The tasty mooncake is getting a new culinary twist thanks to the efforts of Chinese chefs and some innovative ingredients.
Chefs from the various restaurants and luxury hotels around Shanghai are coming out with their unique takes on the mooncakes in preparation for the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival on Sept. 15, China Daily reported.
Hotel Indigo Shanghai, for instance, offers mooncakes stuffed with high-end wagyu beef, which sells for 18 yuan ($2.70) each. According to the hotel's marketing manager Julie Wang, the choice to use wagyu beef was meant to offer a new taste to the traditionally pork-loving Shanghai residents.
Wang also revealed that they were initially worried that the novel choice for a mooncake filling would not sell well. However, the new take proved to be so successful that it has already overtaken their 2015 sales of traditional mooncakes.
Meanwhile, the Peninsula Shanghai Hotel offers its own durian mooncake for customers wanting to have a taste of the exotic fruit.
Restaurants are also not going to be outdone. The Cantonese Xinya Restaurant located along the Nanjing Road has turned the popular yanduxian soup into bite-sized mooncakes, while the 100-year old Wang Bao He offers crayfish mooncakes. The restaurant's mooncakes have proven so popular that all 6,000 boxes they had prepared have already been pre-ordered.
Chen Fengwei, secretary-general of the Shanghai Confectionery Industry Association, expressed pleasant surprise at the huge demand for mooncakes. He explained that this year's unusually hot weather, as well as the early date the Mid-Autumn Festival fell in, would normally have made selling the delicacies more difficult.
"The situation is far better than we expected," Chen remarked. He estimates that the city will be able to sell 1,000 metric tons of mooncakes this year, an increase of 0.5 percent from last year.
And it is not only local businesses who are enjoying the effects of the mooncake boon. Indonesian palm oil producers are also welcoming the demand, as it has also increased the demand for their products, the Macau Daily Times reported.
China has once again moved up as the second biggest importer of Indonesian palm oil, with the country ordering between 80,000 and 120,000 tons of palm oil last week. According to David Ng, a derivatives specialist at Phillip Futures Sdn., the increase in orders is likely in preparation for the coming festival season. China's current palm oil stocks it down to around 300,000 tons, its lowest since 2010.
Palm oil is favored by mooncake makers because it is relatively more affordable than other cooking oils.