vegan (almost) yutou su
I was being a goof and searching for something like “Halloween laminated pastry,” and landed on a stunning “Halloween spiral pastry stuffed with pumpkin and cheddar” from Mandy Lee aka Lady & Pups. But as Lee explains, the Halloween angle was a bit of an SEO thing.
Yutou, is taro, simple enough, thank god. But Su, is sort of an umbrella term for a huge varieties of pastries, and in this case, referring to the laminated pastry dough that is stuffed with mashed taro. . The word basically says “crumbly” and “flakey”. And boy, is it a word of its word. I wish I could ask you to think of croissants or pie crusts as a way of culturally bridging you to my side of the gap. But it resembles neither. Its uniqueness lies in its waffer-thin layers, fantastically delicate, almost like the wings of a bee or a single-ply tissue paper, tightly and intimately leaning on one another to form a beautifully spiralling crust that is flakey yet soft, gentle, feminine even. The mildly sweet, smooth-as-butter mashed taro inside only adds to this pastry’s, how do I say, motherly embrace.
But after saying all that, today, I’m not making Youtou Su. I knew that with its unfamiliarity, plus an elusive root vegetable as a main ingredient no less, my wish to bring it into your home kitchen and hopefully to stay would walk into wall of polite rejections. I knew I’ll need another way in, a gateway drug, perhaps a trojan horse wrapped in the costume of one of America’s most highly participated holiday. Yes, the Halloween.
A trick-or-treat! And so much better than the croissant gimmick-of-the-week that I was anticipating.
I didn't find much online for “yutou su” or “youtou su,” but eventually found this Wikipedia entry for taro pastry/芋頭酥/Yùtóusū. Searching for those, spiral mooncake or thousand layer mooncake, brought back many results. The Wikipedia entry links to Brooklyn’s Win Son Bakery’s vegan version using Tourlami. (Oil and shortening are also popular, along with the traditional lard.)
For my attempt, I used Lee’s recipe and substituted Spectrum shortening for the lard, used canned pumpkin puree, and left out the cheddar (Lee says that if you don't care about the orange interior, you could use chestnut, taro or lentil puree). They were delicious, and a fun introduction to Huaiyang-style pastry! Many thanks to Mandy Lee for the clear instructions and video.
More eating:
Nancy Lopez’s vegan champurrado with Dave Smoke-McCluskey’s red jacket masa and pecan whip based on
’s.’s tomato eggs with community garden eggs and cherry tomatoes. Still so many tomatoes!RG Enriquez-Diez’s vegan ginataang langka — after having
's marinated jackfruit skewers last week, we are on a jackfruit kick. :)Reading/viewing:
Cinema Fouad (1993) — from this youtube playlist of political Arab cinema.
Carolina Kimeu: “‘Not just a museum’: Kenya’s seed bank offers unexpected lifeline for farmers”
Farmers from the village of Obucuun in rural Busia county, on the border of Kenya and Uganda, say that before sourcing new sorghum varieties from the gene bank, growing the cereal had become challenging. Attacks by flocks of weaver birds, which can ravage entire cereal fields, increased in frequency after the wild grasses preferred by the birds became more scarce as a result of the climate crisis.
Ruth Akoropot, a 50-year-old farmer from the area, spends hours each day watching over her crops during peak hours of attack, after studying the birds’ behaviour patterns for years.
“If you don’t do that, your crop will be wiped out,” says Akoropot, who runs the women’s sorghum farmers association, which sells bales of the grain to Kenya’s national beer brewery. “We usually try to plant and harvest at the same time, so that the damage is spread across the farms and doesn’t devastate just one person’s yields.”
Helen Bradshaw’s “In the Hurricane-Ravaged South, Old-School Seed Saving Becomes More Important than Ever.”
“Maybe it’s a new pathogen, or an early frost, or a really wet spring. Whatever it is, those monoculture-style crops perform well in perfect conditions,” Smith says. “But more and more often, we’re not seeing perfect conditions. We’re seeing chaotic climate conditions. When you have climate chaos, you need to have very diverse genetics to stand up against that.”
Mark Arax’s “A Kingdom from Dust.”
Thank you to
for pointing me to this piece on Wonderful Co. from 2018!Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the “ribboned Dukes” and “belted Barons” of California agriculture. If he were on the scene today, he’d have to add “sashed Queens” to the list. Measuring the reach of the Resnicks, it’s tempting to lean on the hyperventilated language of the 1930s: Empire. Kingdom. Fiefdom. Feudal. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. But Paramount isn’t Paramount anymore. By the decree of Lynda, who once contemplated a bowl of those juicy little seedless mandarins and on the spot named them Cuties, this is now the land of Wonderful.
It is hard to keep up with the news on the Resnicks. While they continue to fight United Farm Workers, they murdered an almond worker in August, and a pistachio worker in September. They have given millions to the IDF—California’s pistachio monopoly depending on sanctions against Iran. In spite of impressive greenwashing and virtuewashing by Wonderful and California Grown, these people sum up almost every problem that we have.
I've never heard of this kind of pastry or the technique behind it! It is beautiful though, I love the colour combo. Thanks for sharing!
Yessss! The coolest pastry technique, I wish I had learned about it sooner!! Your cakes are beautiful, I want to make these one day soon!