Fried Flatbread Rolled with Sticky Rice Cake 油饼卷糕

Fried Flatbread Rolled with Sticky Rice Cake (油饼卷糕) is a Dragon Boat Festival food of Wuwei (武威) in Gansu: a steamed cake of glutinous rice with red dates and raisins, rolled inside a freshly fried wheat flatbread. China News Service Gansu calls it Wuwei's own kind of zongzi (粽子), the leaf-wrapped rice dumpling eaten at the festival elsewhere in China.

How it is made

Two things are made side by side in the days before the Dragon Boat Festival. Glutinous rice is washed and soaked, mixed with red dates, raisins and similar dried fruit, and steamed in a steamer until the rice has taken in the sweetness of the fruit and turns soft and translucent. Meanwhile the flatbread, youbingzi (油饼子), is fried: a sheet of dough is laid in hot oil, where it puffs up quickly and turns golden and crisp. The soft rice cake is then rolled up inside the crisp flatbread.

Flavour and texture

Fried Flatbread Rolled with Sticky Rice Cake pairs a crisp, golden outside with a soft, sticky and sweet rice filling. In Wuwei the golden flatbread is taken as a sign of wealth and the sweet rice cake as a wish for a life that goes smoothly.

Where it comes from

China News Service Gansu retells a local legend for its origin. Rice dumplings wrapped in leaves reached Liangzhou (凉州), the old name of Wuwei, in the Five Liang (五凉) period, when the Former Qin (前秦) state conquered the Former Liang (前凉) and moved more than ten thousand households from the Jianghan (江汉) region of the middle Yangtze to the Hexi Corridor (河西). The Hexi region is dry and has little rain, so the leaves used for wrapping did not grow well, and Wuwei cooks wrapped the filling in their local fried flatbread instead.

How it is eaten

It is a festival dish made at home: on the morning of the Dragon Boat Festival, families in Wuwei sit down together around the table to eat it.

Questions before you order

Why does Wuwei wrap festival rice in fried bread instead of leaves?

In the local account, the leaves used for rice dumplings grow poorly in the dry Hexi Corridor, so Wuwei used its own fried wheat flatbread as the wrapper.