Puffed Fried Rice-Flour Balls 煎堆
Puffed Fried Rice-Flour Balls is featured among the local specialties of Hainan.
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Puffed Fried Rice-Flour Balls (煎堆) are fried glutinous rice-flour snacks made across Hainan, where they are commonly called "zhendai" (珍袋); the best-known come from Jinshan (锦山) in Wenchang (文昌).
Where it comes from
The snack is popular around Wenchang, a well-known home area of overseas Chinese, and is especially famous in Jinshan, whose dialect name for it is "Jinshan hollow zhendai" (锦山空心珍袋). Jinshan's version is put at several hundred years old and is given locally as a gift at celebrations. Experts trace the snack to a fried cake called dui that predates the Tang dynasty; the Tang poet Wang Fanzhi (王梵志) wrote of loving oil-fried dui as much as jackfruit.
Hainan makes several kinds: solid balls with a filling, filled layered pieces, and hollow balls fried with no filling at all.
How it is made
The Jinshan shell is made from top-quality glutinous rice, sometimes coated with sesame, and fried in peanut oil. Its filling can run to more than ten ingredients, vegetarian or with meat, sweet or plain, cut in chunks or shreds.
For the hollow kind, a fifth of the glutinous rice flour is mixed with water, rolled into a lump and boiled, then kneaded back into the rest of the flour with white sugar until the dough is elastic and sticky. Each piece is rounded, flattened and pinched into a hollow ball with a small hole, air is blown in and the hole is quickly sealed. The balls go into oil at 120°C and are turned with long chopsticks until they double in size, then left to cool and fried again, three or four times over, until they swell to the size of a volleyball.
A simpler version, the oil fruit (油果), is made from glutinous rice flour rubbed with syrup of Sichuan sugar (川糖), the longer the softer. The dough is rolled into balls the size of a ping-pong ball, coated with white sesame and fried deep red. At New Year the oil fruit are steamed soft and eaten with wine, and they are described as a dish no meal of the New Year period goes without.
Flavour and texture
The Jinshan filled kind has a crisp skin, a fragrant filling and a strong flavour. The hollow kind comes out golden, round and puffed, with a thin, crisp shell and a sweet taste; it is cut into pieces with scissors or broken apart by hand to eat.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.