Two keywords reveal the special features of Tengchong diet

For travelers, Tengchong is an ideal place to have fun. The existence of Gaoligong Mountain gives this small southwest city both the rainforest style of Banna and the spring city climate of Kunming. The ancient Dali Kingdom was like an oriental utopia.

But the rugged food style here was completely beyond my expectation. All the way from Kunming, Jianshui, and Mangshi, my taste buds have always been at a high point of pleasure. On the first day I arrived in Tengchong, my tongue felt the rough style of this small border town: roasting meat (water), copper ladles, earthen pots, without the fine seasoning of southeastern Yunnan, nor the rich colors of the Dai people. Tengchong’s food follows the traditional style. The heroic route of opening up Dahe is really a bit "out of place" in western Yunnan, where people live in seclusion.

I was inevitably disappointed at first, but after staying there for a week, I gradually understood the reasons behind this difference, and realized that the uniqueness of this small town is not just that it has the best hot springs in Yunnan. Tengchong’s diet is written on two key words.

Thin bean flour is an unsurprising breakfast choice in Tengchong. You don’t have to look for it, you can find it everywhere in the streets.

The first time I ate thin bean flour, I felt a little familiar. It reminded me of Beijing’s noodle tea. Even though it’s just a bowl of simple paste, you can already tell the quality of the ingredients from the first bite. Noodle tea is made from ground millet, while the main ingredient of thin soybean flour is peas. After grinding into powder, it is stir-fried and then boiled. When eating, you can add more than ten different kinds of sauce, vinegar, fermented bean curd juice, garlic juice, pepper oil, etc. seasoning.

I prefer simple seasoning, even adding a little salt and chopped green onion, so that the aroma of the beans can be tasted. Tengchong people also like to add shredded bait and soaked bait cubes to the thin soybean flour - I really can't eat these solid rice foods as soon as I open my eyes. The best combination is fried dough sticks, which can be cut into several sections and can be soaked or dipped. , worthy of being the universal choice.

A few months after returning from Yunnan, I went to Shandong and accidentally ate the local breakfast "Tianmo" (a salty porridge made with stick noodles) - if the noodle tea is considered to be thin, Fan's cousin, Tianmo can probably be called a cousin. The two foods, thousands of miles apart, were so similar that I was convinced there must be some kind of connection between them.

In fact, Tengchong is indeed a special area in Yunnan. If the province is divided by the Yuanjiang River, which flows from northwest to southeast, the northeastern part of Yuanjiang is an area inhabited by Han people, while the southwest part of Yuanjiang is an area inhabited by ethnic minorities - with the exception of Tengchong. In the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang regained all of Yunnan, and large-scale military immigration made Tengchong the Han inhabited area farthest from the Central Plains.

During the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty, the technology for making thin bean flour came here following the Han people from the Central Plains.

Similar foods are not alone. In addition to thin bean noodles, there is also a food called "brain" in Heshun Ancient Town in Tengchong. As a famous "hometown of overseas Chinese", the harmonious architecture, food and some traditional handicrafts all reflect the imprint of the Central Plains. "Brain", like thin bean noodles, is also a food culture product born from "border defense".

The people making the fuss this time are the people from Shanxi. Lao Taiyuan's "brain" is a nourishing soup made from mutton, yam, lotus root and rice wine. I don’t know if it’s because the slightly bitter taste is not pleasant, but under the reinterpretation of the immigrants, Heshun Brain turned into a sweet soup. Fried glutinous rice cakes are spread on the bottom of the bowl, with poached eggs in the middle layer, covered with shredded roast pork, shredded tofu and egg cakes, and finally poured with rice wine mixed with brown sugar. For people who have left their hometown, the taste they want to remember the most is still sweet.

Although these fusion foods have their own characteristics, they are still limited to Tengchong. To say that the food that has been most thoroughly influenced by Han culture and has traveled the farthest in Yunnan Province is none other than bait silk and bait cubes.

What Yunnan people call "bait" are different forms of rice food made from rice. It was first invented by people from Hujiawan in Tengchong, and the famous legend of "Great Rescue" began here.

The biggest difference between bait silk and rice noodles is the difference in taste caused by density. Rice noodles are ground into rice pulp and then "squeezed" by a machine. They have a smooth texture and high water content, so they won't make you hungry. However, the same volume of rice noodles is much firmer and chewier. Wang Zengqi summed it up: "If you are not very hungry, eat rice noodles; if you want to fill your stomach and resist hunger, eat bait cubes or bait silk." This shows how filling this thing is.

