Pit-Roasted Food 坑烤
Pit-Roasted Food is featured among the local specialties of Heilongjiang.
Pit-Roasted Food (坑烤) is the pit roasting of Daqing (大庆), Heilongjiang: seasoned food wrapped in tin foil and cooked slowly in a red-hot earth pit rather than over an open flame. A 2025 People's Daily Online feature says that any talk of Daqing food has to mention pit roasting, and calls it another calling card for a city whose first is oil.
How it is made
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes the original method: broken bricks are stacked into a tower inside an earth pit and burned red-hot with planks and other fuel. The food is marinated in seasoning, wrapped in tin foil, coated with yellow clay, buried in the pit and covered with fine earth, then left for two hours before it is taken out to eat.
The improved version seals the marinated food in foil and earth and sets it on an iron grid in the red-hot pit. People's Daily Online describes this as a smokeless braise with controlled heat, in which the foil keeps the moisture in and the seasoning soaks into the food.
Ingredients
People's Daily Online says that over many rounds of improvement the range has grown from roast meat alone to potatoes, eggs, maize, free-range chicken, squab, quail and lamb ribs, summed up in the saying 'eight pit roasts' (地坑八烤). A 2025 Tide News (潮新闻) feature adds large pieces of pork belly, leg of lamb and steak, which it says come out crisp outside and tender inside, as well as goose eggs and carp, and credits the improved method with a scorched aroma and a note of pine wood.
Where it comes from
The method comes from the old rural Northeast, where people roasted food in stove pits or in holes dug at the edge of the fields; that is where the name comes from. During the Daqing oilfield campaign (大庆石油会战), workers who spent long spells in the field dug pits on the open wasteland during breaks to roast potatoes and maize, which saved time at meals.
Tiedong Village (铁东村) in Longfeng Town, Longfeng District (龙凤区), is billed as 'China's first pit-roast village' (中国坑烤第一村). The village borders the Longfeng Wetland Nature Reserve (龙凤湿地自然保护区) to the east and has a street of restaurants that mainly serve pit-roasted food. Longfeng District held its sixth pit-roast culture festival there on 17 June 2023.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.