I moved to Sydney when I was ten years old and I have spent every Moon Festival ever since outside China. It has been so long since my family has celebrated this festival in China that I have forgotten all the traditions. I know we are supposed to go outside and admire the full moon, on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. Of course all good festivals have a food component too and we eat mooncakes on this day.
When I was growing up, mooncakes were a real delicacy. I grew up in Communist China in the 80s and early 90s, just at the beginning of China's economic revolution. While we still learned strong Communist dogmas at school, the reality was that the economy was opening up fast. Ration coupons had been in use for decades, but they were finally scrapped in the 80s. Still, the average Chinese family was poor. I remember eating chicken for the first time when I was seven and thinking that it was some sort of food from heaven. Most of the meat we ate was pork, in extremely small portions. My father says that in the old days, each person was allowed 50g pork per week. What could one cook with 50g of pork? He says that the family would usually pool their meat ration together and eat one or two meals containing meat, and eat mostly vegetables and rice the rest of the time. It is crazy sometimes when I think about the Chinese food depicted in the west, these were foods that I had never even heard of when I moved to the West!
One of my strongest memories from my childhood was when I was six or so and my grandmother asked me to go get some vinegar from the shop. We used to have glass bottles for all the main condiments (oil, soy sauce, vinegar etc) and we would get a refill once we had run out. The shop was about 100m up the road, a tiny hole in the wall all-purpose grocery store with a grumpy man behind a single counter. I took the glass bottle there and the man refilled it, just like any other time I would have gone to the shop. On the way home, I tripped over an uneven part of the pavement and fell over. I grazed my knees badly, but worst of all, the vinegar bottle went flying and shattered all over the pavement. I tried to pick up the glass shards somehow to save some vinegar, anything at all. The sharp fragments of glass must have cut my hands too, but I don't remember that part. I just remember the frank desolation of my terrified six year old self, feeling too scared to go home without the vinegar. It was the first time in my life that I realised emotional pain could outweigh any form of physical suffering.
It's incredible to think of how life can transform so much with time and space. China has seen an incredible transformation in the decades since we left, and the standard of living has skyrocketed beyond imagination. I don't think any ordinary Chinese family would blink twice about buying a bottle of vinegar these days, but in the 80s it was a big deal.
Since I don't have many memories of the moon festival as a child, I asked my father last week what we used to do to celebrate. He says my grandmother preferred the sweet Cantonese style mooncakes stuffed with lotus paste and salted duck egg yolks, but the men in the family preferred the traditional Shanghai style mooncakes. Outside of Shanghai and the Eastern states of China (Jiangsu and Zhejiang), this style of savoury pork mooncake is hardly eaten. Apparently the queues to buy these from the most famous shops in Shanghai are massive every year.
So this year, I decided to try my hand at making these mooncakes. They were pretty fiddly, but a fun project to do with my dad. I'm looking forward to making them again with him at another moon festival, perhaps it could be even a new tradition for our family.
Shanghai Style Mooncakes
More instructional pics at this recipe (Unfortunately my hands were too oily to take more pics!)
This is an extremely short laminated crust which holds an incredible crunch and shatters into smithereens when you bite into it. The pork should be 2/3 lean, 1/3 fatty to achieve the perfect juicy inside. The recipe has three components - a water dough, an oil dough and the pork filling. The two doughs together form the lamination for the multi-layer effect.
For the water dough:
Plain flour 150g
Sugar 5g (optional)
Vegetable oil 60g (I used olive oil)
Mix briefly together
Add boiling water 75g (this activates the gluten)
Once cool enough to handle, turn onto floured surface and knead till smooth
For the oil dough
Plain flour 135g
Vegetable oil 65g
Mix together till a dough ball forms, turn onto floured surface and knead till smooth
Rest both dough balls for 30min, covered with cling wrap
For the filling
Pork mince 250g, preferably slightly fatty
~1 tbsp each of light soy and Shaoxing cooking wine
1 Spring onion, very finely shredded
Combine all together and mix with chopsticks, turning in one direction only (must be superstition but it works)
Keep turning the filling till it is well incorporated and well aerated, approx 5 minutes
Use wet hands to shape the filling into 15 balls and place these on a platter
To make the skins
Divide water dough into 15 portions (20g each), roll each portion into a ball
Divide oil dough into 15 portions (13g each), roll each portion into a ball
Flatten the water dough into a disc and place the oil dough ball in the middle, then enclose
Repeat till you have 15 balls of oil dough wrapped within water dough, rest covered with cling wrap 10min
Taking one ball at a time,
Use a rolling pin to gently roll out to oval shape, then roll into a scroll from the top down
Turn the scroll 90 degrees so it is vertically oriented, then roll out gently again
Roll the scroll from top down again, and stand the final scroll up
Repeat till you have 15 scrolls of laminated dough, rest for 10min
Final assembly
Preheat oven to 180 degrees (fan forced) and line a baking tray with baking paper
Taking one scroll at a time,
Flatten the scroll into a disc and roll out roughly into a round shaped skin, not too thin (just has to be large enough to enclose around the filling)
Enclose a pork filling ball within the skin and pinch to close, placing seam down on the baking tray
(Ensure there are no cracks over the surface or the juice will ooze out during baking)
Repeat till all the mooncakes are made and rest for 10 minutes
Brush with egg wash and scatter with sesame seeds
Bake at 180 degrees for 25 minutes till golden, turning the tray around half way through baking
For sure a special occasion treat, the dog was drooling while we ate too!
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