Gaocun Mung Bean Starch Sheets 高村粉皮

A village starch craft

The Henan county-economy report describes Gaocun as a village where nearly half the households process mung-bean starch into fenpi. Starch sheets of this kind are made by setting a thin layer of starch and water and then drying or cooling it, and the village version is known locally for sheets that hold together.

The report's own focus is the shift from household selling to organised production. A cooperative was set up to unify raw-material supply, product certification, packaging, trademark and sales channels under what the report calls a five-in-one service.

Clear colour, chewy bite

Henan County Economy Network (Henan Broadcasting System) names the two qualities locals judge the sheets by: a colour that is bright and clear rather than cloudy, and a bite that is chewy rather than soft.

Mung-bean starch is what gives fenpi its translucent look and its springy texture. That is also why it works as a cold dish on its own and as an ingredient that keeps its shape in a cooked dish.

One village, one product

Gaocun sits about ten kilometres from the Changyuan county seat and has roughly 400 households, around half of which make fenpi according to Henan County Economy Network (Henan Broadcasting System). Before the cooperative, sheets were sold loose, without packaging, brand or sales channel, and reached only the villages nearby.

Henan County Economy Network (Henan Broadcasting System) says that registering the Gaocun trademark turned the product around and sent it as far as Beijing and Tianjin, that more than 160 households joined the cooperative, and that fenpi alone now generates an annual output value in the tens of millions of yuan for the village.

Starch and water

The raw material named for the Gaocun sheets is mung bean; Henan County Economy Network (Henan Broadcasting System) calls them mung-bean fenpi, which is the specific version of the wider fenpi family.

Because fenpi is essentially starch and water, the questions worth asking are about the starch and about what the sheet is dressed or cooked with, not about fillings. There is nothing inside a sheet.

Buying the sheets

It is bought by weight as a dry or fresh sheet rather than ordered as a cooked dish, which is why packaging and labelling matter to buyers here: a sheet with a mark and a date is easier to trust than a loose bundle.

Dried sheets need soaking before use, while fresh ones are eaten within a short time of purchase. Buyers outside the county mostly meet the product in its packed form.

How fenpi is used

Fenpi is normally served cold and dressed, or slipped into a hot dish where it absorbs sauce without breaking up. Its job on the plate is texture: cool, slippery and chewy against stronger flavours.

In Changyuan the sheets are a household food and a gift as much as a restaurant ingredient, and Henan County Economy Network (Henan Broadcasting System) presents the village trade as a year-round source of income rather than a seasonal one.

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