Chaopai Flatbread 朝牌饼
Chaopai Flatbread is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
Chaopai Flatbread (朝牌饼) is the long rectangular baked cake of Huai'an (淮安) in Jiangsu. The Huai'an CPPCC cultural-history site explains the name: in the 1970s and 1980s most local baked cakes were rectangular, shaped like the hu (笏), the tablet that officials held at imperial court audiences, so they were generally called chaopai bing, court-tablet cakes.
How it is made
Most Huai'an baked cakes are cooked stuck to the inner wall of an oven. The oven is made from a length of large sheet-iron drum with a fireclay chamber set inside and fired with coal. The baker cuts a piece of fermented dough, presses and stretches it with the palm to the right thickness, and cuts it into rectangles. Each piece is brushed with syrup, coated with sesame and pressed onto the oven wall. After seven or eight minutes it comes out brown and crisp on the surface with a loose, soft crumb.
How it is eaten
The Huai'an CPPCC site names one way above the rest: a chaopai bing fresh from the oven wrapped around a youtiao (油条), the fried dough stick, straight out of the oil.
Few shops in Huai'an sell nothing but baked cakes. Most stalls sit beside housing estates, on roadsides and at market-town crossroads, or run as a sideline of a breakfast shop, usually next to a youtiao fryer, with soy milk, rice porridge and Huai'an spicy soup (辣汤) served at tables alongside.
Another Huai'an plate, described on the same site, puts three local foods together: salty pickled turnip (大头菜), crisp chasan (茶馓) and chaopai, which it describes as a kind of chuibing (炊饼), a traditional word for plain wheat buns and cakes.
More dishes to compare
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Huai'an Fine Fried Dough Twists 淮安茶馓 →
Huai'an chasan, the city's thin strands of fried dough, is eaten with chaopai and salty pickled turnip in the same local plate.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.