Dazhu Gansi

A Yangzhou breakfast-banquet dish, descended from the Qing-era "nine-shred soup" (九丝汤). The standard account ties it to the Qianlong Emperor's repeated southern tours to Yangzhou, where local officials had master chefs prepare the soup — tofu shreds with eight other fine-cut threads (ham, bamboo shoot, whitebait, wood ear, button mushroom, laver, egg sheet, chicken) — in chicken broth; the emperor praised it and the dish became famous. Yangzhou chefs later pared the nine shreds down to a tofu-forward version, today's dazhu gansi.

Yangzhou 18th-century salt-merchant kitchen dish, formalized when Kangxi and Qianlong made repeated southern tours and ate at merchant houses. Pressed white tofu (白干), not silken, sliced into 20+ layers and julienned. Blanched three times in changing water to pull the bean smell, then simmered in chicken-and-ham stock 20+ minutes.

A mound of pressed-tofu threads, each one finer than a chopstick, simmered until they've drunk pale chicken broth into themselves. Shredded ham, river shrimp, bamboo shoot get layered in. The tofu reads as creamy in the mouth even though no cream is anywhere near it — that's the broth doing the work. Eat it hot; the threads stiffen as they cool.

The tofu is not silken — it's bai gan, a firm pressed white tofu, the only kind that can be sliced into 20+ layers and then julienned without falling apart. Real tradition demands blanching the threads three times in changing water to pull the bean smell, then simmering (not boiling) in chicken-and-ham stock for 20+ minutes. Skip the blanching and a raw soybean note sits underneath everything.