In Outing Village, the northern suburb of Shantou City, there is a porridge that has been passed down for a hundred years, and it is called láo pò porridge. Porridge with fork dregs, as the name implies, is to cook porridge with fork dregs.

in Shantou dialect, "fork" means lard. And "fork meal" is lard residue. In fact, it is not uncommon to fry pork into oil residue and then make it into dishes. Some people like the taste of pork that is less greasy and much more fragrant. However, if you want to make porridge out of rice bran, I'm afraid it's the original creation of the people in Oding Village.

Bitter porridge is the signature food of Ou Ting, which is said to have a history of hundreds of years. The practice of this kind of porridge seems simple, but the effort is outside the stall. It is understood that porridge is made of nearly 2 kinds of main ingredients and ingredients, such as glutinous rice, pepper, star anise, cinnamon, garlic, celery and coriander. Among them, rice cake, glutinous rice and pepper are the three main ingredients, and pepper is made of more than ten kinds of materials.

Let's talk about the "main ingredient" of this porridge. Fresh pork should be fried at high temperature to make fat oil, and then pressed into pieces the size of a washbasin. The freshly fried lard residue is delicious, but its shelf life is very short, and the taste appreciation period is usually 1-2 days, so shopkeepers often have to fry it every one or two days.

to make delicious fork meal, you usually have to choose three parts of the pig's fat, one is the muscle on the leg, the other is the pork belly, and the third is the plate muscle on the back of the pig. The oil yield of these three parts is high, and the fried lard residue tastes good, tough and delicious.

next, you have to put the rice cake into the gauge and squeeze out the remaining oil, so that the rice cake will become a cake. When the meal is ready for use, it has to be soaked, washed and cut into pieces before it is put into the pot and boiled with the broth.

It seems simple to boil lard and take off fork meal, but it takes a lot of time. Because you can't squeeze too much oil, you must save some oil. First, you can preserve the fragrance of oil. Second, you can avoid the burnt smell when you squeeze too much goods. The whole process can't use big fire, but it must be boiled slowly with small fire all the time, so as to prevent the excessive firepower from burning the bran or the lard from being extracted.

When the boiled glutinous rice porridge is used as the base, it is not only fragrant, but also because the oil of the fork meal has been squeezed out, it tastes fat but not greasy, refreshing and smooth. The spicy soup impacts the taste buds, and the glutinous rice slowly melts on the tip of the tongue.

The family economic system is in a tense period, and life is relatively difficult. Materials are poor, life is hard, and all the ingredients that can be used to eat and satisfy hunger will be used. In this way, on the verge of being eliminated, the bran meal was used and brought into play, and it came to the front and became delicious.

in those days, this kind of business was mainly to satisfy hunger or warm up, not to mention delicious enjoyment. Later, the glutinous rice porridge was passed down from generation to generation by the Ou Ting people and became an old craft that has been passed down for more than 1 years.

why do Chaoshan people like to drink glutinous rice porridge? Undoubtedly, this is inseparable from the poor days when the older generation went hungry and suffered hardships. In the era of poor materials, because of the lack of oil and water life, the ancestors of Ou Ting, who are diligent and housekeeping, invented the practice of eating porridge out of cherishing the meal. Inadvertently, this century-old porridge has been made, and it has become synonymous with Gouting's food today, which makes countless diners yearn for it.