Traditional Mooncakes of Jinhua

The traditional mooncake of Jinhua is a big round cake steamed with rice flour, white and without filling. For those who are more sophisticated, they are painted on the big round cake with auspicious and favorable motifs. The dyes are natural, red is red currant, yellow is egg yolk or pumpkin juice, and green is vegetable juice. Over the years, some young people have improved the traditional mooncake in Jinhua, and developed a kind of "wu-style mooncake" with filling, low oil and sugar, which is in line with the taste of modern people. The wu-style mooncake reflects the characteristics of Jiangnan, where rice is the main food.

When I was young, I loved to eat white sugar mooncake. Previously, the white sugar mooncake is more delicious than now, why? Because there are crushed icing sugar grains in the filling, bite in the mouth, creaking, cool, sweet, especially good flavor. Moreover, the previous sugar moon cake filling, sugar, rice flour ratio and now also different, more sugar, less rice flour, so eat in the mouth feel more refreshing, not very sticky.

In the 1970s, mooncakes were produced by the Jinhua Confectionery Factory, with a limited supply. At that time, Jinhua already have a wide range of mooncakes, but the market to the Soviet-style mooncakes, also known as "crispy", there are not many varieties, that is, sugar, sesame, fruit filling, high-grade point is lotus seed paste. A tube of mooncakes cost 2.5 taels of food stamps, plus 40 or 50 cents. Every Mid-Autumn Festival, there is always a long line of people buying mooncakes in front of the store.

After the reform and opening up, mooncake production was liberalized. The mooncakes produced by Jinhua Drinking Service Company were still mainly handmade "crispy". Gradually, the assembly line production of Cantonese moon cakes began to take over the market. In the past, Cantonese mooncakes were not as delicious as the present ones, which are sweet and cloying, but they had a variety of flavors and were well packaged. The "crispy" are simple packaging, 10 a tube, wrapped in greaseproof paper on the good.

However, no matter what the popularity of things have a cycle, these years, the "rise of pastry" began to rise again. Now people call it "earth moon cake", probably because the packaging looks a little "earth" it, in fact, the moon cake is not earth and foreign points. In fact, there is no difference between earth and sea mooncakes. If you really want to say earth and sea, it's just that the production tools are different. There is no oven in the era of baking moon cakes with a kind of apparatus called "ao", it is a charcoal fire pot underneath, the middle of an iron plate, the top is also covered with a charcoal fire pot, up and down the two sides of the baking, it can be said to be a clay oven, when the hemp cake, peach cake, moon cakes, these need to be up and down the fire of baking pastries, all to use it.

Jinhua Drinking Service Company retired workers Wu Jinzhong told, Zhang Guoguo finishing