Salted Egg Travel Agency/Wen Hengduan Mountains are majestically located in western China, covering N big snow mountains: Gongga Mountain, Siguniang Mountain, Meili Snow Mountain, Yading Three Gods Mountain... These snow mountains stand like gods, and all tourists are familiar with them and yearn for them.
The Gaoligong Mountain, located in the south-west of Hengduan Mountains, is quite different from his famous brothers' mountains: low latitude, high altitude, vertical landform, large drop, but it is very special: The world species diversity gene bank has the highest tropical rainforest in the world.
The biological resources here are so rich that it is hard to imagine. In the eyes of outsiders, the mysterious Gaoligong is everywhere in the eyes of mountain people We harvest from the mountains, just like we turn on the tap 。 Since ancient times, there has been no mass starvation here.
Flowers are the means of life that mountain people easily grab, and also the romantic feelings of ethnic minority compatriots. They use all kinds of methods, eat all kinds of flowers, and also use flowers as dyes.
Dyeing rice flowers comes from the simple name of mountain people. It certainly has a scientific name Honeysuckle flower 。 The Dai people use it to dye golden rice and make it into colorful rice to entertain guests or worship gods; Lisu people use it to boil water, which "startles" frightened children; Han people regard it as a traditional Chinese medicine, and think it has the function of nourishing the liver, clearing away heat, and clearing the eyes and the clouds.
The Dai people are the most romantic.
Because of the sweet smell of dyed rice flower, last year, we had a sudden idea to ferment it with coffee. The fragrance of dyed rice flowers from the mountains and the sweetness of nectar seep into the coffee beans, bringing us a great surprise. The beans are full of juice, Honey, flower and fruit fragrance Very obvious.
Because it is just a trial, the amount of preparation can only be called micro batch, but it is enough to give us confidence. This spring, we have been collecting a large number of fresh dyed rice flowers and intend to make more fermented coffee with dyed rice flowers. However, because the amount of flowers needed is too large and collection is difficult, the final finished products will not be too much.
On the New Year's Eve this year, fresh dyed rice flowers have not yet opened. I found them hanging upside down in the storage room of the villagers' home. I was excited to ask them to learn how to make golden rice from the Dai people.
Although I got dried flowers, they were fragrant, especially when I smelt them closely, they were still sweet. I wanted to wash away the floating dust with running water first, but I didn't expect that the water at the bottom of the pool would appear yellow once the flowers touched the water, which shows that there is plenty of pigment.
After washing, soak the rice flower in 60-70 ℃ hot water. The temperature is my own guess, thinking that the temperature is too low for the pigment to bubble out fully, and the temperature is too high for the flowers to bubble well? So 70 ℃ may be just right.
The gold appeared before the water was poured out
After 2 hours, you will get a pot of golden yellow water. At this time, you can pour all the glutinous rice into the water and soak it for more than 4 hours, so that each grain of rice is fully dyed, and then you can steam it in the pot.
The steamed rice is very amazing. The pot is full of golden yellow, and the rice is put out in the sun. The color is gorgeous, which is more reminiscent of the happy Dai friends who like all the golden lights.
The golden glutinous rice has the sweet smell of flowers, and the smell of empty mouth is especially obvious. Especially when you know that the smell comes from the mountains and the wild, the beautiful imagination will add more to the chewing in your mouth. When you chew, you will feel that the rice grains are more fragrant.
We squeezed the rice into small balls and ate it with sugar. Before we could take pictures, four or five children snatched it away.
Before steaming the rice, a small dish of rice was specially set aside to make Jiangnan snacks Spicy Meatballs for villagers. This is a snack that will appear on the table in Jiangnan on New Year's Day. "Cimao" is the name of the countryside. It doesn't sound elegant, but it also has an elegant name: Pearl Meatball.
After the meat is rolled into balls, roll it around in the rice. The rice wrapped around the meatball looks like a fried meat ball, from which the "prickles" come. Glutinous rice loosens the original solid meatball structure, and provides more aroma and taste levels.
The villagers and the workers in the manor ate happily and praised me for my ability. In fact, we later joked that compared with working, I'm afraid I can't reach one thousandth of the housewife who is "the most incapable" of working in the village.
Eating flowers is actually Romance from the rough growth of fields and mountains In detail, it is just to try to develop all the food that can be eaten and used around. However, it does not hinder the beautiful creation of life of the Gaoligong Mountain people with it, nor does it hinder the tenderness hidden in his roughness, and the delicacy hidden in his wildness.
Just like our dyed rice flower coffee, its production process is not romantic.
As a large number of fresh dyed rice flowers are required for preparation, and most of these flowers grow in the wild in the mountains and forests, so we can only drive motorcycles all over the mountains to find them. From 600 meters above sea level to 2000 meters above sea level, there are more rugged mountain roads in the Gaoligong Mountains that cannot be called roads.
In addition to local mountain people, we can't help this kind of collection work even if we want to: First, I don't have the ability to ride a motorcycle on the rugged mountain road as if walking on the ground, and second, I don't have the foot power to climb the mountain all day long, but there is a great risk of getting lost in the mountain.
Image source: the author's picture
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