Mid Autumn Festival

(recipe below)

Learn-Teochew wishes everybody an enjoyable Mid Autumn Festival! (but not necessarily 身体健康 星光闪耀 😛)

My favourite part of the festival is eating mooncakes. As a child, I also liked the little dough pigs in toy baskets or cages, which I now realise is a good way for the bakeries to use leftover mooncake dough and avoid waste.

I recently learned that the typical mooncakes that we buy in shops, with the moulded patterns, sweet dark brown crusts, and lotus seed paste filling, are actually the Cantonese style of mooncake. According to recipes that I could find online, Teochew style mooncakes are simpler bean paste pastries with flaky crust. However, they are easier to make at home because you don’t need a mould, nor does the dough for the crust use lye water, unlike Cantonese mooncakes.

This was my first attempt at making Teochew style mooncakes. Below is my recipe, adapted from http://guaishushu1.com/teochew-traditional-moon-cake-潮汕朥饼）/. This website has recipes for many traditional pastries and is worth a look. The author also has a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/GuaishushusPage). The Teochew Store has also featured a slightly different recipe on its blog (https://www.theteochewstore.org/blogs/latest/65662083-recipe-to-make-your-own-teochew-style-mooncake).

Traditionally these were made with lard, hence the Teochew name la5bian2 朥饼 (lard cakes). Substitute with ghee (clarified butter), vegetable shortening, or oil for a vegetarian version (I used coconut oil).

Teochew vocabulary:

• Mid-Autumn Festival • Boih4-ghuêh8 Dong1ciu1 • 八月中秋
• Mooncake • ghuêh8bian2 • 月饼
• Moon (“Lady Moon”) • ghuêh8niê5 • 月娘
• Lantern • dêng1lang5 • 灯笼

Bean paste filling

• 1 cup beans (e.g. red beans, green beans)
• 1 cup sugar (or less, to taste)
• water
• salt
• lard/shortening/oil

1. Soak beans overnight in water, discard water.
2. Put beans in pot, cover with 1 inch water
3. Boil until soft (30 min to 1 h)
4. Drain off excess water, blend beans into a paste
5. Add sugar and a pinch of salt while stirring, until dissolved
6. Fry the bean paste in a pan with a few tsp of oil until the consistency is stiff
7. Cool and then store in the fridge until use.

Dough

Prepare two different doughs separately:

“Water dough”

• 100 g flour
• 50 g water
• 50 g lard/shortening/oil

“Oil dough”

• 100 g flour
• 65 g lard/shortening oil

1. Mix and knead each dough separately, adding some more tbsp of flour if necessary
2. Preheat oven to 180 deg C.
3. Shape a piece of the water dough into a ball. (The quantity above is enough for 6 medium sized cakes, but you can make them bigger or smaller as you wish.)
4. Roll it out into a small circle, and place a ball of oil dough in the middle
5. Wrap the water dough around the oil dough, pinch closed and form into a ball
6. Roll out the ball in one direction into an elongated oval shape
7. Roll up the flattened dough like a scroll, along the long axis.
8. Rotate the dough 90 degrees and roll it out in one direction again, should yield an elongated strip.
9. Roll up the flattened dough like a scroll again, and rotate 90 degrees.
10. Roll out the dough this time into a rough circle.
11. Add a ball of bean paste in the middle
12. Pinch closed and form a ball.
13. Place ball on baking paper and press down gently to flatten it somewhat.
14. Bake for 20-30 min, until the surface is lightly browned.

[Images: my Teochew mooncakes]

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Posted on 2020-09-24 00:00:00 +0000