I'm the Culinary God-Chapter 600 - 285: The Milk Yellow Mooncake that Fails as Soon as You Learn It, Won’t You Try Making It? [Subscribe Please]

Chapter 600: Chapter 285: The Milk Yellow Mooncake that Fails as Soon as You Learn It, Won’t You Try Making It? [Subscribe Please]

Steam Pot Chicken is a unique delicacy from the Southern Yunnan region.

Chicken and ingredients are placed in a steam pot without adding any water and steamed over a soup pot. The steam condenses to slowly bring out the flavors of the food.

This cooking method allows most of the chicken’s fresh taste and nutrients to be preserved.

However, if it’s not cooked properly, it can indeed have a gamey flavor.

After Lin Xu used points to exchange for the Superior method, he discovered that the preparation was quite particular.

For instance, one must use a young hen that has never laid eggs. It must also be free-range and have yellow fat in its belly. Only such a chicken makes delicious Steam Pot Chicken.

Additionally, when cooking, one must not blanch the chicken, add any stock, or even use seasonings.

Adding a small piece of ham while cooking suffices for seasoning.

Besides the ham that acts as a seasoning, common ingredients in Steam Pot Chicken include precious foods like Chicken Mushroom, morels, or matsutake. Medicinal materials like notoginseng and astragalus can also be added.

After it’s done, scooping a bowl of the hot soup and drinking it down is truly refreshing, opening up every pore in one’s body.

While basking in this refreshing sensation, dipping a couple of pieces of chicken in Yunnan-style dipping sauce—that feeling is simply indescribable.

Unfortunately, this authentic method is very time-consuming, especially for small household stoves with weak heat and low steam, making it difficult to have ample condensing water in the pot.

Restaurants, in order to save time and cost, mostly add chicken broth while steaming.

They even add some chicken-flavored additives to artificially enhance the taste of the dish.

Mrs. Huang also started thinking of making it herself because she felt that the Steam Pot Chicken from restaurants was getting worse and worse.

But due to her lack of culinary skills, after several unsuccessful attempts, Steam Pot Chicken became an even stronger obsession.

Now, hearing that Lin Xu could make it and guarantee it wouldn’t have a gamey taste, she quickly said,

"Then, let’s have Old Huang bring the pot tomorrow. We’ll give you all the pots. And morels, Chicken Mushroom, matsutake, cordyceps, notoginseng... we have all these ingredients at home, just let me know what you need."

As the wife of a high-end food supplier, Mrs. Huang was quite particular and immediately listed a bunch of ingredients far more expensive than the chicken for Lin Xu to choose from.

As for what ingredients to use...

Lin Xu glanced at Shen Baobao, his mother-in-law, and the small dieting squad, and said with a smile,

"Just take some morels and notoginseng."

As the saying goes, "Ginseng nourishes qi, notoginseng nourishes blood." Since there were many women around, he chose notoginseng to give everyone a taste of something fresh while exploring medicinal cuisine on the side.

Mrs. Huang heard this and said,

"Old Huang will bring some over with the vegetables tomorrow morning."

How generous!

Lin Xu felt that Mrs. Huang was much better than the stingy Old Huang. He said with a smile,

"Thanks a lot, sister-in-law, but I probably won’t have time to make it before the Mid-Autumn Festival. I need to rush to make some mooncakes these next few days."

The mooncakes hadn’t started selling yet, but one to two hundred sets had been pre-ordered already.

Although the Shen Group, where his father-in-law worked, didn’t pre-order Lin Ji’s mooncakes, they gave every employee a membership card for Lin Ji’s Food with a thousand yuan deposited in it.

They wanted the employees to bring their families to Lin Ji’s Food for meals during the holiday.

This intention was good, but his father-in-law didn’t consider that with so many people from his company coming to eat all at once, even the banquet hall, which was being expanded, would likely not be enough.

「Back in the kitchen.」

He continued making the molten filling.

This had to be prepared tonight and frozen. After freezing overnight, it could be used without melting too easily.

The ingredients needed for the molten filling weren’t too many. Besides the sieved salted egg yolks, the rest were condensed milk, butter, milk powder, and white chocolate.

There are several formulas for this kind of filling.

For example, gelatin sheets can be used instead of white chocolate.

Or cream and white sugar can be used instead of condensed milk.

You can also cut the condensed milk amount by half and replace it with coconut milk, which makes the molten center even more flavorful when eaten.

Regardless of the substitutions, the calorie content of the molten filling is off the charts.

Lin Xu added condensed milk, butter, white chocolate, and a third of the sieved salted egg yolks into a milk pan to simmer over low heat, stirring evenly with a spoon.

Near the end, some milk powder was added to the pan.

The milk powder not only increased the milky flavor but also made the molten center a bit thicker, so it wouldn’t burst open at a bite.

After mixing the milk powder evenly, he poured it out to cool.

While waiting, he took out the silicone molds he had ordered online, cleaned them, and arranged them neatly on the workbench.

"This stuff is really troublesome. Can’t you just knead it by hand?"

Zhuang Yizhou, looking at the workbench full of silicone molds, thought that the preparation for this mooncake filling was too cumbersome.

If it were a traditional double yolk lotus seed filling or the common Northern-style mixed nuts filling, it would probably be much simpler. Even Suzhou-style thousand-layered puff pastry mooncakes have a simpler process than the Milk Yellow Mooncake.

Lin Xu said,

"It’s troublesome, but we just set a higher price for it. Besides, when mass-producing, it’s not as complicated as you’d imagine."

This mooncake might appear to have many steps and a complex process. However, by following each step, it wasn’t as difficult as imagined and could even be made during work breaks without taking up large blocks of time.

When it had cooled sufficiently, he poured the cooked filling into a piping bag and injected it into each mold.

The molds were little spheres, 2.2 centimeters in diameter, which translates to a weight of 5 grams—just the right amount for one mooncake.

The weight of a Milk Yellow Mooncake is quite strict: 5 grams for the molten center, 25 grams for the milk yellow filling, and 25 grams for the crust, resulting in a total weight of 55 grams, which is just over one liang (a traditional Chinese unit of weight).