Saturday, September 14, 2013

Mooncake Golden Syrup -- The first step of making Cantonese Mooncake



The Mid-Autumn festival (中秋节)is approaching again. It is time to make the famous mooncake!

A group of us in NJ get together around this time of the year every year to make mooncake together, some of us will prepared the fillings and some of us made the skin dough, we made so many different kind of mooncakes, ranging from Shanghainese meat/salted mooncake to the sweet treat like Cantonese mooncake.

The debate of which should be official -- the salted version or the sweet version is always one of the heated debates during our get together, the debate will continues to the next few weeks when we meet again to eat our mooncakes and celebrate Mid-Autumn festival together with a lot of yummy pot luck dishes. We can never remember who won the debate,but the memories of celebrations, good time, good foods and food friends are always in our mind.

This year I decided to make a batch of golden syrup, even though I could not make it to the mooncake making get together due to personal reason. 

The Chinese Forum - Wenxuecity that I was honored to be appointed as a moderator (版主) is currently running a Mid-Autumn Festival activity. I figured if I can't write a post about mooncake, maybe I can submit this Golden Syrup as part of the show/Activity.

Ingredients :
400 gm of Sugar
200 ml of water
50  ml of lemon/lime juice (sieved)


1. Measure out all ingredients and place sugar and water in a glass/stainless steel/ceramic pot. (DO NOT use cast iron or aluminium pot, the acid from lime/lemon could cause chemical reaction.)

2. Heat up the syrup at medium, when it starts boiling, add lime/lemon juice, turn the heat down to medium low and continue cooking. (DO NOT Stir the mixture, you can swirl the pot a little if you wish but never stir it with spatula or anything of that sort).

3. You can use a wet brush to brush down the edge of syrup to prevent crystallization, brush only the edge, do not stir the syrup.

4. Continue boiling until the mixture thicken and become golden in color. (Color and texture resemble honey).

5. Cool down and store the syrup in a glass container. The syrup can be stored for as long as 1 year, it taste better as it aged actually.





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