How to get customers to accept it was really a big challenge.
Lin Yuan furrowed her brows and pondered all day until she suddenly remembered the food competitions she had seen in her previous life. She could completely use the format of these food contests to promote her stinky tofu.
With a strategy in hand, it was time for implementation. Rather than picking a specific date, she saw that the Lantern Festival was right around the corner, so she arranged the contest for the evening of the Lantern Festival right outside the Fuman Building, where the crowd ebbed and flowed, both to promote stinky tofu and to attract customers to the Fuman Building.
Speaking of the Lantern Festival, it was indeed a significant day; only after this day was the year considered to be fully and satisfactorily complete. Moreover, this day involved customs like guessing riddles and admiring lanterns, which were even more boisterous than the festivities on the fifteenth of the eighth month. Although it was still winter and going outside could turn one’s cheeks red with cold, this did not dampen everyone’s spirits.
Since it was the Lantern Festival, there had to be yuanxiao to eat. Several days before the fifteenth of the first lunar month, many small vendors had already started setting up stalls to sell yuanxiao. Yuanxiao is actually made by mixing various fillings together, then cutting them into pieces the size of a thumb cap, and then placing them into a large basket full of glutinous rice flour. After that, one shakes the basket, allowing the filling to roll around and stick to the flour.
The yuanxiao made this way are hard and chewy. Moreover, the outer layer of flour on the yuanxiao is not stable and can easily fall off during cooking.
After examining the yuanxiao sold on the market, Lin Yuan decided to introduce tangyuan to the market. Tangyuan is a way of eating popular among people in the South, much like making dumplings, with the filling wrapped inside a glutinous rice dough. Compared to yuanxiao, the filling in tangyuan is much softer, and after boiling, biting into one lets a thick, syrupy filling flow out, which is very delicious.
After explaining the method of making tangyuan to Loudmouth and others, Lin Yuan started preparing the fillings for tangyuan. The black sesame filling was the most common; roasting the black sesame seeds and then grinding them into powder, mixed with sugar and oil would do the trick. This type of filling made the tangyuan particularly fragrant, and sesame was very common in rural areas.
Just like last year at Osmanthus Cake Sister’s house, seeing that sesame was highly profitable the year before, she planted a lot of it, only to find no buyers when the seeds matured, leaving her with a surplus of sesame seeds. Since people didn’t know how to use them, many even fed them to chickens.
Therefore, the sesame seeds Lin Yuan needed were collected in just one day.
Apart from sesame filling, Lin Yuan also prepared a peanut filling and to make the peanuts more fragrant, she also added a small amount of sesame seeds to it. Besides these, there was also osmanthus filling; Rice Flower Fragrance already sold osmanthus cakes so there was plenty of dried osmanthus in stock, ready to use.
Due to the urgency of time, this Lantern Festival only introduced these three types of fillings. In fact, there could be many other styles, such as various fruits, fresh flowers, and even making the glutinous rice dough of tangyuan in different colors. Of course, she wasn’t planning on introducing these for the time being. If new products were all introduced at once, it could create aesthetic fatigue for customers, and too many options might make them less appreciated. So, she planned to introduce these new varieties slowly at next year’s Lantern Festival.
Since tangyuan was a new product, Lin Yuan still used the old method—cooking a large pot in the store and letting customers taste it. This approach proved to be astonishingly effective; the two thousand tangyuan made on the first day were snapped up by everyone. Even the tangyuan she planned to send to Fuman Building were hastily sold instead.