Mr. Gan may didn’t have good education, probably only a few years of elementary school, but he has experienced a lot and is very good at conversation. However, what impresses people most about him is his cooking skills, particularly in cooking rice. He is considered to be unmatched and unbeatable in this regard.
Most people in the world can cook rice, and almost everyone who eats rice can cook it. In the eyes of ordinary people, cooking rice is the least technical job in the kitchen, and cooking schools may not even teach how to cook rice. With the popularity of electric rice cookers, cooking rice has become no technical. However, in the past, when there were no electric rice cookers, especially when cooking with a wood stove, some skill and experience were required. But this was not the area where Mr. Gan displayed his skills. Mr. Gan cooked large pots of rice, enough to feed over a hundred or even several hundred people, using a wood stove, and sometimes even digging a hole in the wilderness to cook with a military pot. This is an experience that most people have never had.
A military pot is a pot used by troops to cook in the wilderness. It is round and tapered, with a flat bottom and a slightly smaller diameter, and an open top with a slightly larger diameter, about three to four feet high. Dig a hole about one meter deep in the wild, and dig a hole on the edge of the pit. Place the pot on top, burn local firewood underneath, and cook outside. One company has one cooking class, responsible for the food of over a hundred people. The rice used for cooking is fifty or sixty catties, thirty times that of a typical household. Inexperienced people either cook it into mush or leave it half-cooked.
Similar to the above but it was black iron pot
Before the Cultural Revolution, there was a cooking skills competition for cooks in the Qianyang District (formerly Huai Hua District). It is said that Mr. Gan won first place in the military pot rice cooking competition.
Mr. Gan's large pot of rice is fast and good, not too soft or too hard, each grain is fully cooked, and the texture is just right, not sticking to the spoon or bowl (which is important for serving rice). It is said that he had a record of success for over two decades of cooking, at least in Zhijiang, which was unprecedented.
There were about three to four hundred Zhijiang Normal School students, plus faculty and family members, making a total of about four to five hundred people eating. Assuming each person eats 200 grams of rice, it would require more than 80 kg – 100 kg (176 - 220 lbs) of rice. Most canteens would put the rice in tens of bowls, use steaming to cook for such a large number of people, but Mr. Gan insisted on cooking rice with pot.
At the Zhijiang Normal School cafeteria on Wood Oil Hill, there are two large firewood stoves built with a round, tapered wooden barrel on top, with a diameter of about four feet, two feet high above the stove counter, and one foot below the stove counter, and larger at the bottom than at the top. When there are many people, Master Gan uses both stoves to cook rice at the same time, but when there are fewer people, he uses only one stove.
To cook rice, Master Gan first puts enough water in the pot and starts the fire. When the water boils, he pours baskets of rice into the pot, then stands on the stove and uses a long shovel to stir the rice in the pot. It takes a lot of strength to stir the hundred or so pounds of rice, but Master Gan has big biceps, a round waist, and strong tendons all over his body. In the steamy water vapor, he concentrates on his work, skillfully flipping the rice in the pot non-stop. Even in the coldest winter without heating system in kitchen, Master Gan cooks rice in just a single layer of clothes and still sweats profusely.
After stirring for about thirty minutes, he checks the color of the rice and determines that it's almost done, then throws a large sieve into the pot to strain out the excess rice soup and pours it into a large wooden barrel. When he's finished scooping out most of the excess water, he stirs the semi-cooked wet rice evenly, covers the pot, and removes the fire below, leaving only the glowing charcoal. Even after the rice is steamed, the steam continues to escape from the gap between the lid and the pot.
After twenty minutes, the kitchen is filled with the aroma of rice. Master Gan lifts the lid, and a white, steamy aroma wafts into the air, with the fragrant scent of fully cooked rice. He hangs a large scale on a rope from the ceiling and attaches a large bamboo sieve to the hook. He uses a large ladle to scoop out the hot, plump, non-sticky rice into the sieve, pouring ten pounds of rice into a small wooden bucket. He knows from experience that 200 grams of uncooked rice should yield 500 grams of cooked rice, and one table of ten people requires 5 kg of rice. He weighs it accurately, usually just right, with the occasional last bucket being a little more or less. If he has too much rice, he puts it in a small bowl and adds a little to each bucket. If he has too little, he takes out a little from each bucket and adds it to the last bucket.
After the rice is distributed, he scoops out the crispy, fragrant, yellow-brown crust from the bottom of the pot, divides it evenly, and covers each bucket of rice with it. Every time, Master Gan calculates the time and prepares the rice a few minutes before mealtime so that the students can still enjoy the crispy crust on top of their rice.
Everything is clean, neat, and done in one go.
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