Source: Quanzhou Network
Making mille-feuille requires skill
Huang Meilan is frying suncakes
According to the Report of Quanzhou Network on February 14, every Spring Festival, returned overseas Chinese from Shuangyang Overseas Chinese Farm in Luojiang District will elaborately make Spring Festival delicacies indonesian mille-feuille cakes, suncakes, cat ears and so on according to the Customs of Southeast Asia that they were once accustomed to. These delicacies have different exotic flavors, but they all have the same strong New Year flavor.
Recently, this reporter came to the home of Huang Meilan, a returned overseas Chinese relative in Yangshan Overseas Chinese New Village, Shuangyang Overseas Chinese Farm, only to see that many Indonesian specialties of mille-feuille cakes were placed on the table in her living room. According to local Indonesian customs, during the Spring Festival, every household will cook traditional Indonesian pastries to entertain guests. In the kitchen, Huang Meilan was busy frying suncakes, and the basin next to her was already filled with freshly baked suncakes, golden and yellow, emitting a seductive fragrance; in the oil pot in front of her, several suncakes that were about to be formed were floating, making a "nourishing" sound. She held chopsticks in her right hand and turned over the pot, and in her left hand, she took the mold and dipped it into the paste on the side, and then put it back into the oil pot, and after a few seconds, her left hand was gently shaken, and the suncake stuck to the mold broke away from the mold, like two flowers "blooming" in the oil pot. "There's flour, eggs, coconut flour and sugar in the slurry, the syrup can't be too thin or too thick, and the molds are all handmade. In addition, the grasp of the heat is very critical, the color is too dark to fry for too long, the time is too short and afraid of not being cooked, these skills need to be mastered in practice. According to reports, Huang Meilan's parents returned from Indonesia in 1960, and she has been making suncakes and mille-feuille cakes with her parents since she was a teenager.
Xu Yuli, 62 years old this year, is an authentic returned overseas Chinese. In 1960, when she was just over 1 year old, she was carried back to China by her parents, who brought back to her homeland the popular food such as mille-feuille cake in Indonesia, and this craft was passed down, and she followed it when she was a child. When the reporter came to her house, she and her daughter were making mille-feuille cake. She said that to make this mille-feuille cake, it takes thirty or forty minutes to mix eggs, sugar, flour and spices together. "Mixing raw materials is the easiest preparation process, to make a delicious mille-feuille cake, the baking step is the most important, and the secret of delicious pastry is hidden in the baking."
During the conversation, Xu Yuli added soybean oil and condensed milk to the stirred slurry, stirred, poured into the oven, and put it into the oven to bake. It didn't take long to take out the oven, add another layer, and continue to bake, so that it was baked layer by layer until it reached the top. She said that it takes about an hour to make a mille-feuille cake, and it takes more than an hour to beat eggs. This step requires not only patience, but also skill. "In the process of baking layer by layer, as long as one of the layers is not controlled by the heat, the whole drawer of mille-feuille cake will be destroyed and can only be restarted, so in the baking process, there is no distraction at all." When she took the baked mille-feuille cake out of the oven, the kitchen was suddenly full of aroma, and she picked up a piece to taste carefully, and the dense texture and sweet smell made people linger.
Zhuang Yanyan, director of Shuangyang Overseas Chinese Farm, introduced that Shuangyang Overseas Chinese Farm was established in February 1960, mainly to resettle Indonesian, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian returned overseas Chinese, there are currently more than 600 returned overseas Chinese, they have been integrated into the local area. "Chinese New Year's Eve eat reunion dinner, set off firecrackers, worship the heavenly gong, and Chinese New Year's Eve meals include Indonesian and Chinese dishes. On the first day of the Chinese New Year, neighbors will greet each other, and they will also call their relatives overseas or WeChat to say goodbye. (Reporter Wu Zhiming Lin Jinfeng text/photo)