What to do if soybean paste has maggots

Many people know that people in Northeast China like to eat pickled vegetables, so many families in Northeast China make their own soybean paste. The soybean paste made at home tastes very fragrant and is much cleaner and more hygienic than the one bought outside. However, making soybean paste is not a simple matter. There will be various small problems, such as the problem of soybean paste having maggots and a bad smell. So what should we do if soybean paste has maggots? Let’s talk about it in detail below.

Nowadays, very little of the soybean paste sold on the market is made from soybeans. Why don’t we use soybeans anymore? The most fundamental reason is that it is expensive to make soybean paste. In order to reduce costs, soybean paste manufacturers have switched to using corn to make paste. However, the paste made from corn has two problems: one is that the taste is not good and the flavor is not pure; the other is that it has no nutrition. Even if the soybean paste is marked as being made from soybeans, it is not made 100% from soybeans. Soybeans are only a part of the paste. This is why people feel that the soybean paste bought from the store tastes weird and not delicious.

Soybean paste is a specialty of Northeast China. The reason why soybean paste is a specialty of Northeast China is because the raw material for making soybean paste is a specialty of Northeast China.

In the past, every household would start making soybean paste as soon as autumn came. First, the soybeans had to be washed and then boiled in a large iron pot. Boiling the soybeans took about two or three hours over a low heat. The boiled soybeans need to be crushed. This process is very laborious and difficult, and requires someone who is in good health and strong to do it. It takes several hours to crush a large pot of boiled soybeans.

The prepared soybean paste blocks must be kept until May of the following spring, and then the soybean paste making process officially begins, that is, the soybean paste is actually made in the soybean paste jar. People in Northeast China call this process "making soybean paste".

During this process, if the sauce jar is not well protected, maggots will grow. When the maggots grow to a certain length, they will crawl up the wall of the sauce jar. Maggots are a common occurrence in the process of making sauce. Almost everyone's sauce has maggots. But maggots in soybean paste are not harmful to the human body, they just look uncomfortable.

So there is a common saying in Northeast China: The maggots in the pickle jar don’t bite people, but they make people itchy. This phrase usually refers to people who are annoying. Bo Yang also figuratively compared the Chinese to maggots in a jar of pickled mustard, saying that the Chinese can only crawl in such a small world as the jar and even push against each other.