Speaking of Heze delicacies, hot bread cannot be avoided. The reason why I haven't written about hot bread for a long time is because my impression of hot bread is too vague. Hot bread is not like fried buns. It is often seen in the streets and alleys of Heze and can be the protagonist of breakfast. When I was a child, I only ate it maybe twice. At the end of the last century, I ate it again in Huihe. It was no longer the taste of my childhood. According to the old father, now Heze Yinshengyuan also sells hot bread, which is the best hot bread in Heze. However, if you tell me, it's still not as delicious as the ones made at Hongqi Restaurant before.

My surname is Fu. It turns out that my family owns a teahouse located at the south of Pan Yushou intersection south of the Drum Tower in the old city of Heze. The Hongqi Hotel is on the north of the intersection. I guess he must have gone there more often than me. Because of the short distance, and secondly because the family is relatively well off. Hot bread was a luxury item in Heze's traditional food world back then. You could not eat it even once for many years.

Before the Red Flag Hotel became the Red Flag Hotel, it was privately owned and operated. It was the only shop selling hot bread in the old town of Heze. Later, it became a public-private partnership and was named the Red Flag Hotel. Today, the Red Flag Hotel has disappeared and has become a yellowed photo and memory.

The hot bread was stuffed with pork. Brother Fu Min recalled that it was not pure meat in his mind. It might be mixed with beans in summer and radishes in winter. But my mother said that the hot bread she ate as a child did not contain vegetables. Whether there is food or not can actually be explained. Adding vegetables is to lower costs and lower prices so that people can afford it. At that time, ordinary people only cut their meat once a month, so they could only eat a few more white-flour steamed buns during the Chinese New Year. The bread was made with white flour and high-quality pork. How many people could eat it regularly? Anyway, I have a vague impression that I probably ate there once or twice before going to college in the provincial capital. Because hot bread can be called luxurious in terms of craftsmanship and ingredients, it has never become the protagonist of Heze cuisine.

The Hongqi Hotel back then had a small facade. There were five or six tall Eight Immortal tables and more than 20 long benches in one room, and the other room was an operation room. After customers enter the store, they first spend money to buy cards. After buying the cards, you can sit on the bench and wait, but many customers still have to wait in the operation room, because the aroma of the steamed buns and the aroma of another kind of food are really tantalizing, making it difficult to sit down. live.

Paired with hot bread, it is another noble delicacy in Heze, called Laoji Soup Wontons. The reputation of the Red Flag Hotel relies on these two luxurious delicacies. A restaurant is just a place to eat. It doesn't sell stir-fried vegetables, but it still lives up to its name. There is an old man at the door all year round, selling fried burnt fish and fried river shrimp. In the restaurant's operation room, there is always a cooked old hen standing next to the pot, which is intended to tell customers that the old chicken soup is genuine and does not deceive customers or adulterate. The old chicken soup wontons at Hongqi Restaurant, how many are in a bowl, I can’t remember clearly, the hot wontons have thin and crystal clear skins, and in the soup, you can see shredded chicken, egg shreds, fungus, coriander, and a layer of oily flowers floating in the soup. I can't stop drooling just looking at it. Many years later, when I was eating wontons in the land of Wuyue, I learned that the last step before serving the wontons is to add a little cooked lard to the soup, so that it tastes wonderful. The aroma of lard is used to sublimate the freshness of the wontons. I'm afraid it belongs to the same cuisine as Heze's Laoji Soup Chaos.

There are 10 pieces of hot bread in a basket. If you are sharing it between two people and are not very full, then drinking a bowl of chicken soup wontons alone will be the most beautiful enjoyment.

The hot bread at Hongqi Restaurant is delicious. First, the stuffing. The stuffing is chopped into diced meat with a knife, which can be fat or thin. It is not like the stuffing of hot bread nowadays, which is minced with a meat grinder. Minced meat and pigs at that time were not instant. The second is the skin. The skin is chewy but not soft, and tastes sweet. The sweet taste is indescribable and hard to describe. It is not the sweetness of white sugar, nor the sweetness of any kind of fruit. In fact, it is not difficult to make steamed buns by hot noodles, but it is too difficult to make them well. It is especially difficult to make the crust of red flag restaurant hot bread. First of all, how much water is hot water for scalding noodles? It all depends on the feel. What is the ratio of noodles to water? Is it to be added once or multiple times? Then there is stirring. My mother recalled that she had seen it done with a rolling pin. To what extent was it stirred? After stirring, there is still kneading. To what extent do you knead? I guess everyone has their own experience with this.

The hot bread of Hongqi Hotel probably became a legendary delicacy around the 1990s, as a generation of chefs retired one after another.

The last time I ate hot bread at the Red Flag Hotel was before the Spring Festival in 1997. At that time, I felt that I couldn’t taste the taste of my childhood. At that time, I thought it was because of the bad taste and the improvement of living standards. Today, Fa Xiao revealed the mystery for me, because at that time the Red Flag Hotel had been contracted by an individual and the original chefs had retired, including a tall and fat one.

Now, more than 20 years have passed, and even if those masters are still alive, they are all in their old age. Although hot bread and wontons in chicken soup have not been lost, the haunting taste has still disappeared in the past. This feeling can be remembered later, but it was already at a loss.

The accompanying pictures are from the Internet and have nothing to do with the protagonist of this article.