Sugar shallots pancakes

Nowadays, occasionally there are people selling sugar onion pancakes on the street corners of Causeway Bay, which are pieces of dried sugar, snacks wrapped in flake crusts, which is a unique craft of Teochew people.

A good friend liked it and once asked me how to do it. I saw it when I was a child, and I still have a fresh impression:

To start, start with a large pot and add water to the sugar. How do you know it's hot enough? I remember that the master fu wanted to take out a little of the syrup, soak it in cold water, and suddenly become an irregular transparent body, with a lot of bubbles sticking together. Experienced elderly people look at it and know that the syrup is not hard.

Cook until the syrup turns orange-yellow, use two wooden sticks to pick it up, and then drop it, hang it on the wooden pillar, and you can start pulling. At this time, it is still necessary to use a wooden stick, because the temperature is too high, and it will burn the hand.

Pulling and pulling, a little cold, I repeated the pull with both hands. Like ramen noodles, folding and folding; also like noodles, how many strips can be pulled out is how many holes can be pulled out.

A charcoal stove is also made on the ground, and when it is pulled, it is roasted on it so that the sugar balls will not harden. At this time, the master threw the sugar ball at the pillar and pulled it again with force.

It is also strange to say that it is boiled from white sugar into transparent sugar water, and then condensed into a yellow sugar ball. After a pull, like a piece of cloth, under the refraction of the sun, raw silk is colorful and dazzling. Finally cools down and turns completely white.

At this time, with a knife, everything was done, and many holes appeared in the air holes of the sugar cake on the cross-cutting surface. Under a number, there are sixteen large holes and two hundred and fifty-six small holes, which can never be miscalculated.

This artisanal art, which has been passed down from generation to generation, has become famous in the Ming Dynasty, and Guo Zizhang, who was the governor of Chaozhou at that time, has written down: "The onion sugar of the tide, the extremely white pole pine, there is no dregs."

Vendors cut into rectangular sugar cakes, put them in non-leaking aluminum drums, and then sell them on the street, sprinkle sesame seeds and peanut crushed and wrap them in pancakes.

I was in Taiwan, and I also saw this snack, in addition to peanuts and sesame seeds, but also sprinkled with coriander and green onion, but it is really a veritable sugar onion pancake.