The fifteenth day of the first lunar month is the traditional Lantern Festival of the Chinese nation. Eating Lantern Festival, enjoying lanterns, solve riddles on the lanterns, lion dancing, walking on stilts, boating and dancing Yangko are a series of traditional folk activities during the Lantern Festival. On the fifteenth day of the first month, Lantern Festival is celebrated. From New Year’s Eve to the sixteenth day of the first month, a series of celebrations continued, pushing one climax after another. Streets and alleys are decorated with lanterns and colored lanterns, and eating Yuanxiao has become a custom that has been around for generations. Today, I will introduce another traditional food in Xinzhou ancient city-handmade Lantern Festival.

There is a gourmet shop specializing in making Yuanxiao at the mouth of the North-South Street in the west of the North Gate of Xinzhou Ancient City, opposite to Yishan Ci. The operator is Zhang Xiu, an employee of the former Xinzhou Food Factory (pastry factory). He has been working in a food factory (pastry factory) since he took part in the work. Later, his unit was restructured and he also contracted a food workshop for 78 years. He has been making traditional food Yuanxiao. After leaving the food industry for a few years, there was no self-produced Yuanxiao for sale in Xinzhou market. The platform of the ancient city allows the missing food to reappear, the self-produced Lantern Festival culture in Xinzhou to re-enter the market, and also allows citizens and tourists to taste the self-produced Lantern Festival in Xinzhou, which has been passed down for more than 100 years.

The making process of Yuanxiao is more complicated. In the south, people make glutinous rice balls, which are made by mixing glutinous rice flour with water and then wrapping the stuffing. The Lantern Festival made in the ancient city is made by frying black sesame seeds and crushing them, adding sesame oil, sugar, rose sauce or osmanthus sauce, mashing them into mud, freezing them, cutting cubes about 2 cm, soaking the cubes in cold water for three minutes, and shaking them in a laundry basket covered with dry glutinous rice flour for several times, so that more and more glutinous rice flour is stuck on the stuffing until the skin is uniform and the size is moderate. Their best ingredient, glutinous rice flour, comes from the super-grade water mill glutinous rice flour in Huaiyuan, Anhui Province. Before making Yuanxiao, it needs to be crushed and finely processed by the machine again. Yuanxiao has no additives from the inside out, and it is made by hand. The stuffing of Yuanxiao is thin, fresh, fragrant and sticky, and the skin is strong and chewy. It is a unique food in Xinzhou market. At present, Yuanxiao has two flavors: black sesame and osmanthus.

Handmade Lantern Festival Shop is located opposite Yishan Temple in Nanbei Street, Xinzhou Ancient City.

Black sesame and longan stuffing for making Yuanxiao.

Hanging slurry with supercooled water

Keep shaking in the laundry basket

Yuanxiao cooked in a pot

Cooked yuanxiao

enjoy the food

Yuanxiao can be cooked and eaten. After the water is boiled, it can be boiled twice and floated for three minutes. Can also be fried to eat, crisp appearance, sweet waxy inside. If you want to buy it back to eat, 13 yuan is a kilo. After eating it, several Taiyuan tourists were full of praise and wanted to buy five catties to take home for their families. Eating Yuanxiao means reunion, which symbolizes that the whole family is round and round, harmonious and happy. When the Lantern Festival comes, do you buy it and have a taste?

Wrap the cooked Yuanxiao in eggs and bread flour.

Fried golden yellow

Delicious fried yuanxiao

The flow of people can’t wait

There is an endless stream of people buying Yuanxiao.

Zhang Xiu, the operator of Yuanxiao Food Shop.

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