Cuisine and Snack Recommendations in Tongling

Tongling’s local food scene has limited highlights. Aside from Anhui’s classic Huizhou cuisine, there are only a handful of iconic local snacks. The most well-known ones include Datong Dried Tofu, Moon Brand Dried Tofu, Hu Yumei Broad Bean Paste, Duck Blood Vermicelli Soup, and Salt & Pepper Pork Knuckles.

The very first piece of Moon Brand Dried Tofu rolled off production lines in Tongling, the ancient copper capital, in June 1989 and quickly won wide popularity among consumers. In January 1990, it was honored as one of the Top Ten Trustworthy Quality Products. Many merchants and locals choose it as a gift for relatives and friends, cementing its status as a genuine famous specialty of Tongling. Crafted with the finest soybeans, it undergoes unique processing techniques and refined scientific formulas.

Datong Dried Tofu has a production history dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Its elaborate production process features careful brine curdling and fine mesh screens for filtering soybean milk. Each raw tofu slab is wrapped in gauze and tightly pressed on wooden boards. The plain white tofu blocks are soaked for eight hours in a seasoned broth brewed with shiitake mushrooms, star anise, licorice, rock sugar and original soy sauce, then simmered in the pot. After being fished out, they are tossed with sesame oil. The finished product is square, thin, springy and pliable — a single piece can even be rolled into a small tube. It boasts a distinctive profile of vibrant color, rich savory flavor and satisfying chewiness. In earlier times, pilgrims traveling to Jiuhua Mountain, a sacred Buddhist site, from all across China and even India would stop by Datong to buy this dried tofu for their vegetarian diets, boosting its fame far and wide. Datong Dried Tofu comes in assorted varieties such as ham-flavored, shrimp-flavored, reed-wrapped and stinky dried tofu.