Huaiji Sixty-Day Pickled Radish Greens 怀集六十日黄菜

Huaiji Sixty-Day Pickled Radish Greens (怀集六十日黄菜) are young radish plants, trimmed of their roots, salted and fermented, from a crop grown around Gansa (甘洒镇) in Huaiji County (怀集县), Zhaoqing (肇庆), Guangdong. The pickle is golden and glossy, and it takes its name from the roughly two months the crop needs from sowing to harvest.

Where it comes from

The seed is sown at the end of summer or start of autumn on the sandy alluvial banks of Gansa's rivers and streams, and about sixty days later the growers harvest young plants with plump roots and full leaves. The Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences gives 40 to 45 days in the field and 15 to 20 days of pickling before the vegetable goes on sale, with crop after crop sown in rotation until spring. Nanfang+ reports that three crops can be grown between the White Dew solar term and the twelfth lunar month, with pumpkins grown in the other months. Huaiji County's media centre quotes the county gazetteer, the Huaiji Xianzhi (怀集县志), as saying that Gansa huangcai has been fragrant for a hundred years.

How it is made

Huaiji County's media centre describes four steps. The roots are cut off and the greens are sun-dried until half dry. They are then scalded quickly in water at 60°C, which brings out the golden colour. Next they are pressed in bamboo baskets weighted with stones to squeeze out water while keeping them crisp. Finally they are packed into jars in layers with salt, sealed and left to ferment for 30 days. After three months the flavour is fuller, and the pickle keeps for up to three years. No preservative is added.

Flavour and texture

When a jar is opened it smells sour with a note of radish. The greens stay dry and firm rather than soft, crunch audibly when bitten, and taste sweet-sour with a fresher finish than ordinary pickled greens. Nanfang+ notes that boiled plain it is dry and tender, while stir-fried it is sour, spicy and refreshing.

How it is eaten

In Huaiji it is stir-fried with garlic and green peppers as a rice dish, braised with pork belly, steamed with spare ribs or fish belly, and cooked into a quick sliced-pork soup in summer or a pork-bone soup in autumn and winter. It also goes into meat buns, pancake fillings and dumplings. County firms make huangcai buns, glutinous rice cakes known as baici (白糍) and bowl-steamed rice cakes (砵仔糕) with it, and the leftover radish heads become dried radish and sour radish.