It was many years ago to get in touch with Hulutou, it was the cold winter wax moon, and it was more than ten o'clock in the evening after taking the train for several hours to Xi'an Railway Station. When I got out of the station, the cold wind hit, and I needed a bowl of steaming rice to warm my body and soothe my hungry stomach.
A man dragged a heavy suitcase and walked in a strange city, the wheels of the suitcase rubbing against the cold concrete floor made a harsh empty sound. After several turnarounds, I came to a small alley and stumbled into a small shop selling gourd heads. The shop is small, separated from the front and back, with a kitchen at the back and a few tables in front. There was a stove in the middle, and the long chimney turned a corner and stretched out directly out of the window. Although the shop is small, it is clean, and the tables and chairs are probably peeled off a lot because of the frequent wiping, showing the inherent patterns of the wood, which makes it look a little more simple and elegant.
The small shop is a mom-and-pop shop, run by a husband and wife. The woman is not tall, with a melon seed face, revealing a sense of wit. The man has a big belly, a fat man without a neck, probably the chef in the world almost the same look, and his chubby face is a ball of harmony. To be honest, I originally went to the beef and mutton steamed buns, after all, the beef and mutton steamed buns are famous, and the gourd head don't say that I have eaten it, I have never heard of it before. However, if you come to it, you will be safe, and you can't try it. Putting down the suitcase in his hand, he found a table near the stove and sat down, and shouted, boss, come to a bowl of gourds. I said I was going to have a bowl of gourd head, but I didn't know what kind of dark cuisine gourd head was. Actually, I don't need to shout, the woman has already taken a bowl and put it on the table in front of me, and poured a thick white noodle soup from a large iron kettle into the bowl. And the men are busy in the kitchen.
Eating noodles in a noodle restaurant in Shaanxi is generally without tea, and most of them give you a bowl of noodle soup. After eating too much, I didn't like the cup of clear soup and watery tea, and I liked a bowl of steaming thick noodle soup with a grain aroma. A bowl of noodle soup was in his stomach, and his frozen body gradually stretched out, and the chill on his body had already slipped away quietly.
While drinking the noodle soup, the woman brought an empty bowl and a plate. There were two white cakes on the plate, and the woman asked me to break the white cakes little by little and put them in a bowl. I didn't know how to eat the gourd head for the first time, and everything was under the command of the woman, so under the woman's smiling gaze, I patiently broke the cake little by little and put it in the bowl. The woman saw that I had broken the bread, took the bowl with the bread and twisted my waist back to the kitchen. It doesn't take much effort to put a big bowl of steaming gourd on the table, the milky white soup, the broken cakes appear and disappear in the soup, the plump fat intestines are full and lovely, and there are a little green coriander floating in the soup. Before I ate it, the smell of the smell had already stirred up my stomach. I couldn't wait to pick up the bowl and take a sip of the soup, the soup was thick and mellow, fresh and delicious, and the comfort quickly spread throughout the body from the taste buds. The hard cake is gently moistened by the delicious soup, and it is soft in the mouth, and it is chewed without losing its tendons. In particular, the well-made fat sausage is smooth and chewy, fat but not greasy.
A bowl of gourd head instantly captured my stomach, and while I was feasting, I blurted out the word "beauty". The flavor is mellow and the soup is thick, fresh and fragrant, the steamed tendons are tender, fat but not greasy. I came up with such a few words to evaluate the gourd head. Eating the gourd head and chatting with the boss, I learned that the so-called gourd head is the fat intestine at the junction of the pig's large intestine and small intestine, which is named because it shrinks like a gourd head after cooking.
There is also a rumor about the origin of the "gourd head", the "gourd head" is obtained by the medicine king Sun Simiao using the medicinal materials in the "medicine gourd" to remove the fishy shame of the large intestine, but in the Tang Dynasty where Sun Simiao lived. Mutton was the mainstream meat, and pork did not become popular until the Song Dynasty. A more credible statement is that the gourd head is inherited from the "fried white intestines" of the Song Dynasty, which is named because the fat of the pig's large intestine is thicker and resembles a gourd. Later, as long as you go to Xi'an, you must eat a bowl of gourd before you leave happily. When I come to Xi'an and don't eat gourd heads, I always feel empty in my heart, just like I don't want to step on the Great Wall in Beijing.
