Yushan Flaky Pastry Cakes 郁山擀酥饼
Yushan Flaky Pastry Cakes is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
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Yushan Flaky Pastry Cakes (郁山擀酥饼) are baked flaky cakes from Yushan (郁山) in Pengshui Miao and Tujia Autonomous County (彭水苗族土家族自治县), Chongqing, made from fine wheat flour with more than twenty other ingredients. Their making technique is on the second batch of Chongqing's municipal list of representative intangible cultural heritage.
How it is made
Fine wheat flour is the main ingredient. The other ingredients, more than twenty in all, include soybeans, peanuts, sesame, rock sugar, white sugar, maltose syrup, osmanthus and lard.
The Pengshui county government lists the steps as mixing the dough, making the flaky pastry, making the outer skin, wrapping the pastry in the skin, rolling it out (擀酥, the step that also names the cake), wrapping the filling, shaping, coating with sesame, baking, and finally sorting and packing. The pastry, the filling and the baking are the critical stages, and because the texture depends mainly on the pastry and the filling, makers usually keep those two secret. The cakes are made by hand without additives.
Flavour and forms
The baked cakes are golden, fragrant, sweet, flaky and crisp, and are said to leave "丹桂盈口" (a mouthful of osmanthus) after eating. The range covers plain flaky cakes, mooncakes, stamped cakes (印花饼) and arhat cakes (罗汉饼), with fillings such as osmanthus and sweet bean paste; the mooncakes, stamped cakes and arhat cakes are shaped in wooden moulds. Because no preservatives are used, the cakes keep for three months in spring and summer and six months in autumn and winter.
Where it comes from
The cake was developed during the Jiaqing reign of the Qing dynasty by a master baker of the Yan Fuchun shop (严富春斋), and the recipe has been handed down for more than two hundred years. In the Republican period the cakes spread quickly in Yushan, and the Yin (殷) family also learned to make them. After 1949 the Yushan district supply and marketing cooperative set up a factory and produced them on a larger scale. When the market opened up in the 1980s the cooperative stopped production, and several makers each opened a family workshop to carry on supplying the cakes.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.