Jianghua Eighteen Stuffed Dishes 江华十八酿
Jianghua Eighteen Stuffed Dishes is featured among the local specialties of Hunan.
Jianghua Eighteen Stuffed Dishes (江华十八酿), also known as the Yao-family eighteen stuffed dishes (瑶家十八酿), is a family of stuffed foods from Jianghua Yao Autonomous County (江华瑶族自治县) in Yongzhou (永州), at the southern tip of Hunan where it borders Guangdong and Guangxi. A filling is packed into fresh tofu or into vegetables such as chillies, mountain bamboo shoots, garlic, bitter melon, niu'er cai (牛耳菜) and shiitake mushrooms, and the stuffed pieces are pan-fried, braised, dry-roasted or deep-fried. For Yao families in Jianghua it is a dish they must have at New Year.
Ingredients
People's Daily Online's Hunan channel describes the set as a series of snacks built on the 'holy water' tofu ball, and names eighteen versions: fresh tofu, chilli, bitter melon, river snail, rice tofu, fried tofu, shiitake, garlic bulb, muyu tofu, bamboo shoot, aubergine, loofah, lotus root, winter melon, pumpkin flower, niu'er cai, radish and egg. For the other seventeen, the choice of ingredients, the method and the way of eating are much the same as for the tofu version.
How it is made
The fresh-tofu version is the one Rednet singles out as the most representative and the hardest to make well. The tofu starts from plump soybeans, and spring water from Dexian Rock (得仙岩) at Zhuyuanzhai (竹园寨) in Tuojiang town (沱江镇) is regarded as the best water for it. Fresh lean meat is chopped by hand to a paste and seasoned only with spring onion, salt and MSG. The cook pokes a hole into each block of tofu with a bamboo chopstick and fills it with meat while keeping the block whole, so it swells out.
Cooking is done in a large wok over a wood-fired stove. Rapeseed oil goes into the hot wok, some firewood is pulled out to lower the heat, and the tofu is fried slowly until golden on both sides, then braised over a strong fire for ten minutes. Red chilli powder, chopped spring onion and a few drops of stone-ground sesame oil go on before serving.
How it is eaten
The host lifts a piece into the guest's bowl, and it is eaten hot, when the tofu is soft and smooth and its bean flavour mixes with the meat filling. Yao families have also opened restaurants and snack stalls serving stuffed dishes, stuffing ever more ingredients to suit visitors' tastes.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.