Chapter 1476 - 573: The Pinnacle of Northeast Desserts—Snowy Bean Paste! Making a Jade Carving for Dundun!

Chapter 1476: Chapter 573: The Pinnacle of Northeast Desserts—Snowy Bean Paste! Making a Jade Carving for Dundun!

Among vegetable oils, corn oil is a bit better.

But corn oil also has a slight browning effect, so the best choice is still lard.

Rendered lard is snow-white in color and won’t cause any browning at low oil temperatures.

Yuan Debiao put half a pot of lard into the wok, turned on the burner, and cranked up the heat.

Then he brought over the egg white batter and the Red Bean Paste coated in starch, ready to start frying.

This step is the most critical stage in making Snowy Bean Paste, and it’s also where many people end up failing.

Whipping the egg white is hard too, but as long as you invest enough time and effort, you can basically get it right. The low-temperature frying, however, without a certain amount of experience and guidance from an old master, will most likely end in failure.

This isn’t something you can brute-force with good strength and energy. From controlling the oil temperature when heating, to the way you coat it in batter, to the force you use when putting it into the wok and the way you pull out the chopsticks—all of it is very particular.

Good Snowy Bean Paste demands a snow-white color, a plump body, and a round shape.

But during frying, a single misstep can ruin any one of these three requirements, sometimes all three at once.

When the oil in the wok reached about forty percent of full heat, Yuan Debiao turned the flame down and began frying.

He took a slightly longer pair of chopsticks, picked up a ball of Red Bean Paste, dipped it into the egg white batter a few times, letting the pure white egg white batter coat the surface of the Red Bean Paste evenly.

While dipping, he also rotated it a few times in the bowl, so that the egg white on the surface of the Red Bean Paste turned into as perfect a sphere as possible.

Then he gently placed the sphere into the hot oil.

You can’t use force when placing it in; otherwise, the buoyancy on the surface of the oil will squeeze and deform the egg white.

You rest the sphere on the oil surface, then carefully release the chopsticks and slowly draw them back, letting the egg white keep its spherical shape.

Yuan Debiao said to Lin Xu:

"A lot of people do everything right up to this point, but when they pull the chopsticks out, they don’t handle it properly and end up dragging a pointy tip out of the finished sphere, which ruins the look."

Lin Xu felt that if he rushed in and tried it himself, he’d most likely do exactly that.

After all, egg white is light and airy, yet extremely delicate; it’s indeed very easy to pull a little peak out of it when you’re withdrawing the chopsticks.

He asked curiously:

"Is there any specific trick to this?"

"Of course there is. For example, use chopsticks with a smooth surface—the smoother they are, the easier they are to pull out. And when you pull, draw them back along their own direction to minimize the contact area."

For those who know what they’re doing, there’s no need to think about this step at all; however they do it, it feels very simple.

Lin Xu thought for a moment and decided he’d better just learn it with a Cooking Learning Card. If he relied only on practicing by himself, he might figure it out eventually, but it would take too much time.

And right now, time was what he lacked the most.

With his rich experience, Yuan Debiao quickly finished a whole wok full of white spheres.

He grabbed a ladle, scooped up the hot oil from the wok, and slowly poured it over the Snowy Bean Paste, letting the egg white on the surface of the paste heat evenly. As he worked, he said:

"I’ve seen some people online using a spoon: they first scoop a level spoonful of egg white batter, put the filling in the middle, then add some more egg white, letting the egg white in the spoon form a ball. Then they drop them into the oil one by one. That seems to work too."

This method is like making egg-skin dumplings, using the spoon to help shape the exterior.

The technique itself is fine, it’s just slow, and it looks very amateur. Under normal circumstances, chefs don’t really choose this method; only those influencer types with no culinary foundation and plenty of time on their hands play around with it.

Before long, when the egg white batter in the pot had already set, Yuan Debiao pushed and turned them a few times with the ladle. Feeling how light they were, he scooped them out with a slotted spoon.

The fried Snowy Bean Paste still kept its pure white color, looking like snowballs rolled by children on a heavy-snow day.

Yuan Debiao arranged these white spheres on a plate, took the powdered sugar, set a sieve over the Snowy Bean Paste, and sifted the sugar down through it.

Using this method to sprinkle the sugar makes it finer and more even, and it’s easier to create that fluffy, snowflake-like feel.

Once the sugar was dusted, Lin Xu also finished learning the Perfect Level Snowy Bean Paste.

Just like other restaurants in the Northeast, Lin Xu wouldn’t put this dessert on his regular menu. The reason is the same as in those other places: the efficiency is too low, and cost and profit don’t match.

But he could add it to banquet set menus. Since banquets are charged as a flat package, he could set the profit margin a bit higher and still let customers try something new.

As a restaurant owner, you can’t put low-profit dishes on the menu—that’s a hard rule.

But as a chef, you still have to promote traditional dishes when you should.

If nobody makes them, then when the next generation grows up, not to mention having seen them, they might not even have heard of Snowy Bean Paste. As for its flavor and texture, they could only rely on imagination.

"Try it, Brother Lin. See how it tastes, whether it suits your palate."

Once Yuan Debiao finished this batch, he immediately started frying the next pot.

Lin Xu smiled and took out his phone:

"This is my first time eating Snowy Bean Paste. I have to take a photo to commemorate it."

After taking the photo, he picked up one with his chopsticks and brought it to his lips for a bite.

The powdered sugar on the surface was fine and sweet. When he bit in, there was a thin white crisp shell on the outside, and beneath that shell was the smooth, delicate egg white.

It tasted somewhat like cream—dense and soft, fresh and light—with that sweet, rich aroma of Red Bean Paste after heating.

Before he’d ever tasted Snowy Bean Paste, he’d always felt this dessert was overpraised.

But only after actually eating it did he realize that this delicacy was even better than the praise, especially when he bit into the sweet filling inside: the sweet, sandy Red Bean Paste, paired with the cream-like egg white batter, plus that little crisp shell on the outside.