Chapter 1402 - 549: Making Qiegao and Kebabs! A Wonderful Northwest-Inspired Night!

Chapter 1402: Chapter 549: Making Qiegao and Kebabs! A Wonderful Northwest-Inspired Night!

Cut cake, which should technically be called Maren Sugar, is a cake-like dessert that uses syrup to bind various dried fruit ingredients together.

This delicious snack from the Northwest frontier once became a tool for unscrupulous people to extort and overcharge customers in the mainland, leading to many protests and aversion from the public.

"Xu Bao, how do they scam people with cut cake?"

During the time cut cake was popular in the country, Shen Jiayue couldn’t afford it. By 2008, when Shen Guofu’s business started to take off, the presence of cut cake vendors in Beijing had significantly decreased.

This led to the big foodie beauty never being able to buy cut cake on the street.

When she heard that Chen Yan was scammed, she was quite curious about what it felt like to be tricked by food.

Lin Xu said:

"It’s simple. When people ask how much it’s sold for, those cut cake vendors usually say ten or twenty something. Many people hear this price and think it’s fine, so they ask for a piece to be cut. Only after it’s cut do they realize that the ten or twenty isn’t per jin, it’s per liang. Isn’t this being scammed?"

Using price confusion is just part of it. The key is the weight of the cut cake is very high, and even a small slice weighs at least two jin.

If it’s twenty yuan per liang, two jin is four hundred yuan.

Back then, when the average wage was only one to two thousand yuan, it was unaffordable for many, even today.

But not buying isn’t an option. If you don’t buy, they start threatening you aggressively, forcing you to buy.

This is why cut cake left such a bad impression on everyone.

Lin Xu knew about it because he encountered it when he was in middle school.

Unlike Shen Jiayue, Lin Xu never really suffered much as a child, always having snacks and never lacking anything, so he wasn’t particularly fond of desserts.

One time after school, he saw a vendor selling cut cake at the school gate. He originally wanted to try some, but a senior student beat him to it.

Then he witnessed the whole process of extortion by cut cake.

That senior student went from the joy of being the first, to the shock of hearing the price, followed by fear of being threatened, and finally the embarrassment of not being able to pay over four hundred yuan.

His emotional changes were evident, and his expressions were vividly rich.

Luckily, the incident happened at the school gate, where teachers and school leaders intervened, and with the police patrolling the area, the situation didn’t escalate further.

Since then, Lin Xu came to recognize this street snack as a "culinary bandit."

Costing hundreds or even thousands of yuan, it’s almost more profitable than highway robbery.

"Hmm... I didn’t expect those colorful cut cakes to have such a hidden story. No wonder so many netizens are still criticizing cut cake..."

Shen Jiayue didn’t expect her Xu Bao to have such an experience.

She took a bag of almonds from the box, opened it, and started munching while saying with a grin:

"If I encounter it now, I’ll definitely buy a little to try, or maybe I’ll just buy that entire tricycle..."

As soon as she finished speaking, Lin Xu couldn’t help but say:

"Oh no, having to spend hundreds of thousands just to eat some cut cake, that would be such a waste, Yan Jie will probably tease you about it forever."

"Hundreds of thousands?"

Shen Jiayue was frightened by that number.

She never thought that such a small piece of cut cake could sell for so much.

Lin Xu said:

"They set a high price, and cut cake is heavy, so a whole piece indeed costs that much money. I heard there are even pricier ones, one yuan per gram, if you buy the whole thing, they can directly buy a decent car."

Shen Jiayue immediately lost the desire to be a "big spender."

"Then I’ll honestly learn to make it myself... Xu Bao, do you think these Northwest people do it on purpose? Why is no one managing this?"

Lin Xu took out the white sugar, maltose, and honey, laughing and said:

"It’s not just the cut cake vendors, early on Tianjin twists were the same. Ask the price and it’s two or three dozen, but if you want to buy them, it least costs several hundreds, and those selling Tianjin twists have no connection to Tianjin, they’re a group of northern Anhui people."

Upon hearing this, Shen Jiayue remembered:

"I know this, I once bought it with grandma, just a little bit cost a lot, and the taste was just so-so. I always wondered how those twists are thicker than my legs, I’d love to know how they make them."

"It’s just like cut cake, glued together with sugar. First, they fry small twists, coat them with sugar, then bind them together into cylindrical big twists. If you want to eat, we can make them later."

These snacks aren’t very difficult, Lin Xu’s current cooking skills can easily tackle them.

While chatting, he began to arrange the ingredients Shen Jiayue brought from the restaurant.

Almonds, pecans, pistachios, walnuts, peanuts, sunflower seeds, white sesame, black sesame, raisins, hazelnuts, cashews, pine nuts, dried figs, pitted date paste, pitted dried apricots...

Basically, all the dried fruits and nuts in the house were brought over by this girl.

These nuts are all roasted, no extra processing needed. Lin Xu inspected them and started to set up the stainless steel pot for making desserts and began to melt sugar.

In the traditional method of making cut cake, grape juice is needed to melt the sugar.

This syrup combined with various dried fruits results in Maren Sugar, which Northwest people can’t do without during festivals.

But it’s not grape season now, and although there are Shine Muscat grapes at home, with prices over a hundred yuan per jin, Lin Xu was really reluctant to use them for cut cake.

He added water to the pot, first melted the white sugar, then added maltose, and boiled it over high heat.

While boiling, he had to stir constantly, which not only speeds up sugar dissolving but also prevents the syrup from sticking to the bottom and burning.