![]() In the past, Taishanese immigrants to the United States and Canada were a big market, especially since they love steaming minced meat cakes with salted shrimps. Shrimp paste isn’t only sold in Hong Kong. Photos by Nicolas Petit for Zolima CityMag This uniquely salty, shrimpy flavour seizes all of your taste buds. But they also work with a smaller distributor who sells to wet markets and dai pai dongs, so whether you are eating in a fancy restaurant or on the street, it’s the same Tai O flavours you will be consuming. The Chengs spend all their time processing shrimp, so to sell their product, they work with a sauce wholesaler who supplies high-end restaurants and hotels. Shrimp paste (haa gou 蝦膏) is cut into a small pink brick, you take a teaspoonful for cooking, similar to a cube of chicken bouillon. All of this gives the paste a smooth, silky texture and an unforgettably potent aroma. Shrimp sauce (haa zoeng 蝦醬) is kept in a jar, ready to use like marmalade. Krill are fermented for three to four days and ground with a stone mill, then dried under the sun for a month. The next step is to dump the krill into barrels, cover them with sea salt and leave them to ferment.Ĭompared to shrimp sauce, which can be processed and sold on the same day, shrimp paste takes much longer to make. He recalls that the heaviest load he had ever bought in one day is 200 piculs – about 12,000 kilograms. The fishermen return every morning at five o’clock and berth at the shrimp paste factory, where they weigh the krills and sell them directly to Cheng. Many fishermen trawl for krill, which has been illegal in Hong Kong waters since 2013, so they now travel outside the city’s boundaries. Tai O is a particularly good place to make shrimp paste because the waters right outside the town are home to krill - a type of tiny shrimp - that make an appearance from June to October every year. Because they are so much cleaner, krill caught at night have sold for 40 percent more than krill caught during the day. It’s easier when night falls and the krill swim closer to the surface. If fishermen want to catch them during the day, they must hold the nets as close to the seabed with their hands as they can, but both the nets and krills will be covered with mud and all sort of sediment. It is only at night, when other fish are asleep, that krill come to the surface. They usually travel in groups and the seabed is their haven from the predators. Krill find themselves on the bottom of the food chain. In Cantonese, they are known as ngan4 haa1(銀蝦), which can be directly translated as “silver shrimp.” Each krill takes around three weeks to grow from a fertilised egg into a full-grown creature about two centimetres long. ![]() ![]() Pink paste (Photo by Nicolas Petit for Zolima CityMag) ![]()
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