Except for some foods that need to be dipped in vinegar, "sour" is used to stimulate their delicious taste, and it can also be seen in representative dishes in various places, such as Shanxi sour porridge, Guangdong Gulai meat, Northeast sauerkraut stewed vermicelli, Jiangsu sweet and sour pork ribs, Sichuan hot and sour rice noodles and so on.
Guangxi, in the field of "acid", is a hard to ignore. Guangxi has its own particularity, diversity and inevitability in terms of usage, taste and variety of sour food.
1. "acid" is special
In the Book of Songs, there is a cloud that "there is a thatched cottage in the middle of the ridge, and there are melons in the battlefield, which is the ancestor of stripping sacrifices". Among them, "rudder" is the current sauerkraut. It can be seen that in ancient times, sauerkraut was a product sacrificed to ancestors by the royal family, and it was also a food with a certain status. From this point of view, sourness has been a popular taste since ancient times.
Among them, in Guangxi, it is most convenient to "attach" sour taste to various foods.
Here, there is a particularly sour food-acid. "Suanjie" is a local dialect, which means pickled vegetables or sour things, so Suanjie is actually a general term, mainly including fruits and vegetables with sour taste after pickling. Guilin, Liuzhou and other areas in Guangxi are more straightforward and directly called "acid".
According to legend, the sour taste in Guangxi can be traced back to the time when Qin Shihuang ordered the construction of Lingqu. At that time, a chef introduced pickled pepper technology into Guangxi, and after improvement and development by Guangxi people, it became the current sour technology.
There are two kinds of pickling processes: vinegar pickling and sauerkraut jar pickling.
The first method is pickling with vinegar directly, which can greatly reduce the pickling time and make sour plums taste faster, so it is also a widely used method in the market.
The second kind of pickling is not adding vinegar, but using the principle that sugar or other substances are fermented and turned sour to make the sour taste of food more natural, but the pickling time is longer. This pickle jar often contains sour water. When you want to pickle something, just "throw" it into the jar.
In addition to making food sour, sugar, salt and pepper should be mixed according to different tastes to achieve the best taste.
Because there are different tastes in different parts of Guangxi, sour plums have also developed different flavors. Among them, Nanning is famous for its many kinds of sourdough, which generally includes two kinds of sourdough: fruit, sour pineapple, sour watermelon, sour mango, sour papaya, sour guava and other vegetables, such as sour lotus root, sour radish, sour garlic, sour ginger, sour pepper, sour bean and sour mustard. ...
Sour fruits and vegetables in the season will be selected for pickling, and generally the fruits will be selected for processing, such as raw mango, raw papaya and so on. Because overripe fruit is not crisp enough.
Although the name is sour sister, in fact, many times it is not so sour, but more of a "sweet and sour mouth." For fruit with sour taste, making sour taste will stimulate the inherent sweetness and sourness of food, and plum powder will be added to some areas to bring different flavors, such as pineapple and lemon.
There are often condiments such as Chili powder, licorice salt and Chili acetic acid water on the stalls for diners to add according to their own tastes.
"Heroes are sad about beauty, and beauty is sad about sour stalls" is a local saying in Guangxi. The attraction of acid is obvious.
"People can't stop" is also the charm of Guangxi acid. Guangxi Suanjie skillfully combines the four flavors of "sweet, sour, spicy and salty" without collision. This sour, sweet, spicy and salty "immortal" taste makes you feel that the food in your mouth is real and illusory, and you just want to keep eating one bite after another.
2. Everything may be "sour"
Guangxi people are not only "sour" vegetables and fruits, but also meat such as chickens, ducks, fish and pigs. It can be said that only you can't think of it, and they can't be "sour" without it.
In the past, some ethnic minorities in mountainous areas had to work in the mountains every day. In order to save the time of going back and forth for lunch, they came up with a good way to pickle fish and meat.
Sour meat needs to be washed and dried, cut into long strips, put a layer of meat, put a layer of fried rice flour and salt, and so on, compacted layer by layer without leaving gaps, and then sealed in an urn, which can be eaten raw without frying for more than ten days; Fish with Chinese sauerkraut is similar. After cleaning the fish, dry it in the sun until it is half dry, and then add glutinous rice flour, sweet wine koji, pepper, ginger and other condiments. Sealed in a jar for two months can be eaten directly.
Now, because the resources are more convenient to obtain, and the production of sour fish, sour meat and sour duck takes too long, it has become a first-class local dish, which is only used to entertain VIPs or major festivals. Even some ethnic groups have the custom of sending a pair of sour fish and a sour goose when picking up the bride.
There is a folk proverb that "sour fish makes old wine in ten years, and it is worth a lifetime", which shows how obsessed they are with sauerkraut.
"Acid" in fact, everything should be timed. In Guangxi, vegetables are harvested in March, fish are fattened in August, and pigs are killed in the New Year to celebrate, so there is a habit of "pickling vegetables in March, pickling fish in August, and curing meat in the first month".
