Mooncakes: What Are They and How Are They Made

This pastry, this, and this, they're all mooncakes. 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 eating trays and trays of mooncakes. But what exactly is a mooncake? Where did it come from? 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. The mooncake variations are endless. For simplicity's sake, we've broken them down into three types. Number one is the Cantonese mooncake. 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. Some have a salted duck egg yolk center. Most mooncakes nowadays just have the bakery name or the mooncake flavor printed on top. But this Hong Kong shop has been making a line of mooncakes with protest messages on them, tied to recent demonstrations in the city. The skin is actually quite complicated to make. The dough is a wheat flour base, bonded together with lye water and golden syrup. Golden syrup is made by cooking plain table sugar with acid. The fructose in the syrup is the yeast. Lye water, which is alkaline, is added to neutralize the syrup's acidity and speed up the process of browning in the oven. The result is a tan and moist dough that can easily be shaped with various molds. Number two, Suzhou-style mooncake, savory edition. Unlike Cantonese mooncakes, the Suzhou variety, which hails from the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, is flaky and comes in a meat-filled, savory form. And this restaurant in Shanghai has been making it the traditional way for years, with lard instead of butter. The most primitive method has one problem, you have to use a pot for half an hour. I make 4 pots a day, and drive up to 5,000 miles in 10 hours. If it's too big, I can't get it out. If you don't have any meat or biscuits, this is not a perfect Mid-Autumn Festival. Savory mooncakes are so popular that this other bakery across town practically has a cult following. following. They see a steady line of customers who are obsessed with their pastries. Some lining up as early as 3 a.m. Number three, Suzhou-style mooncake, sweet edition. I learned how to make these a couple years ago. The recipe is similar to the savory one, except that it uses red bean paste instead of meat and butter instead of lard. It's also easier for the home cook and here's how to make it. There are two types of crusts, a soft water crust and a flaky pastry crust. So we're gonna start off. This is flour. I've added a little bit of sugar in there. It's combined with butter and water and then kneaded together. So it's getting a little bit more smooth and what I'm trying to do right now is to just get all the flour off the edge of the bowl so the bowl's clean. That's how you know a dough is done. 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. I have no idea where to buy lard. So you can see it's coming together slowly. It's kind of like a play-doh consistency. It's very chalky. 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. Okay 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 boring old dough ball. This is what it's supposed to look like. It kind of has like a snail exterior. 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 is then baked for 20 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. That was pretty good. You can actually taste the flakes and the red bean inside adds this creamy consistency throughout. And to me I say I think Hanley, our cameraman, likes it very much as well. Isn't that right Hanley? So there you have it. Three different types of mooncakes, three different ways to make them, and three different ways to celebrate the mid-autumn festival. Happy eating! If you're into baked goods, we did this whole story on pineapple buns in Hong Kong. Click this link for more and as always don't forget to subscribe to Goldthread2.