Tianmen Guokui Flatbread 天门锅盔

Tianmen Guokui Flatbread (天门锅盔) is a baked flatbread from Tianmen (天门), Hubei, made by slapping pieces of risen dough onto a guokui oven. In Ganyi (干驿), a town in the middle of the Jianghan Plain (江汉平原) where Tianmen held its first guokui contest in 2021, the town government's profile calls crisp sesame guokui (酥麻锅盔) the undisputed star of the Ganyi breakfast for centuries.

How it is made

The steps show up in the judging of the first Tianmen Guokui Innovation Contest, which the Tianmen Bureau of Commerce, the city trade union federation and the Ganyi town government held in Ganyi on 29 May 2021. Contestants raised and kneaded the dough, filled it and slapped the pieces onto the oven, and judges scored them on the dough, rolling it into strips, cutting the pieces, sticking them to the oven, control of the heat, and look and taste. A specially built oven at the contest bore the name 'Ganyi's number-one guokui oven under heaven', and the loaves came out smelling strongly of sesame.

Ingredients

The guokui at the 2021 contest ranged from traditional kinds, such as old-dough guokui raised with a fermented-dough starter (老面), soybean-paste guokui, pork guokui and pickled-vegetable guokui, to new flavours such as durian, cheese and banana.

Flavour and texture

In Yuxin (渔薪), another Tianmen town, Hubei Daily describes guokui baked over charcoal as crisp and browned outside, soft and chewy inside, and more fragrant the longer it is chewed. At Ganyi's crayfish food festival, which opened the same day as the 2021 contest and included it, visitors could eat Ganyi guokui alongside Tianmen's 'ten big bowls' (天门十大碗) of steamed dishes.