The curing time is also very strict. Some fruits can be preserved for about an hour. If soaked for a long time, it will not only lose its original sour and crisp taste, but also be harmful to human body.
There are several faces in this acid.
Geographically, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region is adjacent to Guangdong, Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan and Vietnam. In terms of eating habits, Guangxi can be said to be the most complicated area in China.
The special geographical location and complicated eating habits doomed the "sour" in Guangxi to have a "changeable" taste.
In southern and southeastern Guangxi near Guangdong, such as Nanning, Binyang, Wuzhou and Yulin, the taste is light and sweet, and the food is similar to Cantonese food. The "sour" in these areas may be mostly biased towards "sweet and sour".
Guiliu language area is close to Hunan and Guizhou, such as Guilin, Liuzhou and Hezhou. It will be spicy, and the diet will often have the characteristics of the Central Plains. Due to the influence of neighboring provinces, the "sour" here will be close to "hot and sour".
The western areas near Yunnan and Vietnam, such as Baise, Nandan and Donglan, will be dominated by ethnic minorities' diets, including pickled food and bacon, and the taste will be salty, so the "sour and salty" taste will be one of the characteristics of the diet here.
Southern coastal areas, such as Beihai, Qinzhou and Fangchenggang. Will pay more attention to the delicious food, and more seafood will appear in the daily diet. If there is a "sour" taste, they will also pay more attention to "sour and fresh".
In addition to these, there are Liuzhou snail powder and Wuming raw pressed powder, which all brew a unique "sour smell" and "sour taste".
Although there are some areas in Guangxi where sour taste rarely appears on the dining table, as long as there is sour taste, it is impossible to generalize the "sour" taste.
4. "Acid" is a noun here
In Guangxi, due to the variety of acids, "acid" is more used as a noun than an adjective.
Several well-known earth acids are Duan acid, Wuxuan red distiller's grains acid and Jingxi acid.
Du 'an Acid is a famous "acid" brand in Guangxi. It uses brown sugar as the main raw material, fermented by traditional methods to make sweet and sour puree, and then served with hot sauce and pickled sour food. So this acid will be especially sweet.
Wuxuan distiller's grains acid is made from cooked rice, mixed with distiller's grains and fermented with proper amount of acetic acid and rice wine. Therefore, it will be ruddy and delicate in color, and at the same time have the fragrance of rice, among which gingerol from red distiller's grains is a representative product pickled with it.
Jingxi is one of the cradles of acid. The acid in Jingxi is mainly rice vinegar, and old vinegar is rarely used, so the acid there will not be yellow, and the acid there will be more refreshing.
Interestingly, here, the names of various vegetables and fruits have become adjectives instead. For example: erucic acid, carob acid, fenugreek acid, capsicum acid, gingerol acid, etc.
Although many osmanthus dishes are not directly pickled, they are often inseparable from the "acid addition" of these "acids". In the famous Guangxi dish "Lemon Duck", the essential and irreplaceable ingredients are capsicum acid, ginger acid and citric acid.
5. "Acid" makes sense
Why is Guangxi so sour?
Guangxi has a low latitude, so the temperature is relatively high, especially in summer. Local people can no longer use "heat" to describe the weather in Guangxi, but use another more vivid word-"roast".
This "too hot" weather also caused the decline of enzyme activity in the human body, which made people lose appetite and appetite. At this time, it is the turn of sour food. Sour food can help digestion and absorption, enhance appetite, eliminate greasy, and can achieve the effect of appetizing before meals and relieving greasy after meals, so it is especially suitable for eating in summer.
Secondly, some areas in Guangxi are karst landforms, and the rocks in this area are mostly limestone (mainly composed of calcium carbonate). Due to the dissolution of water, water contains more calcium ions, and the hardness of water is higher than that of other places. Drinking "high calcium water" for a long time is easy to get stones.
Eating acid is conducive to reducing the accumulation of stones in the body and greatly reducing the probability of getting stones.
Another reason is that some mountain resources in Guangxi were scarce in the past. In order to prolong the shelf life of food and make it easy to carry, they preserve it by pickling, which leads to their habit of eating acid.
An international scientific research team tested and analyzed thousands of urine samples and found that the internal organs of Guangxi people in southern China were the healthiest. This is probably inseparable from their eating habits of "eating sour".
At the same time, Li Shizhen mentioned in Compendium of Materia Medica that acid food can dissipate blood stasis, stop bleeding, detoxify and kill insects, and it can be used for postpartum dizziness, jaundice, bloody stool and other diseases, and it has the effect of detoxifying fish and vegetables. Modern medicine has also proved that eating sour food in moderation is beneficial to nourishing the liver.
Therefore, the "acid" in Guangxi is probably one of the "longevity secrets" of Guangxi people.
References:
Liu Qinbo's Preliminary Study on the Customs and Causes of Pickled Sauerkraut in Ethnic Areas of Guangxi, Zhang's Study on Pickling Technology and Cultural Evolution of Jingxi Sour Cake in Guangxi, and Authentic Scenery of Guangxi.