Hunan chef promotes local sun-dried food

For generations, families across Central China's Hunan province have sun-dried green vegetables, chilies, beans, eggplant, fish and meat to extend their shelf life without refrigeration. This process also intensifies their natural flavors, making vegetables taste sweeter and chilies less sharp but more fragrant.

For Zhang Xiaochun, a Hunan cuisine master with 47 years of experience, preserving this flavor has been his lifelong mission.

Hunan natives will often say while eating dried white chili stir-fried with pork: "This has the flavor of the sun in it."

The sun-dried flavor, a key element in Hunan cuisine, refers to the unique taste achieved through traditional preservation methods using sunlight, wind and natural temperatures.

"What's the flavor of the sun? In my memory, it's the flavor of a mother's kitchen," said Zhang, 64, who grew up in a farming family of five children.

He recalled watching his mother bathing vegetables under the sun for days until they were half-dry, then mixing them with salt and packing them into clay jars. These preserved vegetables would last for half a year.

Zhang said meat was scarce on his family's dining table, but these sun-dried vegetables — long-lasting, flavorful and perfect with rice — were an unforgettable taste from his childhood.

"When there was no meat or even oil, my mother would boil a pot of soup with the dried vegetables," Zhang said.

"I could eat two big bowls of rice with just that soup."

Despite having tasted and cooked with a variety of fine ingredients later in life, Zhang always missed the sun-dried foods from home.

"To me, they tasted better than any luxury dish," he said.

These memories have become the foundation of his work.