Gengfuxing Flaky Flatbread 耿福兴酥烧饼

How it is made

Each cake is built from a wrapping dough (皮面), a shortening dough (酥面) and a filling. Two parts of wrapping dough enclose one part of shortening dough, the filling goes in, and every cake is rolled out one at a time and baked. At a 2025 open day held with the Jinghu market-regulation bureau, the restaurant's former manager and former party secretary said the pastry has to reach 16 layers.

In the old shop the cakes were slapped in order onto the hot wall of a charcoal-fired clay oven. A full load was 80 cakes; the oven door was then closed and they baked over a low, even heat for about five to six minutes. Gengfuxing began trying a temperature-controlled electric oven in 1978.

Flavour and texture

The finished flatbread is golden on both faces like a crab shell ('crab-shell yellow', 蟹壳黄) and flaky inside and out. It tastes salty and savoury and is known in Wuhu for being fragrant, flaky and crisp. A typical Gengfuxing breakfast is a basket of crab-roe soup dumplings and a bowl of shrimp-roe noodles with one or two of these flatbreads.

Where it comes from

Gengfuxing began in the late Qing dynasty, when the brothers Geng Changhong (耿长宏) and Geng Changfu (耿长富), newcomers to Wuhu from Jiangsu, opened a breakfast shop at Sanjiekou (三街口) selling fried dough sticks and rice porridge. It became a noodle house, and flaky flatbreads were added when the flatbread master Yan Kaiyin (严开银) joined the business. The Gengfuxing signboard went up in the early 1920s.

The restaurant closed in 1997 and reopened on Phoenix Food Street in 2002 under Gao Shuhong (高述红), who had bought the name. In 2006 the Ministry of Commerce named Gengfuxing in its first batch of 'China Time-honored Brands' (中华老字号), and in 2008 the making techniques of its three big items, the flaky flatbread among them, were entered on Anhui's provincial list of intangible cultural heritage.