Xiting Crisp Layered Biscuits 西亭脆饼
Xiting Crisp Layered Biscuits is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
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Xiting Crisp Layered Biscuits (西亭脆饼) are flaky baked biscuits from Xiting (西亭) in Tongzhou district (通州区), Nantong (南通), Jiangsu, which the Tongzhou district government describes as an intangible-heritage food.
How it is made
At the Xiting biscuit factory, a works with more than forty years of history, the dough is mixed with water held at 25°C and left to rest for a full forty minutes. It is rolled as thin as a cicada's wing, and the flaky layers are built by folding it over and over by hand until it has twenty-eight layers.
Baking has moved from coal-fired copper ovens, which left a smoky taste and blackened, scorched bases, to twelve smokeless rotating ovens held at a constant 160°C, which heat the biscuits evenly to a golden colour. The hand kneading and the twenty-eight-layer folding are kept unchanged.
Flavour and texture
Layer after layer flakes away into crumbs, and the biscuits are not oily or greasy. Fresh from the oven they smell of wheat and olive oil. Newer lines, aimed at buyers looking for lower fat, use olive oil or corn oil and add coarse grains such as oats, buckwheat and sorghum.
Where it comes from
The Tongzhou district government lists the honours of Xiting Crisp Layered Biscuits as a gold award at an international food exposition in 1995, recognition as a Jiangsu famous-brand product and a China well-known product, and, in 2024, a place among Jiangsu's first provincial intangible-heritage workshops.
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Suzhou rice-flour sweets 苏式糕团 →
Suzhou's rice-flour sweets set beside a Nantong wheat biscuit whose flakiness comes from twenty-eight hand-folded layers.
Questions before you order
What makes the biscuits flaky?
The dough is rolled very thin and folded by hand again and again until it has twenty-eight layers.
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.