Guichi Pan-Fried Stuffed Cakes 贵池小粑
Guichi Pan-Fried Stuffed Cakes is featured among the local specialties of Anhui.
Guichi Pan-Fried Stuffed Cakes (贵池小粑) are small leavened-dough cakes with a vegetable filling, fried in rapeseed oil until golden and crisp. They carry the name of Guichi (贵池) in Chizhou (池州), Anhui, and Chizhou Daily (池州日报) calls them one of the breakfasts Chizhou people like best.
Ingredients
The wrapper is made from dough raised with old dough (老面), a piece kept back from an earlier batch, rather than with yeast. Fillings include green beans, shredded radish, glass noodles and pickled greens; cabbage and salted cabbage are also used. In a report on a breakfast shop on Cuibai South Road (翠柏南路) in the city centre, one regular customer names radish and glass noodles as her favourite fillings.
How it is made
The shop owner interviewed by Chizhou Daily divides the work into three steps: raising the dough, mixing the filling and frying, with the dough the most important. He says a wrapper raised with old dough soaks up the rapeseed oil better in the pan and eats softer, but the rise is harder to control, and a poorly raised batch gives a hard skin.
In his shop the non-spicy fillings, green beans and cabbage, are blanched and then dressed with rendered lard. The salted cabbage, glass noodles and shredded radish are dressed with chilli powder and heated rapeseed oil. His father, who taught him, used to stir-fry all the fillings in advance instead. Dough is portioned, the filling is wrapped inside, and the cakes are laid out in large flat pans with rapeseed oil and fried until golden and crisp.
Where it comes from
Guichi xiaoba is one of the 200 dishes chosen in the provincial 'Anhui good flavours, famous snacks of a hundred counties' (皖美好味道·百县名小吃) selection run by the Anhui Department of Culture and Tourism, where it is listed under Chizhou. People's Daily Online printed the list in January 2022 in its report on the opening of a food street for the selected snacks in Hefei (合肥).
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.
Image credits & notes (1)
- Freshly fried Guichi xiao ba at a Guichi District morning market stall in Chizhou · 池州贵池早市摊点现炸的贵池小粑Photo: William Ng · CC BY-SA 4.0 · taken 2022-08-09Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited. Thumbnails may show a cropped view.
