Savoury Breakfast Oil Tea 油茶

Savoury Breakfast Oil Tea (油茶) is a thick, hot, savoury drink of flour fried in peanut oil, sold on the streets of Suzhou (宿州), the city in northern Anhui where Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan and Anhui meet. A food feature in the Suzhou paper Fuxiao News (拂晓报), with dish texts supplied by the Suzhou culture and tourism bureau, lists it as Old Suxian oil tea (老宿县油茶) and calls it a local snack with close to a hundred years of history.

How it is made

Wheat flour is the main ingredient. Peanut oil is heated and the flour is stir-fried in it over a low flame until it smells toasted and turns yellow. Fennel seed (小茴香), toasted sesame and cooked peeled peanuts go in next with cold water, and the pot is boiled while the cook keeps scraping the bottom with a large iron ladle. Strips of wheat gluten (面筋丝) and shredded thin tofu sheet (千张丝) are added, and once the mixture has thickened it is finished with salt and the cook's own seasoning.

Flavour and texture

Fuxiao News describes Savoury Breakfast Oil Tea as smooth and oily, a little pasty in the mouth, with a strong aroma of oil. The crisp peanuts and sesame are chewed together with the fried tofu-sheet and gluten strips.

How it is eaten

In Suzhou's streets and lanes the oil tea is kept in large iron kettles wrapped in cotton cloth to hold the heat, and it is meant to be drunk hot. A 2022 Fuxiao News commentary names it, with sa soup (sa汤) and eel chilli soup (鳝鱼辣汤), as one of the three soups of a Suzhou breakfast, in a city whose cooking leans towards salty-savoury flavours with pepper.