The History Of Peking Duck
June 9, 2018
Top Stories
If you haven’t yet had the chance to try it, Peking duck is a highly iconic Beijing dish. It consists of very thin pieces of tender and roasted duck meat and crispy skin. It’s wrapped inside of a thin crepe, with cucumbers, spring onions, and a special hoisin sauce (sometimes with sweet bean sauce).
It has been found that roasted duck in China dates all the way to the Northern and Southern dynasties (420-589). It wasn’t until the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), however that the delicious dish was associated with the imperial court.
A royal dietary physician recorded it in a 1330 cookbook. The recipe had an elaborate preparation process, in which the duck was supposed to be roasted inside a sheep’s stomach.
The name actually comes from Beijing, as Peking is an older spelling of the city, however the dish actually came from Nanjing, the former capital of China.
The imperial court of the Ming dynasty moved to Beijing, and they brought over the roast duck with them. Peking duck spread to the Qing dynasty nobility and the dish became highly praised in the writings of famous poets and scholars.
Today, the legendary dish still comes with rather majestic connotations due to its very lengthy and detailed preparation. White-feathered are raised in a free-range environment for an entire 45 days. After this, they are force fed for 15-20 days. Once slaughtered, gutted, plucked, washed, and boiled, air is pumped under their skin so that it gets separated from the fat.
The duck is then hung to dry and coated with a thick layer of maltose syrup, making the skin super crispy. It is then roasted in either the traditional method with the oven closed, or with the hung oven method.
You may also like
Asia’s Exotic Fruits
The world is filled to the brim with weird, flamboyant fruit. In fact, there are so many fruits that most people probably won't even come close to trying half of them. The sheer amount of them is quite bewildering; how could mother nature even come up with these? Well, she did, and we decided to survey the most exotic fruits out there, starting with Asia, home of some of the most beloved, yet under-rated fruit on Earth.
Read More
Three Romantic Valentines Day Albums
Valentines Day is coming up, and what better way to materialize the romantic vibe in the air than to listen to some really romantic, sentimental, heartfelt music? This isn't only true for those of us lucky enough to celebrate this day of love with their significant others, but also for the ones like us who'll be riding this day out solo, lone-wolf style. So throw your tacky chocolate boxes out the window and make room for some feverish, wholehearted, tenderhearted, love-sick, and very much sick-
Read More
The Most Lucrative Leagues in the Sports Industry Outside the U.S.
People enjoy sports. That much is a given. It probably won't come as a surprise then when we say that the sports industry is huge. It may, however, come as a surprise to see just how big it really is: No matter how much we tell ourselves we know it, seeing the numbers in their raw form is sure to shock, even if just a bit. That's why we've compiled a brief list of some of the most profitable sports leagues outside of the U.S.
Read More
Unrivaled: Athletes Who Have No Equal
We all know about Michael Jordan and Muhammed Ali, two of the greatest athletes to ever do it in their respective sports, but who's the Michael Jordan of tennis? And what about the Muhammed Ali of soccer? Well, that's exactly what we're about to shine a light on in this article. These are the athletes that were at the top of the game in a game you might've never heard of.
Read More
The Greatest Chess Player to Never Live
AlphaZero is an artificial intelligence bot developed by British research company DeepMind Technologies acquired by google. Knowledge of AlphaZero was made public on the 5th of December, 2017, when DeepMind published an academic paper describing AlphaZero's chess debut: Within the short span of 24 hours of 'training', the bot managed to achieve a level of play unattainable to even the best human chess players. This crowning achievement of bots over humans wasn't new: Stockfish, elmo, and AlphaGo
Read More