The first thing I did was to find out

Chapter 206 Four Joys Dumplings
It was not yet 6 o'clock when Qin Huai and Ouyang returned home.

Qin Huai planned to first try the Four-Happiness Glutinous Rice Balls, which were simpler as the name suggested.

Qinhuai knows how to make Tangyuan.

He not only knows how to make glutinous rice balls, but also how to make Yuanxiao. Tangyuan is a must-eat snack for the Qin family on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. No matter how much they eat, they must eat a bowl of glutinous rice balls before dinner, usually with sesame filling.

Later, eating fruit dumplings became popular in Qiu County, and Qin Huai tried making them a few times. Perhaps because the recipe was wrong, the taste was not very ideal, so the Qin family followed the trend and ate them a few times before returning to sesame dumplings.

As for Yuanxiao, Qin Luo discovered while watching TV that the southern and northern glutinous rice balls are actually different. The southern ones are called tangyuan, and the northern ones are called yuanxiao. Tangyuan is wrapped, while yuanxiao is rolled, and yuanxiao is bigger. Qin Luo immediately didn't want to eat the snacks in the palace fighting drama, and only wanted to eat yuanxiao.

Qin Huai tried to make Yuanxiao several times according to the recipe in "Dim Sum Encyclopedia". Qin Luo found that there was not much difference between Yuanxiao and glutinous rice balls, and the surface of Yuanxiao was not as smooth and sticky as that of glutinous rice balls. The most important thing was that Yuanxiao was all sweet, unlike glutinous rice balls with meat fillings. After eating it a few times, Yuanxiao was put into the cold palace.

Over the years, there are many more dim sums that were banished to the cold palace by Qin Luo than the number of concubines that were banished to the cold palace by the emperor in TV dramas.

In Qin Huai's opinion, making glutinous rice balls is very simple.

This snack is basically not difficult to make. Even though the Four Happiness Glutinous Rice Balls is a complicated type of glutinous rice balls, requiring 4 kinds of fillings and 4 different shapes, the seasoning and fingering skills are not difficult.

Although the game system has been complaining for years that Qinhuai does not give shapes to the dim sum, many dim sum do not really need to be shaped.

There are four shapes of Four Joys Glutinous Rice Balls, which are also used to distinguish glutinous rice balls with different fillings to avoid mixing them up when cooking.

Qin Huai started studying the recipe as soon as he got home.

The recipe was very simple. Qin Huai took a quick look at it, memorized it, and started making the glutinous rice ball skin.

When making four-happiness dumplings, the skin is the most troublesome part.

You need to use special water-ground flour, also known as glutinous rice flour. If you want to make water-ground flour by hand, the steps are very complicated. You need to soak the glutinous rice overnight, grind it into pulp with water, and then hang it in a cloth bag overnight. Drain the water from the pulp, break the remaining wet glutinous rice flour in the bag and dry it. Only then can you make water-ground flour suitable for making glutinous rice balls.

This is the old way of doing things.

It’s different now. With the advancement of technology, you can buy water-ground flour directly in the supermarket. Any quality and grade you want are available.

Qin Huai found six bags of water-ground flour from the cabinet that had never been opened. He picked out the one that looked the best based on the packaging and ingredient list, poured out a small bowl, and stirred it into a dough with cold water.

When Qin Huai first moved in, the cabinets in the kitchen were empty and there was not even any rice in the house.

Since Qin Huai brought ingredients from Huang Ji home for the first time to make crab roe steamed buns, there were more ingredients at home.

There are all kinds of ingredients needed for various pastries, including various sugars, various flours, various yeasts...even the cleaning lady bought 6 rolling pins.

Qin Huai felt that the house was too small and the conditions did not allow it, otherwise Gong Liang would definitely ask the cleaning lady to order a super large steamer of the same model as Huang Ji and put it in the kitchen.

Qin Huai slowly pressed the dough into a thin pancake and put it into boiling water to cook.

Ouyang was standing outside the kitchen and watching. He was shocked to see Qin Huai put the dough directly into the pot. He thought that he had offended Qin Huai in the past two days, and Qin Huai was determined to take revenge on him and cook a pot of dough for him to fill his stomach.

Ouyang began to reflect on what he had done in the past two days.

Could it be that I drank four cups of hand-made lemon tea yesterday and didn't bring one for Qin Huai, so Qin Huai was unhappy?

Or maybe his secret meal at Guanhe Tower the day before yesterday was exposed, and Qin Huai, as Huang's chef, decided to teach him a lesson.

Or maybe Qin Huai discovered that he had secretly eaten three large bags of cheese sticks when he returned home this morning?
Ouyang looked at the dough rolling in the boiling water and swallowed nervously.

