Cartwheel Fried Pastry 车轮饼

How it is made

The filling starts with raw pork fat chopped into small dice, mixed with crushed rock sugar and soft white sugar, candied kumquat, osmanthus sugar, walnut kernels, melon seeds and red and green candied threads.

The wrapper uses two doughs: a water-oil dough of fine flour kneaded with water and oil, and a flaky dough of fine flour worked with oil alone. A disc of water-oil dough is covered with flaky dough, rolled into a tube, cut in half, pressed flat, worked together and rolled thin. Because oil and water do not mix, the two doughs keep clear boundaries and a wave pattern shows on the sheet.

The filling goes between two sheets, the edges are pinched shut and crimped into a decorative border, and the pastry is fried in hot lard until the surface is golden, the inside is cooked through and the smell rises.

Flavour and texture

The Sucheng district government describes it as fragrant, flaky, crisp and sweet, and noisy to eat. In the town's story the audible crunch comes from the rock sugar in the filling.

Where it comes from

The district tells a legend of its origin. In the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty a small Yanghe tavern, the Sanqiao (三巧), was run by Zhang Shanqiao (张善巧), his wife and his daughter. The emperor and the scholar Ji Xiaolan (纪晓岚), travelling as merchants, took offence at the boastful couplet on its door and demanded a cake shaped like their cartwheel that was golden, flaky, sweet and crunchy. The family devised the pork-fat filling with nuts and candied fruit, the two-dough wrapper, and rock sugar for the crunch. In the story the pleased emperor wrote a poem praising the Yanghe cake as better than the pastries of the capital.