Because I like it, I want to **. Many friends from other places like the first time I ate gourd head, stupidly can't tell the difference between beef and mutton steamed bun and gourd head, in fact, everything is in the bowl. Beef and mutton steamed buns are a special delicacy of the Hui compatriots, so they are all halal. The ingredients of beef and mutton steamed buns are not as many as those of gourd head steamed buns, in addition to meat, there are only vermicelli, green vegetables, fungus, yellow flowers and the like.
Beef and mutton steamed buns were originally known as mutton steamed buns, known as mutton steamed buns in ancient times, Su Dongpo has the verse of "Long cuisine has bear wax, Qin cooks only mutton soup", it can be seen that the delicacy of beef and mutton steamed buns has been passed down for a long time. Gourd head steamed bun, more often called boiled bun, is the characteristic of the old Shaanxi Han people.
The ingredients of the gourd head are richer than the ingredients of the beef and mutton steamed buns, and I remember that the first time I ate the gourd head should not be the authentic gourd head, the authentic gourd head in addition to the cake is the staple food, the ingredients are fat sausage, rubber, pork belly, meatballs, tofu, fungus, yuba, vermicelli, green vegetables, leeks, etc.
Leeks are used to enhance the flavor, and garlic sprouts are also used in winter to enhance the flavor. Erasers are not stationery used by school children, but are made of fried pork skin. The pork belly is also skinned, and one side of the skin is fried in oil. The essence of the whole steamed bun is the bowl of soup, the soup is white and strong, oily but not greasy, fragrant but not fishy.
The gourd head is delicious, but it is more troublesome to make. The processing of pig intestines should go through more than a dozen processes such as pinching, scraping, turning, turning back, bleaching, re-pinching, boiling, and drying, which require thorough decontamination, greasy and fishy. Boiling soup, the soup of gourd head soaked bun is made of pig intestine, pork belly, pig fat intestine, pig bone and chicken breast, chicken can remove the bad taste of pig intestine and increase the umami of chicken. The steamed bun soaked in the gourd head should be white steamed without any seasoning, and the white bun is easier to absorb the umami of the soup and will not take away the fragrance of the gourd head. High-quality white steamed flour is added with water and formed into a dough to be baked into a tiger's back chrysanthemum heart of the tuotuo bun, and then broken into a chopstick-sized bun by hand, now some shops selling gourd heads use a machine to break the bun, but the size of the hand-broken bun is uneven, and the bun is easier to absorb the freshness of the soup.
In addition to the regular gourd head boiled buns, there are also three fresh boiled buns, small fried pork boiled buns and lotus vegetable stir-fried meat boiled buns. The flavors are different, but in the final analysis, they all focus on the word "fresh".
Mr. Jia Pingwa, known as a ghost talent, has a description of the gourd head boiled bun in "Waste Capital": Niu Yueqing said: "How to eat the gourd head on a hot day, it stinks, so I won't go." Zhuang Zhidie said: "You don't understand this, the gourd head is the first bowl of Xijing snacks, although it is a pork intestine steamed bun, the seasoning is different and the taste is different." You have eaten the 'Fu Lai Shun' at the East Gate before, of course it is bad, the authentic 'Spring Hair Growth' of the South Courtyard Gate, the legend has it that the ancestor got Sun Simiao's real medicine prescription, and it tastes unusual. If you are constipated for many years, it is a disease in your intestines, and you should eat what you should eat. ”
Some people say that the gourd head smells stinky, and I think that it is made of the pig's large intestine, and I can't get over that hurdle in my heart. But stinky tofu smells disgusting, but it prefers to be sought after by many people. Food is not only bitter, spicy, sweet and sour, but also some peculiar smells are sought after by many people. I ate a lot of gourd heads, and I learned a dialect of the Guanzhong people: A bowl of gourd heads, I pricked it!It's pricked, it means very good!(Written by Liu Xu).
Gourd head soaked bun