Tujia Crumbly Baked Flatbread 土家掉渣烧饼

How it is made

Haiwainet, the People's Daily overseas website, relaying a 2018 report by Taiwan's Economic Daily News (經濟日報), describes the method. Wheat flour is the main ingredient; a filling of meat and spring onion is mixed in and the dough is shaped into oval cakes, which are brushed with soy sauce and sprinkled with sesame. They bake in a pottery vat or a brick oven fired with charcoal: the baker reaches bare-handed into the oven to slap each cake onto its inner wall, where the heat of the wall cooks it.

Flavour and texture

The baked flatbread is golden, crisp outside and soft inside, with a salty, savoury taste that Haiwainet compares to roasted meat floss. There are two stories behind the word diaozha (掉渣, 'dropping crumbs'): the crust is so flaky that crumbs fall as you eat, or it is a pun on tudiaozha (土掉渣, 'rustic to the core'), since this is a flatbread of the Tujia (土家族). Its common nickname is 'Chinese pizza'.

Where it comes from

The Enshi prefecture government traces the flatbread back more than a hundred years, to migrants who brought the method to Enshi. The Tujia adapted it to their own tastes as a flatbread with filling scattered over the surface, and it became an essential food for both the Tujia and Miao of Enshi. A legend that Tujia tribes sent it as tribute to the kings of Chu is doubted by Haiwainet, because the main ingredient is wheat and the Tujia areas of Enshi seem to have had no wheat-growing tradition.

A fast-food version became a craze in 2005. Chinese Wikipedia records that Yan Lin (晏琳), a Tujia woman from Enshi, created it in Wuhan (武汉) in March 2005 from her hometown's traditional flatbread, spread with minced meat seasoned with garlic and cumin. Within months it had reached most large cities, with more than a thousand shops thought to be selling it in Beijing alone; by mid-2006 most had closed or switched to other food.