends to leave to his family.
Whether it's by the mountains or by the water, laborers have a taste that belongs exclusively to their families. The small octopus, known scientifically as the short octopus, was given a poetic name, "Wangchao" (望潮). It goes out when the tide is high and hides when the tide is low. Yang Shih-Yu is a master of catching the mako. The collagen on the surface of Wangchao meets with the seasonings to form a thick, red sauce of gravy, and the meat of Wangchao is crispy, tough and elastic, making it the most famous dish of the fishermen of the East China Sea. Yet my daughter's favorite cuisine still hides on the beach. Mudskippers, also known as jumping fish, are fish that can live on land. Don't try to catch them unless you are willing to spend five years practicing your skills. Using a 5-meter rod and 6-meter line, catching a prey that is only 5 centimeters long from 10 meters away requires as much difficulty and precision as shooting a basketball from 20 meters away. It takes only one-eighth of a second from launch to capture, and a high-speed camera helps us see the whole process. A few tails of jumping fish can make a pot of beautiful soup, tender meat, rich juice, smoked repeatedly with straw, oozing fish oil, drying air drying, is the best flavor enhancer, with other seafood and dishes, to enhance the freshness while maximizing the preservation of the original flavor of the ingredients. Older people who live alone should also treat themselves. The more precious the flavor, the more ordinary it looks. The kind of happiness that hard work brings to the whole body and mind is never the same.
Dongshan to Shanghai's abalone, Zhuhai to Chengdu's grouper, Guangxi to Beijing's vegetables, Kunming to Xinjiang's mushrooms, today's logistics and today's appetite greatly accelerated the speed of migration of ingredients. On the road, the hurry has been not only people, food is also spreading flow, gathering and dispersing, evolved different forms and flavors. The cauldron, locally known as a griddle, is two meters in diameter and processes the iconic Shandong staple of pancakes. However, to appreciate the original process of making pancakes, you must return to the place closest to nature. In the middle of summer, with abundant rainfall, Yimeng Mountain enters its wettest season. Grandpa builds a clay stove and sets up a griddle, which is the tool for making Shandong pancakes. The main ingredient for making pancakes is flour made from dried white potatoes, but of course it can also be made from soybeans, wheat, sorghum, corn and other grains and cereals. Tsubaki ditch, located in the depths of the Mengshan Mountains, the ancient custom is tenaciously retained. Today is Grandma's birthday, and Xiaohui's family has been busy for several days. The griddle is hot, the batter is evenly spread out, the mixed grain batter is quickly molded, the steam disperses, and the air is infused with a simple sweet aroma that is unique to the grains, and the fire power is crucial, too much heat makes it easy to scorch, and too little makes the pancakes moist and sticky. Grandma, who has more than 60 years of experience, is the most skillful cook, and she is the only one who can control the heat. When the pancakes are freshly cooked, they are crispy and flavorful, but when they cool down completely, they become soft and tough. Today, pancakes can be used to wrap almost any kind of food, from big fish and meat to home-cooked small dishes, in whatever quantity you like. But for the local Shandong people, the most suitable thing to be rolled up in a pancake seems to be green onion. The Shandong people value the texture and taste of the pancake, which is sweet in the mouth but a challenge to the human bite. The evolution of the pancake and roll has been exciting. 1,700 kilometers to the south, the spring rolls of Chaozhou, Guangdong Province, are fast and furious, with green beans, scallions, dried shrimp and fish sauce, deep-fried with a crispy skin and a soft, sticky interior. Another 1,600 kilometers to the west, the silk doll is the favorite of Guiyang girls, hot noodles cooked, small, but can hold 20 kinds of vegetarian dishes and four spoons of dipping water. From form to content, from God to action, the pastry rolls come in many variations. It may seem like a self-guided journey for the food, but its evolution is ultimately linked to the movement and migration of people.
Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, a stream, from the seventies of the old man, down to the children under the age of ten, turning over every stone at the bottom of the stream, tirelessly in search of a magical delicacy. In the most remote village in southeastern Guizhou province, Miao girl Li Jianying waits for a happy moment, the first time her parents have been home in six months. Now, the working girl by the assembly line is transformed back into a Miao mother. Just when the rice blossoms bloom, it is too late to rest, Yu Gao Li is ready to make pickled fish for the whole family, eat pickled fish first of all to make sweet rice, glutinous rice is washed clean, on the stove steaming, and so on the glutinous rice is ripe, plus wine fermentation. Carp eaten full of rice flowers, it is the fattest and sweetest time, rather than catching ingredients, it is more like an outdoor game for parents and children. The rice-flower fish are dissected and gutted, arranged neatly on the stove, and smoked overnight over a weak charcoal fire; now they need to be air-dried and fermented with the power of the air and the wind to create a special flavor out of the ****together. Glutinous rice is covered with mycelium, and the mold produces a variety of enzymes that hydrolyze the starch into sugar, ultimately yielding a refreshingly sweet and sour taste. The sweet rice is mixed with salt and chili peppers and stuffed into the belly of the fish. Inari can be eaten as it is, or steamed or deep-fried, and no matter which way you do it, you can't hide the fascinating sweetness and sourness of the pickled fish and the glutinous rice. But the most attractive ingredient is hidden under the water. Every August, the entire village of Qiaogang, young and old alike, goes out in search of the same thing, the rock crawler, the most crucial ingredient in Laysan fish sauce, which is surprisingly delicious. Fish sauce can only be made once a year, you must use the freshest chili peppers, two gold bars is the best, ginger fresh and fat, mainly used to remove fishy. Ginger, also known as mountain pepper, is a unique ingredient from the Southwest, with a rich and mysterious aroma, and a large amount of salt to preserve and enhance the flavor. The ingredients are mixed and stirred, and then sealed in an altar, where the deliciousness is slowly brewed. Mr. and Mrs. Yu Gao Li work in a garment factory in Guangdong, but returned to their hometown because it was harvest time for the family's eight acres of corn, for which they are the main laborers, and because they were able to spend half a month with their family because of house repairs and other chores. Half a month is also the cycle of making fish sauce, where lactic acid bacteria and yeast promote the production of aroma and volatile organic acids, giving fish sauce its unique sour flavor, the proudest condiment of the Miao family. A spoonful of fish sauce is enough to make the most common ingredients steeply sour. This is the most delicious reunion of the year, and it is also destined to be a dinner of mixed feelings. In rural China, 61 million children - as many as the population of the United Kingdom combined - grow up without their parents, known as left-behind children. Li Jianying and his brother have prepared a small jar of fish sauce for their parents, and at 5:00 a.m., it's time to part. A jar of hometown flavor will be taken 1,000 kilometers away to Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, and perhaps one day it will resurface in a new situation in another country.
For thousands of years, food has moved and changed along with people. No matter how far the footsteps go, in the minds of people, only the taste of the hometown, familiar and stubborn, it is like a taste locator system, one end locked thousands of miles away from the foreign land, the other end will always be tied to the hometown in the depths of memory. After 40 years away, the overseas Chinese Cheng Shikun returned to his hometown to pay a grand tribute to complete his return to the family. Feasting neighbors here is called setting the table, and any important matters can only be established logically by setting the table. A homecoming banquet, exhausting all the skills of the country's famous chefs, interrupted decades of acquaintance and old feelings reconnected instantly let everything back to the old days. The past few decades, Cheng Shikun in the United States farm workers, this time the old man decided to return to his hometown to settle down, calling him not only affection, but also a familiar flavor. In Quanzhou, in Fujian, Taiwan, and even Southeast Asia among the Chinese, this flavor is called the old morning taste. As the young man turns gray, his hometown has changed, but all kinds of old flavors remain fresh. The sandy soil of Daxia Village's seashore is home to a famous specialty that is unimpressive, but almost all of it is exported overseas: sandy radish, with a water content of nearly 90%, which is tender and smooth in the mouth, with no fiber. Pork is two parts fat and two parts lean, preferably with the skin on, cut into inches, and cooked with mushrooms, oysters, and dried shrimp. The richness of the meat, the sweetness of the radish, and the fullness of the rice, this is the radish rice that most people in Quanzhou can't get enough of, a simple but rich staple food. Half a lifetime of wandering has brought about a rich family, children and grandchildren. A lifetime of footsteps, starting point and ending point, is ultimately the place where the home is located, this is the belief that the Chinese people have upheld for thousands of years, simple, but powerful. Gansu Shandan Ranch, Mr. and Mrs. Tan prepare to head to the next stop, another thousand-mile trek. In Guyuan, Ningxia, the wheat farmers return to their hometown and start harvesting their own wheat. In the East China Sea, the couple's boat, carrying the hope of harvest, weighs anchor again. This is a drastic change in China, people and food faster than ever, no matter how their footsteps in a hurry, no matter how much the gathering and dispersal and sadness and happiness, come how involuntary, there is always a flavor, in its unique way, three times a day, on the tongue to remind us, recognize tomorrow's direction, not forgetting yesterday's place.