This is a dough made of glutinous rice flour. If you eat it too hard, you will feel full.

Can he apply to dip it in sugar later?

Is it too late to confess now?
"I didn't intend to go to Guanhelou for dinner the day before yesterday. I just heard that the food there is not bad." Ouyang said.

"The food at Guanhelou is good. The squirrel fish is the signature dish, and the water shield and tofu soup is also very famous." Qin Huai nodded.

Ouyang:?
That's not it?

Ouyang continued to confess: "I didn't eat all the cheese sticks in the refrigerator on purpose. I just couldn't help myself. They don't take up much space in my stomach, and I couldn't stop eating them one after another. You know me. I was so poor in the past two years that I couldn't even afford to eat a cheese stick. Sometimes Huihui had to force one into my mouth before I could eat it. Now there are so many cheese sticks in front of me, and I really can't resist their temptation."

Qin Huai stared at the pot without looking at Ouyang at all. Seeing that the dough had already floated up, he quickly added some water, turned to low heat, and cooked the dough thoroughly.

Qin Huai suffered a similar loss when he first started making glutinous rice balls. The dough was not cooked thoroughly and the whole pot of glutinous rice balls was ruined.

"You like cheese sticks, too. Why didn't you tell me earlier? Write a note and stick it on the refrigerator to tell the cleaning lady what flavor you want. She will buy new ones every day."

"Don't just eat the cheese sticks, eat some fruit too."

"Ah?" Ouyang was confused.

While Ouyang was confused, the dough in the pot had been cooked. Qin Huai took out the dough and soaked it in cold water without draining it. He spread the dough on the chopping board, mixed it with flour, added cooked lard, and began to knead the dough like dough.

At this point, Ouyang understood.

Oh, it turns out that Qin Huai was not asking him to eat boiled glutinous rice balls, he was really making snacks.

Ouyang finally felt relieved and continued to watch.

The steps for kneading dough are very similar to kneading dough, both of which involve kneading repeatedly until the dough is smooth and no longer sticky.

After kneading the dough, Qin Huai began to make glutinous rice balls.

The fillings were brought from Huang Ji in the afternoon.

The four fillings of the Four Joys Tangtuan are actually very simple, to put it simply, there are two salty fillings and two sweet fillings. The vegetable and meat and pure meat ones are salty fillings, and the red bean paste and sesame ones are sweet fillings.

Qin Huai also asked Huang Shengli in the afternoon and got a positive answer that the filling of four-happiness dumplings is the most common filling.

This dessert is a common snack made by every household in Longcheng. In the early years, there were small stalls selling it everywhere in the streets and alleys and in front of schools. For such a common dessert, the filling must be the most popular and common.

Qin Huai didn’t prepare much ingredients and only made 16 dumplings in total, 4 dumplings per serving, which is the amount for 4 servings.

The Four Happiness Glutinous Rice Balls are absolutely large glutinous rice balls, which are several times larger than ordinary small glutinous rice balls. In high-end and exquisite shops, they are sold in small bowls, with one glutinous rice ball in each bowl. Both the level and the price go up immediately.

Qin Huai's family didn't have that many bowls, so they found four large bowls and prepared to squeeze the four dumplings into one bowl, just to make do.

For Qin Huai, cooking glutinous rice balls is more difficult than making them.

Friends whose mothers are not good at cooking know that it is easy for mothers with poor cooking skills to break the glutinous rice balls.

When you put the glutinous rice balls in the pot, there will be a pot of glutinous rice balls in it. When you turn off the heat and open the lid, there will be a pot of sesame glutinous rice skin soup in the pot.

Qin Huai has practiced cooking for so long that he would never make such a low-level mistake as boiling the glutinous rice balls to pieces. However, if you want to cook the glutinous rice balls well, especially the large-sized ones like the Four Happiness Glutinous Rice Balls, you need a certain amount of skills.

To cook the glutinous rice balls, boil water and gently place them along the edge of the pot. Stir gently from time to time to prevent the glutinous rice balls from sticking to the bottom. When the water in the pot boils again, add more water in time to keep the water boiling but not boiling. When the glutinous rice balls float up, cover the pot and cook on low heat for two minutes. Then they are done.

The above is theoretical knowledge.

In actual operation, there is a lot of room for ups and downs.

For example, glutinous rice balls are made of glutinous rice. Theoretically, if the chef is skilled enough, the glutinous rice balls can look white and translucent like white porcelain, be so glutinous that they can be picked up to the bottom with chopsticks without breaking, do not stick to the teeth when eaten, and have full fillings without overflowing.

The above are all theoretical.

