Name: Mooncakes: What Are They and How Are They Made
Uploaded: 2020-10-24T00:20:39.000Z
Duration: 7 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The emblematic pastry of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival,

which marks the arrival of the full moon in early fall.

It was traditionally a time to celebrate the harvest.

But now it's more about congregating with family

and what are all the different varieties?

Legend says the mooncake dates back to 14th-century China,

when the Han Chinese fought against their Mongolian rulers

allegedly smuggling messages inside the cakes.

For simplicity's sake, we've broken them down into three types.

This is the most well-known type of mooncake.

It's prevalent in Guangdong Province and in Hong Kong,

and usually comes stuffed with lotus or red bean paste

Most mooncakes nowadays just have the bakery name

but this Hong Kong shop has been making a line of mooncakes

tied to recent demonstrations in the city.

The skin is actually quite complicated to make.

The dough is a wheat flour base bonded together

Golden syrup is made by cooking plain table sugar with acid.

is added to neutralize the syrup's acidity

and speed up the process of browning in the oven.

that can be easily shaped with various molds.

which hails from the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou,

is flaky and comes in a meat-filled savory form.

has been making it the traditional way for years

I learned how to make these a couple years ago.

except that it uses red bean paste instead of meat

a soft water crust and a flaky pastry crust.

This is flour, I've added a little bit of sugar in there.

It's combined with butter and water, and then kneaded together.

is to just get the flour off the edge of the bowl

After that, it's the flaky oil dough, which is just butter and flour.

So the reason why I'm using butter instead of lard

is because it's more accessible to the home cook.

So you can see it's coming together slowly.

It's kind of like a Play-Doh consistency.

Then I divide the two types of dough into nine pieces.

And layer them by wrapping them into each other,

rolling them out, and then folding them onto one another.

So the purpose of this is to create as many layers as possible,

so when you bite into it, you'll see a flaky crust.

Or else it's just a boring, old dough ball.

I then put in a red bean filling and smooth out the dough.

Next, I use an egg yolk wash to give it a shine

and top them all off with a pinch of black sesame seeds.

It's then baked for 20 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

And may I say, I think Hanley, our cameraman,

and three different ways to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.

we did this whole story on pineapple buns in Hong Kong.

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Mooncakes: What Are They and How Are They Made

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