Vegetarian mooncake: New favorite of Mid-Autumn Festival

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One of the traditional ways for Chinese people to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival is to indulge themselves in mooncakes. The round and usually sweet pastry has been traditionally eaten during the festival ever since the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

While enjoying the delicacy which usually comes with various fillings including red date paste, egg yolk, five-kernels and even meat, people may worry about too much intake of sugar and calories.

Now, here’s an alternative – vegetarian mooncakes are becoming more and more popular among Chinese people.

Fresh baked vegetarian mooncakes with fillings ranging from mixed-nuts to pineapple to pumpkin /CGTN Photo

“In general, vegetarian mooncakes refer to mooncakes that are made of no animal products and contain less sugar than traditionally-made ones,” Li Li, a member of Vegetarian Cuisine Arts Commission of the China Cuisine Association told CGTN.

When making vegetarian mooncakes, Li added, people usually use peanut oil and soybean oil instead of animal oil which many traditionally-made mooncakes have. No egg liquid is brushed on the mooncake skin either, and maltose replaces white sugar for a healthier diet, she said.

“In that way, we can lower the sugar and calories content and preserve the original flavor of the mooncakes as much as possible,” Li further explained.

Among the growing variety of vegetarian mooncakes available for the festival, the five-kernel mooncake is surely the most traditional and classic example.

A vegetarian five-kernel mooncake. The Chinese characters on the surface read “Wu Ren” which means five-kernel. / CGTN Photo

Fillings of a vegetarian five-kernel mooncake /CGTN Photo

Five-kernel, as the name implies, refers to five different kinds of coarsely chopped nuts and kernels. They are held together with maltose syrup and vegetarian oil before being wrapped into the dough.

Official standards on mooncakes revealed in December 2015 state that for Cantonese-style mooncakes, the five kernels are walnuts, almonds, olive kernels, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds.

However in reality, especially when making mooncakes at home, people may not strictly follow the standard but use different kinds of nuts, and even more than five, giving it another name – “mixed-nuts mooncakes”.

CGTN Photo

Besides nuts, the red thread (hong si) and green thread (lü si) – which are made of orange peel and edible pigment – are often indispensable ingredients for the mixed-nuts mooncakes.

(Video by Zhang Wanbao, Wang Kailin)