The Sinosphere · Volume 26, The Hung Oven, the Clear Stock and a Banquet That Never Quite Existed
Hu La Tang
Henan (Xiao Yao Town)
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 2 hours 30
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Government tourism copy from Zhoukou and Xihua counties, the place itself promoting its own dish, presents two mutually inconsistent origin legends without picking one, a Song-dynasty court-chef story and a Ming-dynasty Daoist-priest story. A Chinese-language Wikipedia article on the dish itself calls its origin unverifiable, mostly folk legend, and this chapter agrees: what can actually be documented is the dish's role as a real, geographically specific Henan breakfast trade good from at least the Ming or Qing, when Xiao Yao Town grew as a river-trade town. Xiao Yao Town's own production technique was listed as national Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2021, which triggered a genuine, documented commercial dispute when the trademark holder began charging other vendors nationwide to use the name, a claim China's own intellectual property authority ruled had no legal standing.
As tradition built it
A representative version; hu la tang varies significantly by vendor and family.
Serves 6 to 8. About 2.5 hours.
Ingredients
- 1kg pork bone
- 4 litres water
- 300g wheat flour, plus water for washing out the gluten
- 100g each fresh ginger, spring onion
- 100g skin-on peanuts
- 500g sweet potato vermicelli
- 200g shredded kelp
- 150g fried beancurd skin
- 150g shredded egg sheet
- 250g spinach
- 15g black pepper
- 8g five-spice powder
- to taste salt, MSG or chicken bouillon, sesame oil, to taste
Method
- Simmer the pork bone in the water with the ginger and spring onion, hard boil for 20 minutes then drop to a medium simmer for around 2 hours.
- Meanwhile, knead a salted dough from the wheat flour and water, then wash it repeatedly under running water to separate the solid gluten from the starchy wash water; reserve both.
- Stir the reserved starchy wash water slowly into the boiling stock, thickening it to a glossy, spoon-coating consistency, a genuine starch-slurry technique, not a flour roux.
- Add the peanuts, vermicelli, kelp, beancurd skin, egg sheet and spinach.
- Season with black pepper, five-spice powder and the remaining spices, salt and seasoning over high heat, just before serving.
- Finish with a drizzle of sesame oil.
What a modern chef changes
A concentrated bone stock and a precision-washed gluten. Rung 4, applied to a starch-thickened soup rather than a clear one.
Rung 4
Method
- Simmer the bone stock over a longer, gentler cook, closer to the 5-hour lamb-bone version one named inheritor uses, rather than the shorter representative recipe above, for a deeper, more concentrated base.
- Wash the gluten in a high-power blender's pulse function with cold water, a faster, more thorough separation of gluten from starch than hand-washing, giving a cleaner starchy wash water for thickening.
- Grind the black pepper and five-spice fresh in a spice grinder immediately before the final seasoning step, since this soup's whole character rests on its spice bench and pre-ground spice loses aromatic intensity quickly.