When my best friend in high school finally landed at the Los Angeles airport this afternoon, I could feel that we are finally growing up in these years. I can’t say that how much I want to get back to before, but the homesick just like a wave that pushes your heart to the destination called home again and again. The last thing we did before the graduation ceremony was the graduation trip I planned for the whole class with 33 students to travel to three big provinces in China. And one of them, called Chongqing, which is the “mater city” of Kung-Pal chicken. But today I want to write is the local culture and the diverse food in this city, and mostly is what I missed — Hot Pot.
We love to put the meat, vegetables, or any other food into a hot pot which contains a whole pot of spicy condiments and special spices. Especially in winter, sitting with a bunch of friends to talk from class to society, having a bite of the beef dip in sesame paste, there is no way to express the love and satisfaction feeling just like in divine. Even in summer, like this billing summer, sitting with all of the besties and having the beer in the AC room with hot pot, it is a new taste with a stronger taste.
The spices could be the spirit of the hot pot, and the different brands are famous for their own receipt. The first step of making the spices is putting the beef oil into the iron pot until all of them get into the water. Next, use the fresh chili pepper with the portion of 8:1 to the water and put them together in the water and stir all the time. The third, use the fermented bean sauce to a portion of 50:3 with the base spices, and add the old ginger, pickled pepper, and over 12 condiments like fennel, aniseed, etc to boil until all the oil and water vaporized. That is the whole steps of getting very basic spices. However, the steps in a “specialist restaurant” could be so different from the normal ones.
And the other crucial things in the hot pot should definitely be the fresh and first-serving materials for eating, like meats and vegetable. For example, the picture we had in Chongqing is the buffalo’s tripe, which is really rare thus tasted so great. And the vegetable should definitely go over all the meat thing in the spice flavor, or it will gonna be so spicy and greasy.
Except for the hot pot, Chongqing is famous for the noodle and also called “Dandan Mian” in Chinese. This noodle is not that spicy but with the special flavor that combines the local element. And when it comes to the U.S’s every restaurant, we couldn’t get the original one, but it still feels good when you have the gourmet in hometown.
With the experience in Chongqing, the food really could connect different people and make you have the commonplace. So that’s maybe the reason why the spicy food in over thousands of dishes in China, but the only two survived in the trend of American Chinese food that keeps the most home taste.
