Jian'ou Sesame Baked Cakes 建瓯光饼

How it is made

The best Jian'ou cakes come out of a high oven (高炉). This is a traditional cake oven raised on a wooden frame: a brick base with a large earthenware jar turned upside down on top of it, cut with an opening the size of an oven door. The baker sticks the raw cakes to the inside wall on the left, the right and the top and bakes them over fierce charcoal. When they are nearly done he splashes water to damp the fire, so that steam instantly fills the oven. One firing can hold as many as a hundred cakes.

Jian'ou also has a low oven (矮炉). The high oven concentrates the fire, bakes more cakes per firing and gives better ones; the low oven has weaker heat, holds fewer cakes and turns out slightly poorer ones. Locals came to use 'low-oven cake' (矮炉饼) for someone of low skill who handles things badly.

Flavour and texture

The four-part formula describes the ideal cake: a golden, translucent top, a clean silvery-white rim, a base as crisp as iron and a centre that is soft and fragrant like cotton. Jian'ou sets its guangbing apart from those of other places by these quality marks.

How it is eaten

One hole punched in the face marks a plain guangbing; two holes mark a meat cake (肉饼). Besides the filled meat cake, Jian'ou bakers make ginger and spring onion cakes (姜葱饼), sesame cakes (芝麻饼) with white sesame pressed into the surface, and crisp lard cakes (酥油饼), for which the flour is kneaded with lard instead of water.

The cakes also go into dishes. Guangbing stir-fried with pork intestine is a Jian'ou folk dish with its own local saying in its praise. A jiabing (夹饼) is a cake split open and filled with slices of pork belly and pieces of spring onion; other fillings include dried stinky tofu, preserved egg, fried egg, pickled greens, youtiao (油炸桧) and pork cracklings.

Where it comes from

The Jian'ou county gazetteer (建瓯县志) records that in 1562 Qi Jiguang (戚继光) led his troops from Zhejiang into Fujian to fight the Japanese pirates. As they passed through the county, local people saw the soldiers eating dry cakes that tasted good and kept well, copied them and called them guangbing. Locals also call it the 'patriotic cake' (爱国饼).

No Qingming tomb-sweeping in Jian'ou is complete without guangbing, and the cakes are a required offering to deities and ancestors. The Nanping culture and tourism bureau lists the Jian'ou high-oven guangbing craft (建瓯高炉光饼制作技艺) as a provincial intangible cultural heritage item.

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