Sanyuan Puffed Sesame Rice Candy 三原蓼花糖
Sanyuan Puffed Sesame Rice Candy is featured among the local specialties of Shaanxi.
Sanyuan Puffed Sesame Rice Candy (三原蓼花糖) is a glutinous-rice sweet with a golden surface covered in sesame and a fine, mesh-like interior. White sugar and maltose syrup join the rice and sesame in its preparation.
How it is made
Making the sweet involves more than thirty operations, grouped around preparing the pieces, puffing and shaping. The result has a crisp, fragrant sweetness and a cottony network inside. These ingredients and stages are recorded in the Sanyuan County Gazetteer, reproduced by Shaanxi Normal University.
Where it comes from
The gazetteer dates production to the Ming dynasty. It records the earlier name Liaohua (辽化糖), which changed to the present Chinese spelling during the Qing, when the sweet also served as imperial tribute.
After 1949, makers developed the inherited process and expanded production. The gazetteer also describes similar sweets being made in other counties and records sales of Sanyuan’s (三原) candy in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-26. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.