Jieyang Ping-Pong Rice Cakes 揭阳乒乓粿

How it is made

The filling is built on binpei fu (槟醅麸), a meal made from unhulled glutinous rice. The grain is sealed in an iron can and roasted again and again until it swells and bursts, then sieved to remove the husks and crushed into a coarse meal.

For the skin, glutinous rice flour is kneaded with a little peanut oil and white sugar, steamed, and rolled into thin rounds. Each round is filled with the roasted meal, white sugar, sesame, peanuts, orange cake (橙糕) and fried shallot oil (葱珠油), pinched into a flattened round, set on a piece of bean-curd skin (腐膜) and steamed.

Flavour and texture

The Rongcheng district culture and tourism bureau sums the cake up as a soft skin around a fragrant, crisp, sweet filling. After steaming the skin turns semi-translucent, and the roasted meal and sesame show faintly through it; the steamed cake is eaten hot or cold.

The same bureau calls the fried version the tastiest: the cake is dipped in beaten egg, fried golden in oil and eaten straight from the pan. The thin skin turns crisp and smells strongly of egg, while the filling is sweet and powdery, carries the scent of roasted grain and melts in the mouth, with bits of peanut and sesame giving it texture.

Where it comes from

The cake, also called binpei kueh (槟醅粿), developed from shuqu kueh (鼠曲粿), an old Jieyang snack in which cudweed (鼠曲草) is mixed into glutinous rice flour to make a wrapper that is filled and steamed. Its name comes from the roasting: the grain makes a popping noise close to 'pingpang' (乒乓), and in the Jieyang dialect 'binpei' sounds the same as 'pingpang', so the cake came to be known as ping-pong kueh.