Guangdong cuisine is the best in the world, and Huizhou is no exception.

Before going to Huizhou, when talking about food, the first thing that comes to mind is Su Dongpo’s braised pork with pickled vegetables. However, after leaving Huizhou, the most memorable thing is Hakka Yong Tofu.

At my first meal in Huizhou, when the waiter served tofu with minced meat in the middle, I was immediately attracted.

I have never seen tofu like this. It is fried to golden brown, square, hollowed out in the middle, and stuffed with meat filling. The meat stuffing is what we use to make dumplings. The main part is pork, mixed with minced mushrooms, green onion, ginger and garlic. Pick one up and put it in your mouth. The tofu is thin and waxy, soft, and the meat stuffing is chewy and fragrant. It is indescribably delicious. .

I was told that this is Hakka Yong Tau Foo.

It is said that stuffing is a Hakka word, which means stuffing stuffing into something.

After that, during my few days in Huizhou, no matter where I went to eat, the store owners would recommend Hakka Yong Tau Foo when they saw foreigners coming.

This "stuffing" method made me curious. I soon discovered that in Huizhou, it is a common practice to stuff meat into ingredients. Not only tofu, but also eggplant, bitter melon, and pepper can be stuffed with meat. , are called stuffed eggplant, stuffed bitter gourd and stuffed tiger pepper with pork. In order to allow customers to eat a variety of stuffed dishes at one time, some restaurants directly launch "Stuffed Three Treasures", which is a plate with stuffed tofu and stuffed pork. Eggplant and stuffed bitter melon.

The most memorable meal of Hakka Yong Tau Fu was not in a big restaurant or a high-end restaurant, but on Luofu Mountain.

At noon that day, I climbed halfway up the mountain and came to the dining area. I randomly found an open-air table by the railing and started ordering. Of course, the Hakka Yong Tau Foo was indispensable.

When the tofu comes, you will notice its difference at the first bite. The meat filling is salty, but the soup is sweet. When you eat it, your taste buds will burst. There are many Yong Tau Foo in Huizhou, but I will always remember the Yong Tau Foo in Luofu Mountain.

I found that in Guangdong, the tofu used as ingredients is southern tofu, while Hakka Yong Tofu is northern tofu, which is the kind of brine tofu. It is said that in Guangdong, only Hakka people can order tofu with brine because they have inherited the custom from the Central Plains.

Yes, the Hakka people come from the Central Plains. It is generally believed that people from the Central Plains moved south in large numbers at the end of the Northern Song Dynasty to escape the wars of the Jin Dynasty. However, it is also said that people from the Central Plains began to migrate southward starting from the Rebellion of the Eight Kings in the Western Jin Dynasty and the Wuhu Rebellion in China.

They settled in Hunan, Fujian, Gannan and Lingnan, and some continued to move far away, crossing the strait to Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

I thought that since the Hakkas came from the Central Plains, Yong Tau Foo must be related to the Central Plains. Therefore, I wanted to verify whether there are Yong Tau Fu or closely related foods in the Central Plains today.

When I traveled around the Central Plains, I paid special attention to look for Yongdoufu, from Luoyang in western Henan to Kaifeng in eastern Henan, from Zhengzhou in northern Henan to Nanyang in southern Henan, and even in Shangqiu, the Song Dynasty where Zhao Kuangyin and Zhao Gou started their business. , I didn’t even discover the existence of Yong Tau Foo, nor did I find any special tofu delicacies.

It seems that Yong Tau Foo has nothing to do with today’s Central Plains. I guess it may be related to the war in the Central Plains. The war in the Central Plains left thousands of miles of bare land and was desolate. Therefore, in the early Ming Dynasty, there was a saying that the big locust trees in Hongdong, Shanxi immigrated. When the people were gone, of course the food and customs were also gone.

At the same time, I made a discovery that no matter how far apart the country is, as long as they are Hakkas, they all speak the same language. It is said that Ella from S.H.E spoke in Hakka in a documentary, and Hakkas in northern Guangdong can definitely I understand, but in today's Central Plains, that language has become extinct. Does that mean that the food customs and languages ??of the Central Plains have disappeared with the decline and southward migration of the Central Plains population?

