Chapter 296 The Bet Was Right

Considering that some things in the village are not convenient for more people to know for the time being, only two families were sent.

There was the woman begging with her child in her arms and another family from the same village, one surnamed Zhou and the other surnamed Song.

The woman's surname was Zhou. Her two brothers-in-law were eighteen or nineteen years old, and fifteen or sixteen years old respectively. They were said to be soy sauce makers, but in fact they were just apprentices in a soy sauce shop.

The two families were brought to Huanggou Village by Old Man Yang. In addition to farm tools such as hoes, seeds and food rations, the two families were given an ox cart and a plow.

After passing Heifeng Township and going further, I looked at the vast mountains and felt uneasy. Can the land here be reclaimed?

Entering the fork road from the official road, switching to the village road, and stepping on the clean, hard mortar road surface, the Zhou and Song families felt incredible.

I've never seen a road like this before! There were bamboo water pipes on the roadside, and two thirsty families came forward to drink water.

When I walked into the village, I saw a vermicelli factory, an oil press, and large areas of paddy fields, dry land, and ponds. I wondered if I had arrived in a paradise.

I have never seen such a village before, where the factory is jointly owned by the villagers and the income is shared jointly.

This includes honey raised in secluded places, as long as you participate in the work, you will get a share.

Most of the men were helping to build roads in Jinfeng Village, and the children were away studying. Every household had vacant rooms, so the two families stayed in the homes of villagers that night.

Today, the two families, young and old, went to cut bamboo and find a place to build a shack, and the men in the village all went to help.

In just half a day, several huts were built and they finally had a place to shelter from the wind and rain.

"Mr. Su!" The two young men from the Zhou family were a little restrained when they saw Su Ying.

A whole family, carrying the elderly and children, took a boat to Lingnan. Several people died, and they lived with other disaster victims in a small woods outside the city.

During the day, the men went to work at construction sites in exchange for a little food, while the women and children begged in the city, and the children were starving to death.

Fortunately, they met this girl, who gave them food. The next day, the government came to register and set up a porridge shop, so that the women and children no longer had to beg and the children no longer had to suffer from hunger.

They also invited a doctor to examine everyone's body and asked them to drink a large pot of medicine to relieve the miasma in Lingnan.

Now they have distributed farm tools and food rations and settled them in various villages and hamlets.

Although there was only a month or so to reclaim the wasteland, and the two families shared one plow, they were provided with sufficient farm tools and oxen.

We can actually use oxen to plow the land, which is unimaginable in my hometown. We have to rely entirely on manpower to plow the land.

The two brothers even became masters and taught everyone how to brew soy sauce.

As for land reclamation, in addition to the existing paddy fields and dry land, the surrounding open space can be opened up, and rotten soil is inexhaustible.

In the morning, the village chief asked all the children to be sent to school, and the village distributed pens, ink, paper and inkstones.

The Zhou and Song families were simply stunned! How could a poor person still go to school?

My ancestors had never touched a book for generations! I couldn't even imagine that here, children of age were required to go to school!

All this really feels like a dream. Thinking that soon my family will be like these villagers, with cows, fields, houses and money, what kind of life will that be?

It was a good bet to venture into Lingnan! The future is full of hope.

"How is it? Making soy sauce with bean cakes is different from your brewing method. Are you sure about it?" Su Ying asked.

"Let's try it first and make some changes to the process. The process is basically the same, but since the soybeans have been squeezed for oil, the amount of soy sauce produced will probably be less, and there may be a difference in taste and flavor." Zhou Wulang replied.

Zhou Wulang has been working in the soy sauce shop for five or six years and is very experienced, so he can be considered a half-master.

What they learned in the workshop was the process of steaming soybeans, fermenting, brewing, extracting oil, and drying them in the sun.

Soak the soybeans for half an hour, drain them, and steam them in steaming pan for two to three hours.

Mix the steamed soybeans with cooked flour while they are still hot, spread them on a bamboo fence, and place them on a wooden rack indoors to ferment for six days, turning them over and stirring them once every three days.

The room temperature must be warm. If it is not warm enough, you need to light a fire to heat it up.

