In the 2020 Chinese pastry competition held by Shougang Group, Li Dandan, a female pastry chef from the Shougang Industrial Group Shoushi Industrial Company, stood out among the many competitors, winning first place in the final thanks to her solid basic skills and skillful pastry skills. She was awarded the title of "Shougang Technical Expert". Looking back on Li Dandan's growth experience, we can see that her achievements today are all due to her unremitting pursuit of devoted and dedicated professionalism.

Li Dandan, who has just turned 38 years old this year, is a worker from Jilin Province. By happy chance, she worked as a baker previously. As her passing interest in baking grew into a passion, she poured her persistent love for her work into flour and rice. Every day, she stood by the chopping board with her hands on the rolling pin. Through her unremitting efforts, she quickly mastered the basic skills of rolling, kneading, cutting, chopping, steaming, and other basic cooking skills.

In 2009, Li Dandan came to Shoushi Industrial Company. The strong Shougang culture and Shougang's core values of "everything for a better life" made her fall in love with Shougang and enabled her to integrate into the Shougang Industrial family. With modesty, she studied with the pastry masters around her, taking lessons from their strengths to improve her weaknesses. She constantly improved her skills, gradually grasping the techniques required to make all kinds of Chinese pastries. Her special steamed buns, scallion cakes, potstickers, steamed sponge cakes and other pastries were especially loved by dining staff. Because of her outstanding performance in her pastry position, the company transferred her to the cold rolling plant restaurant and the steel plant restaurant in Jingtang factory to act as the pastry class monitor. In her new position, she gave full play to her technical expertise, leading everyone to create a variety of new pastries, meeting the dining needs of employees to the greatest possible extent, and winning herself a good reputation through her work.

As a female baker, she had to deal with more difficulties than male bakers. First of all, her physical strength was a big problem. As you can imagine, her workload was intense, as she had to roll hundreds of pieces of dough and make more than ten kinds of pastries every day. However, Li Dandan's professionalism was admired by all the male colleagues around her. She often said: "If I’m going to do something, I want to do be the best at it." In order to ensure the employees could eat their fill of delicious food, she studied hard and constantly innovated. The key to making steamed buns is the stuffing. The most commonly used seasonings for stuffing are oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and MSG. In order to make the stuffing delicious, she carefully thought over the ingredients and practiced repeatedly, adding the appropriate amount of hoisin sauce, spicy numbing umami seasoning, spices, oyster sauce and other seasonings to make the steamed buns even tastier. The “Chinese hamburger”, made by Li Dandan and her colleagues with great care, was crisp on the outside and tender in the inside, full of delicious meat. It became a hot item on the daily menu.

In 2019, Li Dandan was transferred to the company's food R&D office. With her dedication and excellent business skills, she soon became the main force of the R&D office. In order to introduce old Beijing cuisine into the Jingtang factory, she and her colleagues went out to Beijing Laomenkuang Catering, Huguo Temple Snacks and other companies to do on on-the-spot research, carefully studying their production techniques and processing technology. Through their constant efforts, the delicacies of old Beijing cuisine, such as Mending meat cakes, stewed pork offal, fried liver, red soup hand-pulled noodles, and mutton soup, elaborately made by Li Dandan and her team, were warmly welcomed by dining staff as soon as they were launched at the Shoushi restaurant in front of Jingtang factory. In addition, Li Dandan was not satisfied with the pastry production in the staff restaurant. She also learned from pastry masters and mastered the production of various banquet pastries, such as clear-layered pastry, dark-layered pastry and mixed pastry. In this professional skills competition, she won first place with her skilful skills in rolling dumpling wrappers and pleating buns and pastry.

The catering industry is a busy industry, providing three meals each and every day. As a woman, whether in her position as a baker, pastry class monitor, or professional researcher, she has always arrived at work early and worked until late at night.

When she served as the pastry class monitor in the cold rolling and steel-making restaurants, because the two restaurants both served first-line production units, there would be lots of diners crowded together. In case of major maintenance, the restaurant work would be even more arduous, as they not only had to ensure the normal running of the restaurant, but also had to provide on-site dining service. As the backbone of the restaurant, she always was the first to step forward, never caring about her personal gains and losses. She often went on-site to serve meals right after finishing her pastry class work. Sometimes she worked overtime until very late. In addition, whenever there was a shortage of staff in major festivals, she always took the initiative to take up the work of missing staff, such as washing dishes, cleaning, starting the meal service and selling meals. Driven by her dedication and exemplary role, the staff of the restaurant focused on providing better catering services for the staff of the Jingtang factory. Everyone offered ideas and tried to contribute in the context of their positions.

Hard work will have its just reward. Li Dandan is the perfect example of the meaning of the word "dedication". "I will live up to the hopes and encouragement of leaders and colleagues at all levels, continuing to make persistent efforts, making full use of this demonstrative role to make even more outstanding achievements." Li Dandan said firmly.