KHONG IO
‘Khong Io’ is a traditional Taiwanese style BBQ activity. When I was a child, my family used to have reunions to hold the ‘Khong Io’ activity. ‘Khong Io’ is still my favorite activity because only when all my family members come back to Tainan, we would be able to hold the ‘Khong Io’. It has been a long time we haven’t enjoyed ‘Khong Io’ reunions since we all grew up and are busy at work. Last week, we finally decided to hold ‘Khong Io’ again!!!
The day before the activity, we had to prepare all the food first, season it and put it in aluminum foil bags for one night. We prepared eggs, chicken, fish, sweet potato, corn, and various vegetables.
After prepping the food. There was the most difficult part of the activity, build a ‘Food Cave’. We had to dig a hole and build a bridge across the hole. After that, we had to build a soil tower on top of the bridge. If the ‘Food Cave’ is not strong enough, it would collapse easily.
Here is the inside view of the food cave. Tip to build the food cave: deep and spacious for placing more food.
After The ‘Food Cave’ had been built, we set up the fire by using wood matches and dried grass in order to burn the soil blocks to be dried and heated up.
We had to keep the fire burning at least for 1.5 hours until the soil blocks turned red. The temperature during this process was about 800 Celsius degrees.
When the soil blocks were well burned, we had to move out all the coal, break the tower and start to put food into the ‘Food Cave’. After putting all the food in the cave, we had to bury the food with heated soil blocks.
We had to wait patiently for 2 hours to make sure the food has been well cooked.
The next step was to dig out all the food carefully. However, we tried so hard to dig Carefully.
It was really hard to prevent the food from being destroyed. Just like the next photo, you could see the yolk in the soil.
This activity means a lot to me, it is not just because of the tasty food, but also the time we spent with all the people I love.
