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Master baker makes mooncakes to die for
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The mooncake season is upon us. The baked treat is a tradition for the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on October 1 this year, concurrent with the National Day.
Liu Jinjiu, master baker at the Minhang-based factory of Longhua Vegetarian Chanyue Food Co, oversees seasonal mooncake production.
“You know what a good mooncake is after you’ve tasted ours,” Liu said.
He has every reason to be proud. Thirty years as a senior baker have made him an expert on every detail of mooncakes.
“We guarantee the quality and the traditional way of making vegetarian mooncakes,” he said. “We work with commitment.”
The technique of how Longhua makes vegetarian food is drawn from the cooking traditions of Longhua Temple, the oldest temple in Shanghai. The skills can be traced back 1,000 years ago in records.
They embrace the concept of simple, natural and nourishing food.
Mooncake-making requires a series of steps — ingredient selection, proportioning, dough and stuffing, wrapping and shaping before final baking, quality checking and packaging.
An experienced baker knows how to achieve the perfect dough. The center of a dough pad has to be thicker than the rim to prevent leakage. The fruit or nut filling has to be mixed gently to achieve a smooth appearance.
No machinery could ever replace hand work, Liu said. Quality takes time.
Liu came to Shanghai from Anhui Province in 1989. With no high school diploma, he took a job as a baker’s apprentice at the Longhua Food plant without any clear career plan. With hard work and persistence, he mastered an array of baking skills in six months.
Liu still remembers well his first days at the factory.
“It was just before Qingming Festival, and we were busy making qingtuan, the green glutinous rice balls eaten during the holiday,” he said.
“There was no ideal method to preserve food back then,” he went on, “so qingtuan had to be made only the day before sale. We worked nonstop. In the end, my hands hurt.”
His career may have started by chance, but he stuck to it. In 2016, he was honored as a “China Baking Master.” Today, he has his own baking workshop in the factory. Vegetarian mooncakes were added to the list of Shanghai cultural heritage last year.
Liu said natural ingredients and hand work are two essentials for making a good mooncake. No matter how trivial a detail is, Liu never ignores it.
“Protein in the dough, for example, will be changed significantly if the water temperature is above 60 degrees Celsius, affecting the flexibility of the dough,” he said.
Liu and his team experimented to find the perfect temperature and keep it stable. It took them five years to conclude that dough consistency required a temperature 0.5 degrees higher in winter and 1.5 degrees lower in summer.
“Even a slight adjustment can affect the final taste,” Liu said. “The amount of water, the temperature and the proportion of ingredients are all regulated by a machine, but nothing can replace hands in making mooncakes.”
Originally, the factory turned out only four kinds of vegetarian mooncakes, mostly using nuts. But Liu has developed a few new flavors each year, and now there are over 30 varieties. The company’s sales have soared 10-fold since he went to work there.
Liu has scoured China to find regional ingredients such as chestnuts and longan, or dragon eye fruit, to add new flavors. This year, mushrooms from the southwestern province of Yunnan and pine nuts from Jilin in the northeast are being used.
Artificial sweeteners are used to cater to customers with diabetes.
Liu’s technical title is head of research and development and workshop departments at the factory. Apart from his work there, he promotes the cultural heritage of mooncakes and tries to recruit people to take the baking skill forward to the next generation.
From time to time, he takes apprentices and also visit schools and community centers to talk about mooncakes.
Above all, he loves his job and sees mooncakes as an art form that he will always be trying to improve.
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