Xiang Yang rolled his eyes again and pretended not to hear what Gao Chuang said.
"What should we do with these Zilongs? Just pour the soup on them and serve them on the table?" Xiang Yang asked.
Gao Chuang shook his head. "I can tell from the looks of it that you don't eat eels very often."
"That's impossible. I grew up by the sea, where there are a lot of moray eels. Plus, they can't be sold at a good price, so moray eels were the thing I ate the most when I was a kid." Xiang Yang immediately shook his head.
"It's obvious that you've never cooked before." Gao Chuang said firmly.
Xiang Yang asked in confusion: "Why, is there any other explanation for this conger eel blood?"
Gao Chuang nodded and said, "When handling moray eels, the most important thing is to clean up the blood, because the blood of moray eels contains toxins. If you accidentally eat it, it will harm your oral health and digestive organ tissues. In serious cases, you will experience food poisoning, nerve paralysis, and numbness and weakness in your hands and feet."
Xiang Yang was shocked when he heard this. "How is it possible? I have been eating conger eels since I was a child and have never been poisoned. When I was in school, I also learned about eels. I have never heard of this. On the contrary, I heard that eel blood is very nutritious."
Xiang Yang was sure that eel blood was definitely not poisonous.
Otherwise, there would not have been such a luxurious and famous dish as Zilong in history.
"It's true that eel blood is poisonous, but it's normal that you don't know it, because the toxins contained in eel blood cannot survive in a high temperature environment, so just make sure the eel blood is fully cooked." Gao Chuang said.
Xiang Yang immediately shook his head, "No, if eel blood is poisonous, why isn't it written in the textbook?"
Gao Chuang shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe the people who published the textbook thought it was unnecessary. I've seen many people eating sashimi, but I've never seen anyone drinking raw fish blood in my decades of traveling around the world."
"Uh." Xiang Yang blinked. This reason seemed to make sense.
"These zilongs are actually poisonous when they are just taken out. They must be put into boiling water and boiled for a few minutes to remove the poison and make them taste good."
"In addition, when you go back and cook the moray eel yourself, don't throw away the eel bones. Although the moray eel tastes good after removing the bones, it wastes the nutritional value of the eel bones." Gao Chuang said.
Xiang Yang nodded.
Xiang Yang didn't know that the blood of moray eels was poisonous, but he knew that the bones of moray eels were rich in nutritional value.
The bones of moray eels contain a large amount of calcium and trace elements, which are very helpful for calcium supplementation.
Xiang Yang even knew that many calcium tablets contain conger eel bones.
Of course, you can't eat too many conger eel bones.
It's okay to use it to make soup occasionally.
If you eat it frequently, you will grow wisdom teeth and buck teeth.
As for the fact that the blood of conger eels is poisonous, Xiang Yang still doesn't quite believe it.
Because Xiang Yang himself must eat conger eels with blood, the taste will be bad if the blood is washed off.
In the past twenty years, Xiang Yang has never seen anyone poisoned by eating conger eel blood.
In Qinglongwan, there is still a folk remedy of using eel blood mixed with boiling water to treat nosebleeds.
Gao Chuang seemed to see through Xiang Yang's thoughts and smiled happily: "You are still too young. You still have a lot to learn."
Xiang Yang did not refute. Although the textbooks did not even say that the blood of conger eels was poisonous, proving that even biologists who specialized in eels believed that the blood of conger eels was poisonous was not a big deal, Xiang Yang was too lazy to make excuses for himself.
However, the place must be regained.
Xiang Yang's eyes turned and he asked, "Boss Gao, do you know the Moon-gazing Eel?"
Gao Chuang pondered for a moment and shook his head in confusion, "What is the Moon-gazing Eel? You didn't just make up a name to fool me, did you?"
"Since I mentioned the name of the Moon-gazing Eel, it is naturally not nonsense." Xiang Yang said with a smile.
"The Moon-gazing Eel is a type of eel that cannot be eaten. It likes to eat carrion. Its body is thicker than that of ordinary freshwater eels, but other than that, its shape is no different from that of ordinary eels. When the moon is full, the Moon-gazing Eel likes to swim out of its eel cave to look at the moon. This type of eel is highly poisonous and cannot be eaten. If eaten, humans will surely die."
Gao Chuang frowned, "There are actually such eels?"
Xiang Yang looked at Gao Chuang confidently, "You can check online to see if there are such eels."
Xiang Yang was not afraid of Gao Chuang's investigation at all, because there was an eel called the Moon-Gazing Eel in many historical records, and one could find countless versions of the Moon-Gazing Eel on the Internet, and each version was very detailed and more realistic than the real thing.
But in fact, Xiang Yang felt that the Moon-Gazing Eel was probably a figment of the imagination of the ancients and did not exist.
The origin of the Moon-gazing Eel is a legend.
It is said that during the Qianlong period, there was a small farming family in Zhenjiang City. The husband was named Zhao Tian, who was honest and upright. The wife was named Li, who was hardworking and virtuous. The couple worked in the fields and wove. They loved each other very much. Although their life was hard, they lived a happy and fulfilling life.
There are a lot of eels in the countryside of Zhenjiang, and the locals like to catch eels to eat.
One day, Zhao Tian plowed out a yellow eel more than three feet long while plowing the land.
Take the eel from Zhaotianba back home.
The wife felt that her husband worked hard every day and rarely ate meat, so she cooked the eel and sent it to the field to comfort her husband.
Unexpectedly, after Zhao Tian finished eating, he suddenly felt a stomachache, followed by bleeding from all his orifices, and fell to the ground and died.
Zhao Tian's clansmen reported the case to the government.
After the autopsy, the authorities determined that Zhao Tian had indeed died of poisoning.
As a result, the government arrested Li, tortured her into confessing, and executed her in the autumn for the crime of murdering her husband.
Ji Xiaolan, who happened to be in Zhenjiang at the time, felt that this matter was a little strange.
The well-read Ji Xiaolan found that he could not find out what kind of poison Li used, while Li and Zhao Tian were in love with each other, and everyone in the village knew it.
No matter if it was about an unknown poison or the secret behind his survival, Ji Xiaolan was determined to get to the bottom of the case.
Ji Xiaolan sent people to investigate openly and secretly, but after more than half a month, there was still no result.
So, Ji Xiaolan returned home in a depressed mood.
As a result, when Ji Xiaolan was accidentally flipping through a folk medicine book, a passage caught his attention.
The medical book said that there was a strange eel in the countryside of Jiangnan that hibernated in the fields. Every Mid-Autumn Festival, when the moon was full, it would look up at the moon until it set, hence the name "Moon-gazing Eel". Although this eel was rare, only one in ten thousand, it was extremely poisonous.
Ji Xiaolan immediately understood.
The next day, Ji Xiaolan had someone post a notice, offering to buy eels from villagers at a high price.
Ji Xiaolan put all the eels he had collected in a water tank. When the moon was full, he saw an eel raising its head and looking at the moon until it set.
Immediately, Ji Xiaolan declared that Li was not guilty and that Zhao Tian had died of poisoning from accidentally eating a poisonous eel.
Of course, others didn't believe it. So many people often caught eels to eat and had never been poisoned, but Zhao Tian was the only one who was poisoned to death.
So Ji Xiaolan told the story of the "Moon-Gazing Eel" in public, and killed the caught "Moon-Gazing Eel" and fed it to the dogs.
After the dog ate the Moon-gazing Eel, it immediately started bleeding from all its orifices and fell to the ground and died.
Since then, the name of the Moon-gazing Eel has become more and more popular, and to this day, there are still people arguing whether the Moon-gazing Eel is real or fake.