When yellow-green mold appears on the surface of the beans, take them out and pour them into a jar. Add water to the beans at a ratio of 10:4 and stir.

After absorbing enough water, pour out the remaining water, put it into a bamboo basket and cover it with cloth.

Put it indoors and continue to ferment at the original room temperature. After four hours, you will feel heat when you insert your hand into the beans and smell the aroma of sauce, which means the fermentation has stopped.

The fermented soybeans are put into a tank, and the soybeans, salt and water are mixed in the ratio of 10:3:4.

Spread a layer of soybeans, sprinkle a layer of salt, pour a layer of water, and put them into the jar alternately, with the top layer being salt.

Cover with lid and seal tightly.

After four months of brewing, the vat is flushed with salt water (100% water: 17% salt) every five days, and the sauce that flows out from the oil outlet is soy sauce.

Syrup also needs to be added to the soy sauce, the ratio is 100 soy sauce: 12 syrup.

Put the soy sauce into a jar and expose it to the sun for 10 days in summer and 20 days in autumn and winter. Then the soy sauce is ready.

Bean cakes also go through these steps, but they must be crushed first, added with an appropriate amount of warm water and stirred evenly, and then steamed in a steamer. The subsequent processes are roughly the same.

According to modern soy sauce classification, soy sauce made from soybean cake is called defatted soy sauce.

Moreover, bean cakes can not only be used to make soy sauce, but also to make sauces.

"Mr. Su is very knowledgeable. We have been making soy sauce for years, but we didn't know that soybeans can be used to extract oil, and then the oil can be used to make soy sauce and sauces!" Zhou Wulang said excitedly after hearing this.

After only a day or two in the village, my understanding was refreshed many times.

I had vaguely heard about vermicelli made from fern roots, kudzu root and konjac when I was in Hebei Province. But when I woke up one night, the fern roots, kudzu root and konjac that had covered the mountains and fields were gone.

It is impossible to make vermicelli out of these things when you bring them home. After the powder is precipitated, you can mix them with wild vegetables and cook them into a paste to satisfy your hunger.

Now I know that it was made by the girl in front of me.

Even soybeans can produce more soybean oil than others.

According to the girl, this bean cake can not only be used to make soy sauce, but also other foods, such as the bean products made in Tong County next door.

How can there be such a smart person in the world who can come up with so many ways to eat it!

All the children from the village school came to learn how to extract soybean oil.

When the oil hoop was installed and the lever was used to squeeze out the oil, the village elders nodded continuously.

"Village chief, when Uncle Wang and the others are free, we have to make two wooden wedge oil presses!" Su Ying said to Old Man Yang.

The lever-type oil press currently in use is too crude, and its pressing force is not as strong as the impact force of the wooden wedge-type oil press.

When pressing soybean oil, a certain amount of oil must be retained to make soy sauce later, so there is no problem.

But later we have to squeeze tea oil fruit, radish seeds and rapeseed seeds. This method of oil extraction has a low oil yield and wastes raw materials.

"Yes, once the road to Jinfeng Village is repaired, it will be much easier for us. Then we can go into the mountains and pick two century-old trees!" Old man Yang nodded.

Building the road was not easy. The strong laborers from the two villages worked hard for eight or nine months. If life had not been getting better and better, if they had not had enough food to eat and enough fat in their stomachs, they really could not have endured it.

"Soybean oil is much more complicated to make than tea oil! If you don't get rid of this smell, it's really unpleasant!"

Pei Silang and several strong men led the squeezed oil to the oil storage pool for sedimentation.

It needs to be filtered later, and then salt is added to absorb water, and the filtered oil is steamed to remove the odor.

"Extracting oil from radish seeds and rapeseed seeds is similar to this. In the future, there will be more varieties of edible oil available to the public!" Su Ying said with a smile, "All that's missing is an iron pot!"

The oil mill was filled with the aroma of bean cakes, and the children were drooling with greed.

"Uncle Pei, soak two pieces of bean cakes and make soy milk tomorrow morning for everyone to drink!" Su Ying said generously.

The children from Jinfengzhai and the county government all ate at the vermicelli factory, soaked in soy cakes, and the whole village drank soy milk.