Traditional restaurants update mooncake fillings for young palates

With the Mid-Autumn Festival still two months away, Shanghai’s time-honored restaurants are fully prepared for the festival known as one of the most important moments in the year for family reunions by Chinese people.

It seems that most people’s impression of the traditional mooncake is that it is stuffed with pork, sweet-bean paste, lotus-seed paste, or wuren — a five-nut stuffing that includes peanuts and walnuts. This deters many as the pork may be a little bit greasy, and red bean paste may be too sweet.

Forget the old styles as this year’s new flavors will overturn outdated impressions.

Shanghai’s oldest Cantonese-style eatery Xing Hua Lou, which dates back to 1851, announced on Thursday that it had launched four new flavors, from salted egg yolk and dried meat floss to kumquat and Spanish ham for this year’s festival. The Mid-Autumn Festival falls on September 21 this year.

Salted egg yolk and dried meat floss is the best-known and most popular stuffing of qingtuan – a glutinous rice ball and traditional snack for the Qingming Festival, developed by Xing Hua Lou, and the restaurant made the bold approach of putting it into mooncakes for the first time.

“The inspiration drew from Qingtuan as the stuffing is quite popular among young consumers, however, it is not easy to copy the taste in mooncakes as their technique and moisture content requirement is totally different,” said Shen Quanhua, technical director of the Xing Hua Lou food plant.

“We hope to maintain the same flavor of the stuffing of qingtuan in mooncakes, which should be moist and soft while keep the dietary fiber of dried meat floss,” he explained. “We have made more than 100 tries for the recipe in nearly a year.”

An East-meets-West approach has been taken with the launch of the kumquat and Spanish ham stuffing.

“Usually, Cantonese-style mooncakes taste sweet, and we decided to launch two salty flavors this year,” Shen said.

Chefs tried various ingredients for the recipe and decided to add a Western ingredient as an innovation.

“The mooncake tastes mostly salty and a little sweet, and we used Western ingredients and sauce with a combination of the traditional mooncake techniques of China, thus presenting a unique product for the festival,” Shen added.

Another two new stuffings are lava sweetened bean paste, and shredded coconut stuffing with coconut bubbles.

The restaurant has also introduced Peking opera masks into the design of its packages in a guochao-style (China-chic) for the first time.