A red date is not a date. It is a jujube — a buckthorn fruit the size of a thumb — and it is the reason a lot of Chinese home cooking tastes sweet without a spoonful of sugar anywhere in the recipe.
- Botanical
- Ziziphus jujuba. Same family as buckthorn, unrelated to the palm date.
- Part used
- Ripe fruit, dried whole, sliced, or pitted.
- Origin
- Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Xinjiang. Xinjiang lots are larger and sweeter.
- Flavour
- Date and baked apple, honey, a faint smokiness in older lots.
- Use
- Three to six fruits per pot for four people. Two per cup in tea.
- Keeps
- 12–18 months. They harden rather than spoil if kept dry.
Fresh and dried are two different fruits
Fresh jujube arrives in late summer: crisp like a firm pear, mildly sweet, eaten out of hand. Dried, it collapses into something dense and dark red with roughly two-thirds sugar by dry weight. Both are good; only the dried one is in this article. The drying is what creates the caramel note — the sugars concentrate and partially invert, which is why a dried jujube tastes cooked even though it never was.
Whole, sliced, or pitted
- Whole keeps best and gives the most aroma, but the skin holds it back until the fruit softens. Score the skin with a knife before adding to a pot.
- Sliced gives up its sweetness in a third of the time, which is what you want in a quick tea and not what you want in a two-hour braise. Slices also oxidise faster and go dull in a month.
- Pitted costs more and tastes cleaner. The pit carries a faint astringency that some cooks dislike in delicate broths; in a heavy braise nobody will notice.
What it does in a pot
Four jobs, and it does all of them at once. It sweetens without sucrose, so the sweetness reads round rather than sharp. Its pectin thickens a broth slightly, giving body. It colours — a chicken soup with four jujubes goes amber. And it masks: the flat, dusty note of an older root disappears behind it.
Where it goes
- Chicken or pork rib soup. Four fruits, scored, in from the start.
- Congee. Six fruits with the rice; the porridge turns pale pink and sweet.
- Tea. Two fruits, torn open, with goji and chrysanthemum. This is the most common everyday cup in northern China.
- Red bean soup. With chen pi, as the sweetening agent rather than rock sugar.
- Steamed with rice. A few on top of the rice before it goes in the steamer. The rice takes the aroma; the fruit goes soft and jammy.
Buying
The skin should be deep red-brown, slightly wrinkled, and faintly oily-looking — that sheen is natural, not added. Bright red and glossy usually means sulphur. Smell the bag: sweet, slightly smoky, a little like dried apple. Open one and check the crease for grey fuzz; that is the one place mould hides. Hard, rattling fruit is old but still usable in soup; soft, sticky fruit has taken on moisture and will not keep.
On the pit. Chinese home cooks often remove the pit for a cleaner taste, and some traditions hold that the pit is warming. Practically, pitting is a five-minute job with a paring knife and it makes the fruit release sweetness faster.