Chao Gan (Fried Liver) is a featured local snack in Beijing. Its soup is in bright red color, the liver and intestine are rather delicious, tasty but not greasy, the soup is thin but no clear separation of water.
Chao Gan is evolved from Ao Gan (stewed liver) and Chao Fei (stir-fried lung), folk foods in the Song Dynasty. Its main ingredients are pork liver and intestine, while the auxiliary ingredient is garlic, etc., which are thickened during cooking by starch. Initially, when eating Chaogan, people would sip along the ring of the bowl, and ate small dumplings at the same time. But now the procedure is not so rigid and complicated.
During Tongzhi reign in Qing dynasty, Huixianju restaurant in Xianyukou Alley of Qianmen invented a new recipe to cook Chaogan without starch thickening. Now, many people would think Huixianju is the inventor for Chaogan.
In typical recipe of Chaogan, pork intestine is the main ingredient, while pork liver only accounts for one-third. The process of making Chaogan is: Soak up pork intestine in solution with soda and salt, then wash it with vinegar-added clear water, and boil. When the water boils, continue stewing with soft fire, and make sure the pot lid is well covered so that the intestine would be well done. When the stewing finishes, cut the intestine into segments about half an inch in length, which are popularly called “thumbstall segments”. Next, wash up the fresh pork liver and cut it into strips like willow leaves.
The production of seasoning is to put anise into hot cooking oil, when it is well fried, put in garlic. After the garlic turns yellow, immediately put in some yellow soya paste. When the seasoning is ready, put it in a pot for later application. In addition, some soup made of top mushroom should also be stewed for future use. When all the ingredients and seasoning are ready, we can start to cook Chaogan. First, put the well boiled intestine into hot water, and then add garlic, paste, chopped onion, starch, chopped ginger, and mushroom soup. Next, put raw liver strips into the pot, thicken it with starch. Last, spread some smashed garlic, ready to serve.
When the Chaogan from Huixianju restaurant got popular, more and more small restaurants and snack bars added Chaogan into their food list. Accordingly, there appeared some slang expressions centering on Chaogan, such as “you guy is like Chaogan – short of heart and lungs” to scold a person, or “Zhu Bajie eats Chaogan – an internecine struggle” to satirize those people or actions fighting internally.
(Source: bjchinese.bjedu.cn)
