Steamed Grated Potato 洋芋擦擦
Steamed Grated Potato is featured among the local specialties of Shaanxi.
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Steamed Grated Potato (洋芋擦擦) is a Yan'an (延安) dish of grated potato strips tossed with flour and seasonings and steamed, then either dressed with a sauce or fried again.
How it is made
The Yan'an Culture and Tourism Bureau describes the method: the cook runs potatoes over a grater (擦子, "cazi") to make strips about one cun (寸, a traditional unit of roughly three centimetres) long. The strips are mixed with Sichuan pepper, shredded scallion, ground ginger and salt, stirred together with flour, and steamed in a steamer until cooked.
How it is eaten
There are two ways to finish Steamed Grated Potato. In the first, the freshly steamed strips are tossed with a sauce of garlic juice, soy sauce, vinegar, salt, chopped scallion, oil and MSG. In the second, the steamed batch is left to cool and then stir-fried again, the way rice is fried; the bureau says it tastes better when fried quickly over high heat in a wok. It is eaten in every season.
Where it comes from
The Yan'an city government lists Steamed Grated Potato among the city's traditional foods, and locally it also goes by the names "yangyu bula" (洋芋不拉) and "yangyu kule" (洋芋库勒). In 2014 it was among the dishes shown in "Secret Realm" (秘境), an episode of the second season of CCTV's documentary series A Bite of China (舌尖上的中国).
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.