Double-Skin Milk / Ginger Milk Curd

Double-skin milk and ginger milk curd are Shunde-style desserts found in every Hong Kong-Macau sweet shop: the former sets a double skin on water-buffalo milk for a rich, silky texture, while the latter sees hot milk poured into ginger juice to set, fragrant and gently spicy, warming the stomach, white as jade and melting on the tongue.

These desserts originated in Shunde, Guangdong, and travelled south with Cantonese settlers into the sweet-shop culture of Hong Kong and Macau, becoming the signature of old houses such as Macau's Yee Shun Milk Company, famed for authentic water-buffalo milk and the traditional pouring-and-setting craft, an important thread in the Hong Kong-Macau dessert lineage.

Eaten warm or at room temperature, served in small bowls and taken by the spoon, silky with milk or gently spicy with ginger, usually as a dessert after a meal or at teatime; double-skin milk is often topped with red bean or lotus seed.

The silken, near-set milkiness of double-skin milk and the warming ginger aftertaste of ginger milk curd, with the richness of water-buffalo milk, are the marks of these Macau desserts.