An ordinary pickle costs just a few yuan per kilogram, but there is a pickled mustard green that costs seventy to eighty yuan per kilogram. They are indeed a "luxury pickle." Dazu pickled mustard green is a specialty of Chongqing and is "one of the famous traditional Chinese pickles." Dazu people have had the custom of growing the mustard green since ancient times, with a history of more than 800 years.
Pickled mustard green is not only an essential seasoning for cooking Sichuan cuisine but also an important condiment. Here, the mustard green goes through six processes: sowing, harvesting, drying, pickling, placing into a pot, and then opening. The sealed fermentation of mustard green takes approximately three years or more. The production is dark brown, oily and shiny, crisp and refreshing with a robust fragrant and moist when the pot is opened. Therefore, the pickling technique of Dazu mustard green is on the "intangible cultural heritage" list in Chongqing.
Zhuxi Town is the main planting base of Dazu mustard green, with a planting area of 3,000 mu (two square kilometers). The town adopts the development model of integrating the company, cooperative, base, and farmer. The cooperative's 500-mu planting base is in charge of the surrounding 500 farmers. The daily purchase volume during the harvest season is more than 20,000 kilograms. The cooperative will receive it all no matter how much the villagers plant. It relieves the farmers' concerns and reduces the enterprise's production cost. The output of mustard green per mu here is about 800 kilograms, and the villagers can earn about 2,000 yuan per mu. It has become an important industrial support for poverty alleviation here.