Gourmets of the Heavens

Cut the bitter gourd vertically, and the type of bitter gourd Zhao Youqian chose is also very special. Ordinary bitter gourds have green skin, but the bitter gourd he cut like this is white and even has a touch of white jade.

This is also a relatively new food that has just appeared, and it is a new variety cultivated in the past ten or twenty years, white jade bitter gourd.

The fruit of this kind of bitter gourd is white in color, thick in flesh, juicy, tender and crisper than green bitter gourd, so it has a refreshing taste, lighter bitterness than green bitter gourd, and a warmer taste. It can be eaten directly without soaking to remove the bitterness.

But even bitter melons like this need to go through certain steps.

What Zhao Youqian wants to make is a bitter set meal, but not a medicine set meal. Bitterness is just a part of the taste, and it will never be everything.

After all, it was too bitter, and he also had to think about the drinkers and a few guys who tasted like children, they didn't want to suffer too much.

The white jade bitter gourd was split in half by Zhao Yougan, revealing the fairer inner flesh and light yellow melon seeds.

Usually bitter gourd is processed, in order to make the taste and taste better, and also to reduce the bitterness. Generally, it is necessary to use an iron spoon to remove most of the inner flesh and melon seeds along the inner part of the bitter gourd.

This is also the way to minimize the bitterness of bitter gourd, and Zhao Youqian is naturally the same, but his craftsmanship is obviously higher than that of ordinary people. Before scraping off the melon pulp with a spoon, he even uses a knife to cut the melon flesh with no depth or shallowness. , with a few knives in turn from left to right.

Then use an iron spoon to peel off the melon seeds along the trace of the knife. On the one hand, the peeled melon flesh is more thorough, and the melon flesh can be peeled off faster without damaging the bitter gourd itself. part.

After removing the flesh and seeds, Zhao Youqian directly divided the bitter gourd into four, and then piled it up and cut it into thin slices for later use.

After slicing, add salt and marinate for a while, so as to remove some of the bitterness of the bitter gourd again. When it is time to cook, rinse the bitter gourd with clean water, and then squeeze out all the water, so that the crispness can be maintained. Next, let the bitter gourd be more suitable for the entrance, and it can be served with rice and wine with other seasonings.

Moreover, it can still retain the slight bitterness of bitter gourd, making it an amazing flavor in cooking.

That's the purpose of preparing these bitter ingredients ahead of time.

The root of bitter cuisine is to make bitterness the finishing touch, not bitter for the sake of bitterness, and make bitterness the main axis of everything. This is not called bitter cuisine, but suffering.

Once the bitterness is too strong to suppress other tastes, it is better to eat Coptis chinensis directly, since there is only bitterness anyway.

In order to solve this problem, Yaozhou Cuisine’s approach is to reduce the bitterness at the source and pre-treat the ingredients in a large amount, so that when the bitter ingredients are combined with other ingredients, they can bring out their own unique taste without mixing other ingredients. The taste is completely saturated.

It depends on how each chef handles the ingredients.

At least when selecting and processing ingredients, Zhao Youqian has done his best.

If further processing continues to remove the bitterness, then there is no need to use bitter gourd as an ingredient.

So the grasp of this degree is also very important.

The bitter gourds that were cut vertically from the middle here were processed, and the remaining white jade bitter gourds did not escape being processed.

After removing the two ends, cut them directly into cylindrical sections according to the width of two fingers. According to the diners in Zhutian Restaurant today, each person must eat at least three or four bitter gourds with meat, at least forty or more, In addition to the white beard who eats enough, there will be about ten more.

It can be said that it took Zhao Yougan a lot of time just to cut the bitter gourd into cylindrical sections, let alone remove the bitter gourd pulp and melon seeds inside.

Fortunately, Zhao Youqian's hands and feet were quite quick. He took a small curved knife with a thin blade, inserted it into the flesh of the bitter gourd and turned it around, leaving a hole in the center of the bitter gourd.

This made Zhao Youqian's processing speed much faster, but in order to get rid of the taste of these bitter gourds, he also had to put in some refined salt for pickling, so that some of the juice of the bitter gourds would be lost.

Then blanch it with boiling water. In order to ensure the color of these bitter gourd segments, a certain amount of edible oil should be added to the blanched water.

This repeated blanching and ice water showering would take about three times before it would be fully effective, and after Zhao Youqian removed most of the ingredients, including the mustard greens that had been marinated for a while, the juice and salt were washed and dried.

There is already a bitter smell spreading in the whole Zhutian Xiaoguan.

"What exactly is the store manager going to do today?"

Wesley had a strange look on his face. He didn't expect that he would have a hard day in the Tiantian Restaurant, but the huge body of the white beard was beside him, and he laughed.

"Boy, what are you worried about? Can the store manager let you eat really bad food?"

"Since the store manager has done this, it must be delicious, don't worry!"

Hearing what the white beard said, the weird look on Wesley's face didn't get rid of much, but the others really relaxed a lot.

"Even if it's delicious, I don't want to taste it if it's bitter! That's too weird!"

Wesley muttered a few words, but his trust in Zhao Yougan didn't make him say anything more.

Lao Tianshi and Hong Yi have excellent eyesight. They both noticed the ingredients made by Zhao Youqian. In the Tiantian Restaurant, everyone tacitly abandoned the sensing methods other than the five senses, so except for the white beard because of his tall stature. Aside from being a bit cheaper, the rest of the people can only rely on the five senses of physique piled up by their cultivation bases to inspect others, or use their own cultivation bases to bless and observe.

This is also the reason why most of the diners are not as good as the old Tianshi and Hong Yi's eyesight.

As for the new diner, Mo Cangli, who seemed to be silent and neglected, he was paying attention to everything in the restaurant, including the two children who were pulled to ask what happened.

It was just a detail that made Hong Yi, who had been paying attention to the man in dark green clothes all the time, smile slightly.

That is, Mo Cangli also inadvertently and subconsciously put those appetizers into his mouth from time to time.

'enough'

Zhao Youqian in the kitchen didn't care what the diners thought, unless someone explicitly protested, it was always what he did and what the diners ate in Zhutian Restaurant.

What's more, he is confident this time, and the food he cooks definitely surpasses the understanding of these ingredients by ordinary people.

Jinhua ham, pork ribs, and old hen are all ingredients that need to be processed. In order to make these bitter dishes, Zhao Yougan has to use a lot of ingredients, but fortunately, except for the bitter bamboo shoots, the other kinds are not It takes too much time, so the first thing Zhao Youqian cooks is this traditional famous dish belonging to the Jiangnan area of ​​Yaozhou!