In general, Tangyuan is a snack that looks very homely, but has a very high upper limit and a very low lower limit.

This directly led to Qin Huai being a little nervous when cooking the dumplings.

How to say it, cooking the glutinous rice balls feels like cooking a soup.

The last time Qin Huai stared at a pot so nervously, paying close attention to the state of the water in the pot, was when he was making soup stock in the Yunzhong Canteen.

Finally, the dumplings were out of the pot.

There was no strong aroma, only the faint smell of cooked glutinous rice flour. Qin Huai served 4 bowls of glutinous rice balls, one for himself, one for Ouyang, one for Gong Liang, and one for Guo Mingzhu. The two bowls next to him were placed in the incubator first, and after Qin Huai and Ouyang finished eating and confirmed that there was no overturning, they would be sent over.

Yes, there is even an incubator in the kitchen.

The freshly cooked glutinous rice balls were hot, and Qin Huai didn't dare to take a bite even though he had blown the surface until it seemed less hot. Without Qin Luo standing by as a reference, Ouyang didn't dare to bite it rashly, and could only blow on the glutinous rice balls and sniff them.

Qin Huai didn't know what he could smell. There was no fragrance at all for glutinous rice balls. At most, it smelled a bit like cooked glutinous rice flour, which was not even a fresh fragrance.

"What kind of glutinous rice ball is this? It's so big and has a strange shape. When I saw you wrapping it just now, it seemed to have meat filling in it." Ouyang asked.

"Four Happiness Glutinous Rice Dumplings, a specialty snack of Longcheng. I have never eaten it before. I looked up the recipe online and tried to make it today."

"Remember to give me feedback after you finish eating."

"Don't worry, I've helped you taste so many things, don't you know me? I'm a professional taster!" Ouyang said, and took a bite.

"hiss--"

Ouyang almost spat out the glutinous rice dumpling in his mouth.

He picked one with sesame filling, and all the sweet fillings were hot.

Ouyang sucked in air with a hissing sound while stirring the glutinous rice balls frantically in his mouth with his tongue. He tilted his head back with his mouth open, like a fish washed ashore and dying of thirst. He struggled for a long time before swallowing the glutinous rice balls.

"Sweet." Ouyang commented.

Qin Huai:......

What on earth was he expecting?
Qin Huai had given up on any useful comments Ouyang could give him. He used a spoon to accurately scoop out the vegetable and meat-filled glutinous rice balls and took a small bite.

Very soft and not sticky.

With Qinhuai’s current dough kneading skills, very beautiful glutinous rice ball skins can be made.

Qin Huai took a look at the glutinous rice balls in the spoon.

Pretty.

The vegetable and meat filling is green. At first glance, you can only see finely chopped green shepherd's purse, with only scattered meat mincemeat. It tastes very much like shepherd's purse dumplings without much meat or purse added.

Wrapping the dumpling filling into the glutinous rice balls is not to say that it is not delicious, it is very fresh and the color of the filling is also beautiful, but it tastes a little weird.

Qin Huai was only 70% full after dinner, so he dared not eat the big dumplings quickly. He could only eat them slowly in small bites, savoring the flavor of the dumplings while thinking in his mind whether the shepherd's purse filling could be modified.

When he searched for recipes online, he found that the fillings for vegetable and meat fillings were not uniform. There were shepherd's purse fillings and shredded radish fillings. Both of these are very popular vegetable fillings. Qin Huai thought he could try the shredded radish filling tomorrow.

After eating the ones with vegetable and meat filling, Qin Huai started eating the ones with pure meat.

good to eat!

The glutinous rice balls are stuffed with full meat filling, without any extra ingredients. The meat filling is the main focus, and the meat filling is king.

This is the taste of the most common and delicious meat filling pastry
Qin Luo will definitely fall in love with the glutinous rice balls with this filling, simply because it has lots of meat.

After Qin Huai finished eating the glutinous rice balls stuffed with fresh meat, Ouyang was able to swallow the sesame stuffed ones and drink a few mouthfuls of the glutinous rice ball soup before he could speak:

"good to eat."

"It was just too hot. I almost got burned to death."

"Who told you to eat so fast? If you eat the one with red bean paste filling, it will be even hotter. Haven't you heard the famous joke? Eating a red bean paste bun will burn the back of your head."

After eating two glutinous rice balls with salty fillings, Qin Huai had an idea in his mind. Sweet-filled glutinous rice balls were his specialty, and the red bean paste and sesame fillings for the glutinous rice balls were cooked by Qin Huai himself some time ago, so there would be no failure, so he had to make do with it.

