Gansu cuisine Dongxiang tastes coarse and fine.

Original title: Dongxiang tastes rough and delicate.

Quinoa porridge

Gaicha

twist

In addition to the scenery, food is also essential in the journey. Dongxiang Autonomous County, Linxia Prefecture is located in the hilly area of the Loess Plateau, with a high terrain in the middle and low surroundings, showing a "convex" shape. The Yellow River, Taohe River and Daxia River pass through the county seat, and there are rich tourism resources such as Gaoxia Pinghu, Xingyuan scenery, Danxia landform and cultural sites. Dongxiang cuisine with regional characteristics is well deserved.

1, free-range sheep, like floating clouds hanging between ridges and gullies.

In the Dongxiang finger food shop near Laoxihu Street and Jiangou in Lanzhou, I always heard a guest say, "Give it to the master, it will be better to grasp it by hand."

The so-called "better" is naturally exquisite. First, serve it while it is hot by hand, and tear it by hand. You can remove a few bones. Eating in the mouth will be soft and delicious, and the entrance will melt; The collocation of these two kinds of mutton should be fat and symmetrical, and the meat should be red and white. Whether it's ribs or sheep's back, it's always too fat to eat and too thin to eat.

Although their taste is commendable, I vaguely feel that the chef must have made fine adjustments when cooking to suit the taste of Lanzhou people.

I have been to Dongxiang Autonomous County, the origin of this delicious food. On several occasions, all the dishes I ate were cold, but the taste was very delicious, which lingered in my memory.

If you have the opportunity to go to Dongxiang this time, you must savor the differences.

Driving on the country road in Dongxiang, you can see the free-range sheep from time to time, like floating clouds, hanging between ridges and gullies. Dongxiang is dry and lacks rain, with an annual rainfall of only about 300 mm, but there are more than 8,000 kinds of grass, which belong to arid grassland vegetation. Herbs are mainly Benmao, Artemisia selengensis, mustard and thyme, and mixed with seasoning herbs such as wild onion and garlic. In order to get enough food, the sheep here can only walk around all day looking for pasture. The special geographical environment makes Dongxiang mutton tender, with little and delicate fiber, rich in protein and various trace elements. Eating more mutton has the functions of warming kidney, nourishing stomach and supplementing physical strength.

Congratulations, you have found the best local food store.

In Dongxiang local towns and villages, there are many and dense signs of hand-grabbed shops. Don't ask which store is the most famous, but whenever the restaurant is full of cars and people are buzzing inside and outside, congratulations on finding the best local restaurant.

The hospitable host has put a plate of sunflower seeds and a plate of dried apricots on the coffee table. In this plate of dried apricots, there are both large grafted apricots and pit apricots.

I took a piece of dried apricot with many wrinkles, which is slightly sour, hard and chewy, and it is a big apricot; Try a piece of dried apricot with a core, which is smooth and almost transparent, sweet and sour at the entrance and tough, and the more you eat, the more fragrant it is. While speaking, the cup of tea with blue and white porcelain was brought up, and the dried apricots were soaked in the tea and tasted again before leaving, which was another feeling. The shopkeeper said that these dried apricots are all pure natural fresh dried apricots without any additives, which are completely different from preserved apricots processed with sugar stains.

It is said that there are three treasures in Dongxiang Tangwangchuan, and sunflower seeds and dried apricots are two of them. What else is there? The answer lies in our bowl of tea, Jiao Da Jujube.

Drinking Dongxiang Gaiwancha is very particular. There are spring tips, rock sugar, longan, chrysanthemum and red dates in the coffee table tray. Guests can choose a few according to their own tastes and put them in a teacup, then pour boiling "peony water" and cover the bowl. Then they hold the bowl chassis in their left hand, pick up the bowl cover in their right hand, and scrape it slowly from the inside out and from shallow to deep with the cover.

The aroma of tea is fragrant, the tea juice is clear and the water vapor is curled up. Taste bitter, bitter and sweet, sweet and sour, taste slowly. A pure and rich tea fragrance instantly permeates the five internal organs.

Cover a bowl of tea and drink slowly. While sipping, keep adding boiling water until the sugar becomes weak.

Dongxiang caught the game of Gansu.

Another function of covering a bowl of tea to quench thirst is to offset the feeling of fullness caused by eating with your hands.

After a while, the hand-grabbed meat was served on the table. It was a large piece of cooked meat, divided into ribs, chest forks, sheep's back, sheep's neck and other parts, and placed on the plate respectively. The owner said that this is a "hand-grasping series" set.

The second is the "integrated version" of the swing, that is, the chopped large pieces of meat are bottomed with chest forks and backs, and the ribs are placed on them. This arrangement is distinct and three-dimensional, which makes people drool.

Grab a sparerib on the plate, tear it off, dip it in salt and pepper, Chili oil, vinegar, and serve it with fresh garlic cloves. The meat is tender, fragrant and delicious, and there is no peculiar smell. This is the best meat.

Dongxiang's hand grasp, after cooling, also has its reason. Chewy, not rotten. Shredded pork has clear roots, distinct fat and thin, compact meat and full flavor.

People with light taste can eat it directly, while people with heavy taste can mix it with fresh garlic, oil pepper, refined salt and even a little vinegar.

Some foreign tourists said that Gansu has a long and narrow region and different customs. Only this hand-grabbed mutton, from east to west and from north to south, unified the long and narrow Gansu into a taste, a wild Gansu taste.

Dongxiang people can carry forward hand-grabbed mutton, making it a national cultural business card with high gold content and a wonderful flower in Chinese food gardens, which shows its rich food culture.

4. Hand-grabbed rice+buckwheat porridge+Gaiwancha, with a luxurious Dongxiang flavor.

This time, the hand-grabbed pasta is not the famous riverside noodles, but a large basin of quinoa porridge. When one end is served, the air is filled with the unique aroma of grain.

The host greeted warmly again, "Come and try the quinoa in Dongxiang!"

Dongxiang can also grow quinoa? The host said that in recent years, the industrious and capable Dongxiang people have found their own way out of poverty-planting quinoa. The promotion of Dongxiang quinoa industry is not smooth sailing. Embarrassed, quinoa was almost exactly the same as a local weed called "grey stripe" in Dongxiang at the early stage of growth, but after it matured, many foreign tourists drove over to take pictures, and local talents found that the face value of quinoa was very high.

The ears of quinoa are all red. From a distance, the whole field seems to be on fire. Compared with the famous online grasses such as generation after generation and verbena which are popular in recent years, it has become the new favorite of girls. They spare no effort to show themselves on Tik Tok's fast hands, so that everyone is asking, where is this red plant? It turns out that quinoa originated in the Andes in South America, and it is a traditional food of Inca aborigines with a planting history of about 6,000 years. More exaggeratedly, FAO believes that quinoa is a single plant, which can basically meet the basic nutritional needs of human beings, and formally recommends quinoa as the most suitable nutritional food for human beings.

It crossed the ocean from distant South America, first settled in Tibet, then settled in Hexi Corridor, and then went to Dongxiang, where the terrain is high, the sun is abundant, and the wind is strong, which is a good place for quinoa to grow. Take a sip of quinoa porridge, which smells like nuts. The small germ on it is crisp to bite and feels a little full when chewed, like a sweet preserved fruit. It's delicious with crispy Dongxiang jiaozi.

Eat a hand, drink a spoonful of quinoa porridge and sip a bowl to make Dongxiang's taste journey perfect.