King of Heaven: Steamed buns are undoubtedly the first snack in Shanghai. Shanghai people call steamed buns with or without stuffing. In recent years, foreign food and snacks have become increasingly popular, and local young people don't know about steamed buns. Twenty years ago, Shanghainese called steamed buns. Therefore, whatever is called steamed buns with soup packets on the street now is not a local brand or a local traditional flavor in Shanghai.
Steaming steamed buns is a kung fu snack. First of all, pay attention to the kung fu of steaming, and it is best to steam for 8 minutes. If the steamed buns are flat when they are served, it means that the steaming time difference is five seconds. However, if there are many cages, the store will usually serve several cages together, so when the guests eat the steamed bread in the last cage in large chunks, the steamed bread in the cage below will be too stuffy, and the skin will be burnt off and the soup will be dried by the skin, which will affect the taste.
The skin of steamed buns. The kung fu of the skin of steamed buns is exquisite. Authentic Nanxiang steamed bread uses unfermented flour to make skin powder, and it needs boiling water. The pleats of a steamed bread are required to be between 25 and 32. A steamed bread with 32 pleats is better. The pleats should be closed, the steamed bread skin should be thin, and one or two flours can make eight steamed buns.
Another school of steamed buns in Shanghai is to use half-baked flour as the skin, which has a longer history and came from Yangzhou all the way. There are generally one or two or six cages with half hair, and there are also eight cages with one or two, but they are always bigger. In fact, half-steamed buns are more common, but the disadvantage is that after steaming, the skin is easy to crisp and break. At that time, Lvyangcun and New Zhenjiang Restaurant were both famous for their half-baked buns.
nowadays, it seems that the mainstream of leather is dead face. Rarely half hair is made of leather. I don't have any textual research on this point, it's just intuition, and I need to demonstrate it with the master one by one. The pleats of small cage skins include pointed pleats and bonito pleats, which were originally used to distinguish crab powder from fresh meat. Now when the output is large, it is mixed.
the stuffing of steamed buns is the most exquisite. The meat stuffing of authentic Nanxiang fresh meat steamed buns should not be mixed with chopped green onion, while it is a little in Jiang Mo. The so-called fresh meat is the fresh sandwich pig's hind leg meat cut into pieces that day. It is thin and fat, and the meat stuffing can't be ground into paste. Ding Taifeng lost here. The stuffing is white soup. If soy sauce is added to the stuffing, the flavor of this steamed bread will be rough and close to Jiangbei style.
The proportion of frozen meat in the stuffing should be very particular, and at least the soup is insufficient. In many cases, the soup is oily and covers the umami flavor of pork and crab powder, which even destroys the taste of steamed bread. Moreover, steamed bread is not a soup bag. Now, due to the entry of soup bags from other places, everyone pays attention to the size of the soup, adding more frozen meat, resulting in irrelevant stuffing and soup head, and disjointed taste levels. In addition, the principle of the proportion of crab powder and meat is to let crab powder and pork coexist.
pork is the bottom flavor and crab powder is the main flavor, so we should not neglect both. Generally, for the sake of cost, thrift stores will reduce the amount of crab powder and increase the proportion of frozen skin. If you eat two buns like this, you will be suffocated by lard. How delicious is it? What is even tighter in the meat stuffing is sugar, but the sugar of Nanxiang steamed bread is to hang the freshness of the meat stuffing and cannot be the main flavor. Once the sweetness emerges, it is the pie of Wuxi Xiaolong. So far, I still can't accept the sweet and greasy Wuxi dumplings.
Types of fillings The main varieties of steamed buns are increasingly rich in fillings, which are basically fresh meat, while Shanghai steamed buns are white soup, but all those who eat red soup are foreign dumplings. Anyone who eats a little soy sauce is mostly to ensure the storage time of meat stuffing. Shrimp meat cages are made by adding shrimp into the meat stuffing. In the old method, river shrimp was used and peeled in the morning, which is fresh and delicious. Now chilled shrimps are used, mostly cultured shrimps or sea shrimps, which are fishy and not fresh. Crab powder cage refers to fresh meat stuffed with crab meat, mainly leg meat, and hairy crabs are generally used. Crab yellow cages are more advanced, and the yellow of female crabs should be added. Crab paste cage is the top food in the cage. Take the cream of the male crab as stuffing, and it only lasts for one month a year. Life is delicious, so don't repeat it.