I didn’t give up. I thought of the texts and novels from back then, and there might be records there.

I looked through "Tokyo Menghua Lu" and "Water Margin", and the texts describing the life of the Song Dynasty people were detailed enough, but I still couldn't find Yong Tau Fu. It's not even in the famous "Along the River During the Qingming Festival".

Later, a catering master told me that the relationship between Hakka tofu and the Central Plains actually has nothing to do with tofu, but to do with the form of stuffing - meat filling.

People in the Central Plains love dumplings, but flour is rarely seen in the south. Hakka people who cannot eat dumplings during the Spring Festival must be scratching their heads, so they think about changing things if they are poor (poor means exhaustion, and there is really no way out) ), hollow out the marinated tofu passed down from the Central Plains, put meat stuffing on it, and make it into dumplings, thus creating Yong Tau Fu. Later, according to the prescription, there were stuffed eggplant, stuffed bitter melon and stuffed pepper. Later, yuba, eggs, taro, green garlic... formed the Hakka food culture of stuffed dishes that cannot be stuffed without vegetables.

Some research says that the stuffed vegetables among the eight major cuisines today come from Hakka.

In "Tokyo Menghualu", there is no record of Yong Tau Foo, but there is a record of dumplings. It records the grand banquet of the palace like this: "When the royal banquet reaches the third banquet, there will be meat with wine, salty soybean, fried meat, and double hump coins." Camelback coins are hump meat dumplings. Camelback is said to be an ancient delicacy and extremely expensive!

Hakka Yong Tau Foo originated from dumplings, but it is no longer limited to dumplings. It has jumped out of the category of dumplings and become an independent food series. It not only includes dishes, but also desserts.

Outside the gate of Luofu Mountain, there is a dazzling array of tofu desserts of various brands and flavors at the entrance of the street shop, which is so colorful that it makes people feel a little dizzy for a while.

Different from Hakka Yong Tau Fu, dessert tofu is more like southern tofu, also called bean curd. There are soybean tofu pudding, red bean tofu pudding, and further subdivided into rock sugar tofu pudding, kidney bean rock sugar tofu pudding, and even tofu pudding with double skin milk.

The most famous dessert tofu is Shanshui Tofu and Hakka Po Tofu. The most unforgettable dessert tofu I have ever eaten is iced tofu.

On the day I went to Luofu Mountain, it was a hot summer day. I ordered a box of iced tofu. After a spoonful of it, the tender tofu was ice-sweet and smooth, sweet and greasy. One bite was sweet. The refreshing and refreshing feeling is refreshing. Compared to ice cream, it is lower in calories and more nutritious.

The preparation of Yong Tau Foo is very simple. Cut the northern tofu into cubes, dig holes, and put the meat filling. The meat filling is similar to our dumpling filling, except that you need to add shiitake mushrooms, fry on both sides, take it out of the pan, and use Sauté the onion, ginger, and garlic in oil until fragrant, add water, soy sauce, and oyster sauce, then add the tofu, fry until the juice is reduced, and remove from the pan.

The production of tofu pudding is also very simple: first soak the soybeans in clean water for 4 or 5 hours; squeeze them into soy milk, filter out the soybean residue with a filter cloth; then boil the filtered soy milk When the temperature reaches 95 degrees, pour in appropriate amount of gypsum water, mix well and wait until it cools down. The white and tender tofu curd will be freshly baked.

Yong Tau Fu is the Hakka people’s nostalgia for the Central Plains in the way they eat, and it is the continual longing for their ancestors’ homeland that descendants continue to miss.

Behind the delicious food is the bitterness of the migration of an ethnic group for thousands of years. Yong Tau Foo is delicious, but the history of Yong Tau Foo is very vicissitudes.

I think that in the future, I will forget everything about Huizhou’s food, and I will never forget Yong Tau Foo. Moreover, I will always tell those who want to go to Huizhou that Huizhou has more than Daya Bay and Luofu Mountain. , not only braised pork with pickled vegetables, but also Hakka Yong Tofu.