Why do Chengdu Chuan Chuan have so many bamboo sticks?

The reason why Chuanchuan in Chengdu has bamboo sticks is because you charge money based on the number or weight of the bamboo sticks. For example, a chicken foot costs three yuan, and only six bamboo sticks are inserted into it. So many bamboo sticks look a bit funny.

Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, is a very beautiful and comfortable place. It is also the birthplace of Sichuan cuisine and the world's gourmet capital. This title of "City of Gastronomy" is not self-proclaimed, but awarded by UNESCO. It is reported that there are currently only seven "Cities of Gastronomy" selected by UNESCO in the world, of which China accounts for three. In addition to Chengdu, there are also Macau and Shunde in Guangdong. If you travel to Chengdu, you will quickly discover two very obvious characteristics of Chengdu: first, the locals love to speak Chengdu dialect. If you speak Mandarin to them, they will still speak to you in Chengdu dialect; second, the people who eat in Chengdu There are so many special places.

Not to mention those small stalls such as barbecue and braised food. The most popular restaurants with storefronts on the street are hot pot, skewers, and maocai. In fact, chuanchuan and maocai should be regarded as a type of hot pot, because they are cooked in a soup base and eaten, but there are some differences in the specific forms. There are many skewers restaurants in Chengdu, usually called "XX Xiaojun Gan Chuan Chuan". The first time I had skewers in Chengdu, a local friend took me to eat at a restaurant that is said to be the most famous internet celebrity chain. My friend ordered a mandarin duck soup base and said that the biggest concession for Chengdu people when eating hot pot is the mandarin duck pot. Otherwise, they always order oil pot, because oil pot is spicy enough.

After ordering the soup base, go pick out the ingredients. All the ingredients here are cut into small pieces and then skewered with bamboo skewers for your choice. There is a wide variety of meat and vegetables. Each bamboo stick had a little bit of food on it. Although we brought back a bunch of sticks, there wasn't actually much food. Some foods have extra bamboo sticks stuck on them, like a boneless chicken foot with 5 bamboo sticks stuck densely on it, which looks quite funny. After asking, I found out that skewers usually charge according to the number of bamboo sticks. One bamboo stick costs about 50 cents. You just need to count the sticks after eating.

My friend asked me to get more Jun Gan, saying it was very delicious. Later I suddenly realized that what Chengdu people call Jun Gan refers to the gizzards of chickens and ducks. We usually call this kind of chicken gizzards and duck gizzards, or chicken gizzards and duck gizzards. Cantonese people call these chicken kidneys and duck kidneys. When eating Chuan Chuan in Chengdu, you have to prepare your own seasonings (seasonings), including millet pepper, oil, salt, vinegar, MSG, minced coriander, minced celery, minced garlic, chopped green onion, etc. You can prepare whatever seasonings you want.

In fact, many hot pot places prepare their own sauces. However, after mixing the sauces in Chengdu, instead of adding soup or soy sauce and mixing well, you directly pour in a packet of sesame oil and mix it with Oil to mix these seasonings (in addition to oil sauces, there are also dry sauces)! When this packet of oil went down, I was immediately confused. There was a thick layer of oil in the pot, and the sauce was also a packet of oil. How should I eat it? Fortunately, when you actually dip it in and eat it, it doesn't feel too greasy. After the flavor plate is prepared, the food is put into the pot together with the bamboo skewers and cooked. When eating, the food on the bamboo skewers is put into a bowl and eaten with the sauce.

But this seems to be more troublesome, because there is an extra step to take the food off the bamboo sticks, and too many bamboo sticks obstruct the space. I don’t understand why you have to eat food on bamboo skewers. Just like other hot pot restaurants, the food is clearly marked with prices and poured into the pot. Isn’t it good? But my friend thinks that if there are no bamboo skewers, it will not taste like this. Only with bamboo skewers can you taste it. At this time, the owner of the store just came over and interrupted: Strings without bamboo sticks have no soul!

After eating and drinking, we left two buckets of bamboo sticks. At a rough glance, there were probably two to three hundred bamboo sticks. I thought the store clerk would count the bamboo sticks one by one and then calculate the money, but unexpectedly, they weighed them directly. Because the weight of each bamboo stick is almost the same, you can weigh them all together and then divide the weight of the individual bamboo sticks. This can save a lot of time in making bamboo sticks. A friend rushed to buy the food. He said with emotion: In order to cater to tourists from all over the world, most of the dishes in Chengdu are not as spicy as before. They can be regarded as improved versions of Sichuan cuisine, but they cannot satisfy the spicy requirements of old Chengdu people.

Times are changing, and so are diets. This is an inevitable phenomenon in social development. Therefore, when you travel to a place, you may not necessarily be able to eat authentic local food. Either the taste has changed, or the ingredients have changed. If you really want to eat something authentic, it's best to go to the countryside, because there are few tourists in the countryside, so you don't have to worry about the tastes of outsiders, and most of the dishes can retain their original taste.