The common vegetable market has banana flowers for sale, purple and huge. I often ignore it. Banana flowers can be seen in Kunming almost all year round. Flowers bloom all the year round, so there won't be so many surprises when you meet flowers that can be seen all the year round in this vegetable market.
Banana flowers are very strong. Vendors can keep selling. If nobody cares, the bracts will remain like this. If someone comes and peels off one or two bracts, it will be fresh, fresh. Therefore, vendors will not be in a hurry to sell flowers for a long time, so selling plantain flowers in Kunming is priced at two.
Buy back plantain flowers, usually throw away the old bracts wrapped outside, remove the flowers in the bracts and remove the pistil. The delicate bracts are cut into finger-wide strips, blanched with flowers and soaked in clear water for 20 minutes. Stir-fry with pickles or stir-fry with lobster sauce. How to match it depends on personal preference. I tried something, but it was just a dispensable dish.
Until one day, I ate braised pork with banana flower in Dai restaurant, which was amazing for a while. It's fresh, smooth and fragrant, and I can't find anything to match it. At this time, every time I stew braised pork, what I think of is not chestnuts or potatoes, but plantain flowers.
Banana flowers usually bask in the sun in the vegetable market every day. When I wanted to stew braised pork, I searched every corner of the market and still couldn't see it. I just learned that although it is common to see plantains with big buds hanging down, you can't buy them if you want to eat them. Later, as soon as this matter developed, the cart before the horse. Meat became a side dish, and plantain flower became the protagonist: after buying plantain flower, I bought meat and stewed it.
However, many places are blessed. Once in Xinping county, I saw them throw away all the bracts of banana flowers, leaving only flowers for use. It's really a feeling of wasting the world. Thirdly, in Honghe County, it is common for them to fry plantain flowers. They put lobster sauce and pepper, but the taste is much better than usual, and it feels very special. I still don't understand after asking for a long time. The chef was surprised, too, and thought it was just lobster sauce. Later, I finally knew that it was really lobster sauce: the lobster sauce of Honghe Hani nationality is different from other lobster sauces. After soaking soybeans and swelling them, they pounded them into fine slag before fermentation. So it was fried into banana flower, which was delicious and had a different taste.
In the kitchen, there are always some genius names buried. For example, the first person to stew braised pork with banana flower, the first person to invent lobster sauce. But I don't think this is the strangest thing. A sentence that is often forwarded now is: it doesn't matter who you are, what matters is who you are with. Banana flower is the most perfect interpretation of this sentence: when there is no good partner, it can usually be ignored. With Hani Douchi, it has upgraded itself and Douchi by more than one grade; Together with braised pork, it became a delicious food that everyone praised.