"You eat the rest first. I'll go deliver the dumplings to the next room." Qin Huai stood up and went to the kitchen to get the bowl.

Ouyang continued to laugh while eating the one with red bean paste filling.

Qin Huai carried two bowls of four-happiness dumplings and rang the doorbell next door.

"Come on, who's that?"

The person who opened the door was Gong Baozhu. Because the heating was on in the room, she was wearing thin clothes. The hem of her clothes, sleeves and even her pants were a little wrinkled, and she looked like she was working.

"Master Qin!" Gong Baozhu said in surprise. She took one look at the bowl Qin Huai was holding and exclaimed, "Four Happiness Dumplings! I haven't eaten this for a long time!"

Gong Baozhu hurriedly got slippers for Qin Huai and welcomed him in.

"Master Qin is here, Old Gong, stop looking for that crappy tea in your room, Master Qin is here to visit." Guo Mingzhu stood at the kitchen door and shouted, "Master Qin, do you want some juice? I just want to make some juice."

Gong Liang hurried out of the room and said to his daughter, "Baozhu, go look in the upper cabinet again. I clearly remember there is a jar of mountain mist."

Gong Baozhu's eyes were fixed on the Four Happiness Glutinous Rice Balls: "Dad, let's not look for it today. Maybe you left it at someone else's house and forgot to take it. Ask me to look for it tomorrow."

"The dumplings will get cold if you don't eat them now."

Only then did Gong Liang see the Four Happiness Dumplings.

Gong Liang was almost moved to tears.

He told Qin Huai at noon that he wanted to eat four-happiness dumplings, and Qin Huai made them in the evening!

I did it while working overtime!

He was so moved that he wanted to buy something for the house next door.

Zheng Da really doesn't know how to do things. He rents a two-bedroom apartment in Qinhuai alone and doesn't even know how to rent a bigger house.

If you rent a detached villa, it would be best to get one with a garden. Wouldn’t that allow you to buy more things?
"Mr. Gong, I happened to be free today, so I made the Four Happiness Glutinous Rice Balls after I came back. Please try it to see if it's authentic and if there are any problems. This is my first time and I don't have much experience."

"No problem, no problem, what can be wrong with such a good-looking glutinous rice dumpling." Gong Baozhu couldn't wait to go to the kitchen to get a spoon, scooped up a glutinous rice dumpling stuffed with shepherd's purse and put it into her mouth.

One mouthful.

Gong Baozhu showed a satisfied expression.

"Hmm~ I can eat Uncle Huang's meal at noon and Master Qin's four-happiness dumplings at night. It would be nice if I could eat like this every day."

Guo Mingzhu stood at the kitchen door, helplessly looking at her useless daughter, shaking her head and smiling: "That's all you can achieve, not even as good as your dad. Your dad's ultimate ideal when he was young was to eat crab roe steamed buns for a month and then eat double crab buns for a month. You are satisfied with just a bite of four-happiness dumplings."

"Mom, it's different, it's delicious!" Gong Baozhu said seriously, "The four-happiness dumplings made by Master Qin are super delicious!"

After saying that, Gong Baozhu swallowed the remaining half of the four-happiness dumpling in one bite, and then scooped the shepherd's purse dumpling from another bowl.

"Dad, you don't like shepherd's purse stuffing anyway, and mom doesn't like it either, so I'll eat it all for you!" Gong Baozhu said vaguely.

Qin Huai immediately grasped the point and looked at Gong Liang: "Mr. Gong, you don't eat shepherd's purse?"

Gong Liang nodded: "I ate a lot when I was a kid. Sometimes my family would eat dumplings like the northerners during the Chinese New Year. I wanted to cry when I saw shepherd's purse dumplings."

Qin Huai nodded: "That was my mistake. I forgot to ask if you have any dietary restrictions. Four Happiness Glutinous Rice Balls also have shredded radish filling. I'll make the shredded radish filling tomorrow."

"My dad doesn't like the ones with shredded radish filling either." Gong Baozhu answered quickly, "He likes the ones with fruit filling that few people make nowadays."

"Fruit filling?" Qin Huai thought about it and searched for relevant information in his mind. "It is made by mixing together a variety of nuts and dried fruits, as well as sweet fillings such as coconut flakes and sesame seeds. Is it usually used as the filling for mooncakes?"

Gong Baozhu was not sure and swallowed the glutinous rice dumpling in her mouth: "Maybe, I don't know how it is made specifically. Now it is basically impossible to buy glutinous rice dumplings with various fruit fillings. No one likes to eat them."

"That's because they don't know how to make it." Gong Liang said, "The glutinous rice balls with various fruit fillings made by Master Jing back then were the most delicious!"

(End of this chapter)