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People lining up for pork-and-pickle mooncakes
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The mixed smells of hot pastry, pork and pickles wafting from bakeries these days are luring customers, who leave with satisfied smiles and oven-fresh, flaky and salty mooncakes.
It’s a common scene around Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls next Thursday this year, in Hangzhou. While people around China eat all kinds of sweet mooncakes, Hangzhou residents are among those who queue up for a saltier variety of the traditional treat made with ingredients not usually found in desserts — minced pork and pickled mustard stem, or zhacai.
Pork and pickled vegetable mooncakes originated in Suzhou and used to be one of the most sought-after snacks in Hangzhou. They have been experiencing a revival among local gastronomes after several years of being eclipsed by the widespread popularity of Cantonese-style mooncakes.
Unlike many mooncakes sealed in plastic bags in gift boxes that can sell for hundreds of yuan, pork and pickled vegetable mooncakes are best bought fresh at a bakery or store and rolled in paper at about 3 yuan (49 US cents) each.
These local delicacies are popular in Hangzhou and Suzhou, while in Shanghai, people line up for pork mooncakes that are similar but usually without pickled vegetables in the filling.
“The mooncake is a typical salty Suzhou-style mooncake, and it can only be hand made,” says Ma Minhua, pastry cook of Zhiweiguan Restaurant, an old local brand that sells pastries and snacks. The brand sells about 30,000 pork and pickled vegetable mooncakes every day.
Ma says that since it is made from fresh meat, the pastry must be sold fresh, and the best time to eat it is when it is hot out of the oven.
The mooncakes have enough fat to give them a good taste and texture, and zhacai is crunchy, slightly spicy and salty and goes well with pork. Also, zhacai is not very watery so it does not make the flaky pastry mushy.
Many residents find the fragrance of the baked pastry, hot and juicy pork and zhacai hard to resist. So despite the explosion of mooncake varieties, pickled vegetable and pork mooncakes are holding their own, especially in the past decade.
“Dozens of years ago when living standards were not high in the city, sweet mooncakes were popular, but nowadays people ask for lower-sugar and lower-fat foods, so salty mooncakes are welcomed again,” says Zhao Xingyun, vice general manager of Zhiweiguan.
Since the beginning of the month, Hangzhou mooncake makers have been selling the seasonal treats, and every manufacturer uses their own tactics to win customers.
September Life, a bakery chain whose stores are filled with the very strong fragrance of mooncakes, promises all their treats are oven-fresh; Wuweihe sells tubes of paper-wrapped pork and pickled vegetable mooncakes in almost every supermarket in the city.
And Zhiweiguan, as well as Caizhizhai, two time-honored brands, rely on their established reputations to sell mooncakes in their stores.
“Usually at every chain, every day before 7pm, all pork and pickled vegetable mooncakes are sold out,” says Hu Qi, operations director of September Life. Its stores open at 8am, and it is common to see people lined up at that time to buy the freshest cakes.
Making your own pork and pickled vegetable mooncakes
Ingredients:
200 grams ground pork with lean to fat ratio 7:3, 120g zhacai (available in grocery stores) minced, egg yolk, minced ginger, cooking alcohol, soy sauce, salt and sugar, water-and-oil dough (mix 150g flour, 50g lard and 120g water into a dough), oiled dough (mix 150g flour and 100g lard into a dough)
Steps:
1. Make the filling: Mince zhacai, place in bowl with pork, egg yolk and spices. Mix well and set aside.
2. Make the dough: Knead water-and-oil dough first, then make oiled dough. Cover and allow to sit for 20-30 minutes.
3. Roll the two doughs into a long, thin shapes, and then break them into individual pieces. Shape oiled dough pieces with your palm into round balls. Roll out water-and-oil dough with a roller and shape into a circle. Take the dough balls and put them into circular dough. Carefully cover the balls with the flattened dough, then cover for 20 minutes.
4. Making the cake: Take a roller and lightly roll the dough pieces made in last step into a flat circle, thicker in the middle and thinner around the edges, big enough to hold the filling. Put a spoonful of the pork and zhacai filling into the center of the dough, close up with dough to cover the filling, and slowly roll it into a ball again.
5. Put mooncakes on a tray and bake in an oven for 30 minutes at 180 Celsius degrees.
6. Brush the hot mooncakes with a thin layer of liquid yolk.
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