Hong'an Ember-Roasted Dried Gourd 红安煨葫芦
Hong'an Ember-Roasted Dried Gourd is featured among the local specialties of Hubei.
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Hong'an Ember-Roasted Dried Gourd (红安煨葫芦) is a dried vegetable made from fresh young gourds in Hong'an County (红安县), Huanggang (黄冈), Hubei. Hubei Daily describes it as a dried vegetable that people in the north of the county like to make, and as one of Hong'an's distinctive vegetable products.
How it is made
The raw material is tender gourds grown locally. At harvest time they are picked and laid in the still-hot ashes left after rice straw has burned. When a gourd has gone soft it is taken out and pressed slowly under a wooden board until it cools, then put back into the hot ashes. Heating and pressing are repeated five or six times, until the gourd has become a slab 1 to 2 centimetres thick. It is then dried in the air, after which it is ready to eat or to sell.
The gourd is not broken or treated in any other way during the process. Hubei Daily credits this with keeping the gourd's own character while giving it a flavour of its own.
How it is eaten
A 2026 Changjiang Web (长江网) post on Hong'an cooking presents it braised with pork (煨葫芦烧肉) and describes it as crisp and tender, rivalling bamboo shoots. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism lists Hong'an Ember-Roasted Dried Gourd among the featured foods of its rural tourism route through Hong'an's old villages and buildings.
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.