Hugou Baked Flatbread 湖沟烧饼

How it is made

Bakers use flour from the first milling of local wheat, which gives an elastic, good-coloured dough. The kneaded dough is coated with prepared cooking oil and left to rest. The filling is donkey fat mixed with chopped spring onion, salt, pepper and ground star anise; the donkey fat makes the bread flakier, but it has grown scarce and lard is increasingly used instead.

Each piece of dough is pressed with the palm into a long strip, stretched by hand, spread with the seasoning and rolled up; some bakers reach as many as 30 layers. The roll is pressed into a round by hand, scattered with sesame seeds and stuck inside the oven, and it is done in two minutes. The county government counts the oven as one of the secrets: it is fired locally, and Hugou's sandy soil is prized for making such ovens.

Flavour and texture

A proper Hugou Baked Flatbread is the size of a palm, a little over half a cun (半寸, a Chinese inch) thick, with seven or eight layers inside and out around a filling of spring onion and dough. The crust is the colour of crab roe, crisp outside and soft inside, and not greasy; the sesame seeds are golden, and the bread glows translucent when held up to the light.

How it is eaten

It is best eaten hot beside the oven. On market days in Hugou, local youcha (油茶) is sold from a huge galvanised-iron kettle: a thick, greyish-brown gruel of tofu skin, wheat gluten, peanut halves and black sesame, thickened with starch. A bowl of youcha, two flatbreads and a little black pickle make the classic Hugou breakfast, and people in Guzhen serve the flatbread to friends and relatives visiting from elsewhere.

Where it comes from

Hugou takes its name from a ditch dug at the end of the Yuan dynasty to drain long-standing floods. A local legend says farmers brought flatbreads to the rebel soldiers of Chen Sheng (陈胜) and Wu Guang (吴广) after their uprising at Dazexiang (大泽乡), and that the breads shattered when riders dropped them, earning the name 'horse-hoof crisp' (马蹄酥). The present form was developed in the 1930s and 1940s by the baker Huang Kainian (黄开年), whose five apprentices ran flatbread shops in Guzhen and Suzhou (宿州). The flatbread became a municipal intangible cultural heritage item in 2012, and in 2021 Hugou town set out, with the county culture centre, to prepare a nomination for the provincial list.