Huahudie Numbing-Spicy Snack 花蝴蝶麻辣

Where it comes from

Information Daily (信息日报) traces the snack to 1998, when Ouyang Shengzhong (欧阳生忠) left the countryside to pay for his four children's schooling and set up a street stall in Pingxiang with one table and two glass jars, selling numbing-spicy bean-curd skin. He threaded six garlic-flavoured bean-curd sheets on each bamboo skewer, and the skewer looked like a butterfly in flight; he also likened the customers crowding round his stall to butterflies circling flowers, and named the business Huahudie.

By 2008 Huahudie had become one of the representative snacks of Pingxiang. Ten years later the Jiangxi Department of Commerce (江西省商务厅) certified it as a Jiangxi Time-honoured Brand (江西老字号). Jiangxi Huahudie Food Co. (江西花蝴蝶食品有限公司) was set up in 2019 and opened a 12,000-square-metre central factory. In 2025 Pingxiang Daily (萍乡日报) described the company as mainly producing numbing-spicy bean-curd skin and other numbing-spicy snacks, sold through its own chain shops.

Flavour and texture

The original product is garlic-flavoured bean-curd skin (蒜香豆皮) seasoned to be numbing and hot. A Tianjin customer quoted by Information Daily says his parents like Huahudie's snacks because they are fragrant and chewy and do not stick to the teeth. The range has since grown from garlic bean-curd skin to seven lines of snacks, including other soy products, vegetable snacks and aquatic products; the Huahudie shop that opened on Zhubao Street (珠宝街) in Nanchang (南昌) in January 2024 sold numbing-spicy bean-curd skin, garlic spicy strips (蒜香辣片), edamame, flavoured tofu and cartilage meatballs.

How it is eaten

Huahudie Numbing-Spicy Snack is eaten as a casual snack: Information Daily's headline calls it a companion for binge-watching television, and a customer from Hangzhou (杭州) quoted in the same report likes to eat the spicy strips while watching a series. She first came across them after climbing Mount Wugong (武功山) in Pingxiang in 2019.