In the past few days, villagers in Shanyuan Village, Xikou Town, Fenghua, had been busy drying sweet potato vermicelli in sunny days. Under the winter sun, the vermicelli looked bright and crystal.
"It is sunny so the sweet potato vermicelli can be dried out in two days, and the quality of sun-dried vermicelli is much better than that dried in the shade," A villager said.
Shanyuan Village is located in a mountainous area and near a river, and every household has a sweet potato field, large or small. The villagers' home-made sweet potato vermicelli is popular in the market.
In fact, drying is only the last process of making vermicelli. To make vermicelli, there are a lot of processing steps before you can put it to drying.
In mid-October, villagers cleaned the sweet potatoes after grubbing them out of the ground and removing the mud and roots, then cut off both ends and surface roots, rolled them with a grinder, and ground them into a pulp. The pulp would be filtered and placed in vats and buckets to settle.
After two days of precipitation and water filtration, the villagers fished out the sweet potato flour, then rolled and dried.
Then, water was added to the sweet potato flour and mixed into a paste. The paste was steamed in a special steamer and evenly spread into a thin layer of pastry.
After the layer was fully steamed, the pastry would be placed in a container to dissipate the heat, and then a manual scraper was used to scrape the pastry into a strip of vermicelli with a tasty texture. After a series of processes, the vermicelli is successfully made to be a delicious dish on the dinner table in winter.