Jianbing Crepe with Fried Dough 煎饼果子

Jianbing Crepe with Fried Dough (煎饼果子) is a Tianjin (天津) street snack with a thin pancake, egg, sauces and a fried filling. It is also written jianbing guozi (煎饼馃子). The filling can be a dough stick or a thin crisp sheet.

How it is made

A mixed-grain batter based mainly on mung-bean flour is spread into a thin pancake. An egg is broken onto it and spread across the surface, followed by sauces such as sweet bean paste, fermented bean curd and chilli. The pancake is then rolled around the filling.

The dough stick is called guozi (馃子), while the thin sheet is guobi (馃篦). Chinese Wikipedia describes the pancake as soft and fragrant, the stick as oily and slightly salty, and the sheet as crisp and aromatic.

A Tianjin tradition

Chinese Wikipedia associates the snack with Tianjin’s wharf culture, while noting that its precise origin is unknown. It identifies a written mention in the Tianjin supplement of Ta Kung Pao (大公报) on 20 November 1933. The preparation craft entered Tianjin’s fourth municipal intangible cultural heritage list in June 2017.

In Tianjin, the snack was initially eaten mainly late at night and later became a common everyday breakfast.

Source introduction: Wikipedia contributors: 煎饼馃子 · CC BY-SA 4.0. English translation and adaptation of the cited encyclopedia revision.