Historically, there have been several large-scale southward migrations from the Central Plains. People missed the noodles of their hometown but could not get wheat, so they invented rice noodles according to local conditions. As the most densely populated area of ??Han people in western Yunnan, Tengchong is obviously not satisfied with such a substitute, so people pound the steamed rice into lumps, imagine the rice cakes as dough, knead and roll them into pieces, and then cut them into pieces. Silk or strip. If Noodles sees this scene, he will definitely feel jealous: Isn't this the kind of treatment I could only enjoy before, but rice has actually usurped it?

After understanding the origins of bait shreds and bait cubes, and seeing the stir-fried "Dajiujia" with mixed vegetables, it is no wonder why it looks so much like the "fried noodles" in the north; The noodles are as solid and chewy as the noodles, which makes you understand the immigrants’ good intentions. The food style of a place is a living history written on the dining table.

In addition to the cultural connection with the Central Plains, another intuitive impression given by Tengchong food is that it is rough. This kind of roughness is not the fierceness or wildness of the diet of the surrounding ethnic minorities, but the informality of eating meat and drinking alcohol.

Near the hotel where we stayed, there was a barbecue restaurant with a big sign. This roasted pork is not the Cantonese roasted pork, but the traditional Tengchong native roasted pork. The shop displays smoked pig heads, pig ears, pig intestines, pig hearts, pork belly and other more than a dozen parts in different categories. It is a bit like the "box shops" in Beijing that used to sell marinated meat and other cooked food. Just choose a few items, and the store will pour the ready-made braised meat soup. The staple food is of course one of shredded bait, bait cubes or rice noodles. This is a big bowl full of pig offal, even braised is too delicate compared to it.

If you can’t get used to local barbecue meats, which are mainly made from water, there are also roasted pork roll noodles.

Roasted pork is deep-fried pork, either fat or lean, served cold with seasonings and rolled noodles. It is a common local snack. Because of the hot weather, many places in Yunnan like to eat cold roll noodles and cold rice noodles.

Compared with the cold roll noodles in Jianshui, the roasted pork roll noodles in Tengchong offer a lot of meat ingredients, such as shredded pork, pork skin, and eight or nine kinds of toppings. It is very lively. Bowl, but the taste is not as layered as expected. If the seasoning of southeastern Yunnan is like embroidery, every stitch is done with precision; then Tengchong's craftsmanship is like patching, which is slapped on blankly, leaving no room for aftertaste.

The broad lines of Tengchong’s food are inseparable from the history of the Tea Horse Road for more than a thousand years. As the hub of the Ancient Tea Horse Road, Tengchong has welcomed horse caravans since ancient times. Before the construction of the Burma Highway in 1937, horse caravans were the most important mode of transportation in the mountains of Yunnan. A team of people walked for several months to connect the inaccessible Yunnan-Guizhou and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

The greatest demand for food for horse drivers who live in the open is that it is easy to carry and store. Therefore, smoked roast meat and air-dried meat have become the first choice for protein supplements. When eating, take it out and chop it into large pieces and simmer it in a large pot. If I can buy fresh meat at the market, I will also change my taste. For horse drivers who consume a lot of physical energy every day, eating enough is the last word, and there is no way to be picky about taste.

If you want to deeply experience the food culture of the caravan, Tonglao Beef Hot Pot is the ultimate choice. Compared with this "side dish", the roasted pork rice noodles just now became a trivial matter.

The fine points of Chaoshan beef hot pot are far less realistic in the eyes of horse drivers than the copper-ladle beef that is eaten by the pound. Caravan packers traveling between Yunnan and Tibet carry copper ladles made by Bai craftsmen when they set out. When they arrive in Tibetan areas, the simple Tibetans bring their own slaughtered cattle, and they can have a hearty meal on the spot. Big meat in red soup.

The day we decided to eat copper gourd beef, we had just climbed down from the Volcano Park, our legs were shaking, like two exhausted horse drivers, looking forward to resurrecting with this big meal. .

The facts did not disappoint. Beef and offal are stewed in advance and then put into a soup base made with spices to add flavor. The copper ladle has very good thermal conductivity. With the help of charcoal fire, the original beef is very enjoyable. It is dipped in richer seasonings than Korean food, and a plate of mint is added to remove the greasiness. A pound of beef and beef offal were completely destroyed by us.

Nowadays, when people eat hot pot, they are paying more and more attention to refinement. In fact, roughness is its true nature. Chongqing hot pot is inseparable from dock culture, and mutton-shabu-shabu emerged during the Mongolian March. They are all delicacies created by the working class in every possible way. This hot pot beef meal in Tengchong can be regarded as a complete return to the essence of hot pot, and everyone who eats it will enjoy it to the fullest.

Frankly speaking, Tengchong is not the most delicious place in Yunnan, but it gave me the most special experience in Yunnan. In addition to feeling the taste of my hometown from a foreign country, I could also see a world.

Text/Xixia