Compared with other famous gastronomic regions, Guangxi's cooking is generally relatively simple. One day at dinner, a local chef proposed to "promote cinnamon dishes", and the guests in the industry said: There is no need at all - forcibly promoting this concept, consumers take it and other cuisines, you are dwarfed, but it creates a bad impression.
However, the powder in Guangxi is still very good, especially the raw pressed powder, which left a deep impression on me.
The characteristic of raw pressed powder is "freshly squeezed and eaten".
In the shop, there is a large basin of very viscous rice milk. The shopkeeper put the rice milk in the abrasive with many small holes in the bottom part, and by squeezing, the rice milk came out of the hole and became a uniform vermicelli. The noodles are sent directly into the boiling water, and after tens of seconds to a few minutes, the noodles float up and you get the cooked rice noodles. For modern people who are far away from the kitchen, this is somewhat of a "moment of witnessing miracles" – in the words of the food master Sparkstone, it is "visible freshness".
The cooked rice noodles are fished out and then poured into the leek and pork offal soup that was first made, and the fresh aroma that cannot be experienced in high-end restaurants suddenly spreads.
There are different rice noodles and noodles in various parts of China, and the key to whether they are delicious or not is two: the taste of the noodles and the taste of the soup. There is no drying step in the whole process of guangxi raw pressed rice flour, and the starch is always in a state of water absorption and expansion, and the uniformity from the outside to the inside is better when cooking. For the same ingredients, this maintains better "viscoelasticity" – it is said that more "elaborate" stores will fish out the powder after cooking the powder and cool it with cold water before adding it to the soup. Rice flour is a kind of "starch glue", and the process of heating and curing is actually a process of continuous change in the structural state of starch molecules and the entanglement and interaction between different starch molecules. When the ideal state is reached, by cooling them down and "staying still", it is conducive to maintaining a better taste.
The effect of soup naturally goes without saying. Regardless of the powder, there is no obvious flavor in itself. The taste of the powder mainly comes from the soup. The soup we eat is made with fresh pork hearts, pork loins, pork liver, etc., plus tender leeks, cooked under the eyes of customers. Compared with the bone broth and mutton soup obtained by boiling for a long time, there is no "thick freshness" produced by the synergistic effect of glutamate and inositinate, and it is a "freshness" presented after the sulfide of leeks suppresses the "visceral smell" of pork offal. Accustomed to the thick white "broth", it is still very wonderful to eat this "fresh" soup.
Raw pressed powder is characterized by that "fermented sour taste" – some people like it, some people don't like it. Ground rice needs to be soaked and fermented. As a traditional food, there is no standard production process, so on the Internet, you will see different people writing "authentic raw powder production process", which is not the same. After all, in the past, all food production was tailored to local conditions. In short, rice needs to be fermented. As for how to ferment, to what extent, each family has its own way. Different degrees of fermentation will also get a powder with different flavors.
Rice differs from wheat in that it has gluten proteins with good gelatinization properties, which can easily form a tight network structure, so that the dough has good mechanical properties. The protein in rice flour is very "stubborn", the molecules are difficult to unfold, and it is not easy to form viscoelastic dough and noodles. The rice milk of raw pressed flour has a clever operation, that is, a part of the cooked powder is added, and after sufficient mixing and beating, the rice milk also obtains certain mechanical properties.
The operation of forming cooked rice syrup is also different. Some cook one-fifth of the rice into rice, beat it into glue, and add it to raw rice milk. Some are made by directly boiling doughs made of raw rice milk in water, mainly about 1 cm thick skin, and then whipping and mixing well. Through cooking, the starch molecules absorb water and expand, glue each other, and then whisk into the corn starch pulp, which plays the role of gluten in the wheat dough.
However, the role of this "simulated gluten" is still much weaker than that of real gluten, so it cannot be made into a ductile dough like wheat flour, and it is more difficult to make "raw noodles". Make them into a viscous rice milk, squeeze them into vermicelli strips through abrasives, and cook them directly into boiling water to become the "powder" of the molding force.
Raw pressed flour is a rather "original" processing process, with more processing steps, combined with small shops on the street and in the community. Relatively speaking, it is easier to standardize the hot and fried powder made with ready-made powder. Raw squeezing and blanching, in fact, is only the difference in process, and the ultimate determination of the flavor and taste is the quality control of the powder itself and the production of the soup. Whether it is raw pressed powder or other powders, if it is done well, it will be delicious.