Tanghulu from the Tomb Raider Cookbook
Tanghulu is a Chinese snack of candied fruit served on a bamboo skewer. It's a popular street food in China, made by dipping fruit into a sugar syrup and allowing it to solidify into a hard shell. While traditionally you would use hawthorns and/or hollow them out and fill them with sweet red bean paste, the Tomb Raider Cookbook's recipe uses strawberries, which are likely to be more accessible to the Western cook than hawthorns. I made Tanghulu, 'Otai and one more recipe from the Tomb Raider Cookbook (the last post is coming next week) on the same day with my two most trusted taste testers.
Lara Croft has visited China in the Tomb Raider series, most notably in Tomb Raider II. The entire first level takes place on and around the Great Wall of China, which is somehow devoid of tourists during her trip. In Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Lara visits the Great Wall again, then Shanghai, then Hong Kong in pursuit of the Mati, a map that will lead her to the titular Cradle.
The cookbook's recipe has you heat sugar and water until it's at 300 degrees or slightly browned and boiling. I let mine go to about 280 before deciding that was close enough. As directed, I rinsed and dried the strawberries before I started to cook. One of the strawberries I picked was enormous and it fell off the skewer as I was dipping it into the syrup, forcing me to stab into it to lift it out. Then you let them set up for ten minutes.
Peep the big boi in the last slide, apart from the pack.
We found they tasted like candied strawberries. The candy around the fruit did harden and provided a nice crunch, but we shouldn't have expected a flavor revolution. Perhaps if the recipe had you hollow out the berries and fill them with red bean paste, it would have been a more authentic experience. I'm still glad I made and tried them though. I'm not so glad for how the leftover sugar syrup cooled and hardened within the pot. I had to soak it in hot water and soap at least twice to get it all out; thankfully, the pot was able to be cleaned.
If you want to make this recipe for Tanghulu yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide.
