Winter is here, and with the north wind blowing, the weather is suddenly much colder. Many city streets and alleys, overnight, the streets and alleys unknowingly more than a few baked sweet potato stalls. Vendors standing in front of the oven, not much to shout, and can not afford to spend money to ask celebrity endorsements, because the roasted sweet potatoes rich aroma is good advertising, attracting many pedestrians to stop.
Sweet potato, also known as red potato, red potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato. From the variety, it can be roughly divided into sweet potatoes with red flesh and sweet potatoes with white flesh. In China, there are many ways to eat sweet potatoes, but baking sweet potatoes is the most primitive and simple way to eat them. In my hometown, red-fleshed sweet potatoes are mostly used, and the roasted red flesh is particularly sweet. But there are also roasted white potatoes in Beijing, which taste like chestnuts.
People have a memory for food, and this memory almost always begins in childhood. I remember that Mr. Wang Zengqi once wrote an article about his childhood, when he was “injured from eating” and was over 60 years old. It’s a food that “has been missing for a long time and has feelings”. In fact, almost all of us have the memory of this food in Mr. Wang’s taste, such as the childhood baked sweet potatoes.
As far as baked sweet potatoes are concerned, the first impression many people have is not of the ovens on the streets of the city, but of the countryside in their childhood, when every family cooked with pots and pans, and the fuel was mainly straw from crops such as rice and wheat straw. After the rice was cooked, a few sweet potatoes were buried in the fire and simmered while the fire was still burning in the stove.
The black potatoes were black, and the black charred skin was peeled off to reveal the yellow flesh, which emitted a burst of fragrance, and when I bit into it, it was soft, crispy and sweet. The hands of the peeled sweet potatoes are covered with black charcoal ash, which will get on your face and nose if you are not careful.
All food is gourmet, and so is sweet potatoes. According to gourmets, there are three levels of food: the first is the need to eat, the second is the desire to eat, and the last is the need to comfort the soul. The gluttonous nature of our generation actually stems from a childhood when food was scarce and it was already the dream of many families to have enough to eat. However, it is in this immediate need for satiation that some food memories are planted that last a lifetime and are difficult to change.
In the memory of baked sweet potatoes, it seems that it is all about winter. And in the memory of winter, we can never miss the small merchants walking down the streets, pushing the oven carts transformed from gasoline barrels. The oven was covered with an iron lid, and a layer of baked sweet potatoes was placed on the top of the stove, one by one, soft and hot, with a fragrance wafting against the cold wind.
Perhaps baked sweet potatoes are so common that the tools for baking are so simple and consistent throughout the country. Roasted sweet potatoes seem simple, but it is not easy to master the fire. Pinch a little to ripen. This pinch should be light and moderate, pinch light, not easy to ripen, pinch heavy melon will be deformed, it is not easy to sell. There are two ways to sell baked potatoes, one is to sell by the pound, a few pieces, with a scale, the scale pole hit high, never lack of catty short two. There are also some places that sell it by the piece, and there are different sizes of pieces, and different prices for different pieces.
As with any cooking technique, baking sweet potatoes has its technicalities. Xu Xiacun, another writer during the Republic of China, wrote “Snacks in Beiping’s Alleyways” and summarized the characteristics of baked sweet potatoes as “fat, transparent and sweet”. Fat, is the selection of the round, thin-skinned, thick flesh of white potatoes baked; thorough, said baked white potatoes baking techniques, can not be heart and can not be burnt, baked dry; sweet, is sweet and not greasy, the more you eat the more fragrant, people love to put it down. Therefore, the secret of roasted sweet potato is “seven minutes roast and three minutes pinch”.
One person, one stove, one basket of sweet potatoes, this is the standard configuration of the “specialty store” of roasted sweet potatoes. In the past, baked sweet potato vendors had a hard time standing on the street early in the morning, facing the winter wind, and could not earn much money all day. During the Republic of China, a writer, Drunken Beggar Zhang, once wrote a limerick for a painting of baked white potatoes: “White potatoes simmered by fire after frost, and pushed by carts along the street; children’s food for the common people, a copper dollar for a few. The hot taste of sweet fragrance, white potatoes actually roasted yellow; profit seeking fly boastful scheme, only to know the hawker for the poor busy. Few sentences, visible let us know how hard and difficult it is to make a living roasting sweet potatoes.
Eating baked sweet potatoes is a very interesting thing. Just out of the oven sweet potatoes to hand, because it is too hot, sweet potatoes in the hands between the flip jumped up and down, but even so, still can not resist its temptation, while blowing, while eagerly peeling off the layer of sweet potatoes like weathered bark like skin, golden flesh will appear in front of undisguised, a burst of hot air up, in the air red blossoms a white and transparent flowers.
As the saying goes, you can’t eat hot tofu in a hurry. After swallowing, my mouth was still filled with warm air, and I felt my throat was sticky and sweet! Battered. Then the whole roasted sweet potato was swept away like a storm cloud, and some people didn’t even have the skin left.
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