Barkol Steamed Bread 巴里坤蒸饼
Barkol Steamed Bread is featured among the local specialties of Xinjiang.
Barkol Steamed Bread (巴里坤蒸饼) is a steamed cake from Barkol Kazakh Autonomous County (巴里坤哈萨克自治县) in Hami (哈密), Xinjiang. China Ethnic News calls it a traditional Barkol food, and it is one of the New Year breads (年馍, nianmo) that Barkol families and bakeries make for the Spring Festival, in both large and small sizes.
Where it comes from
Xinjiang Daily describes New Year bread-making as a long-standing Barkol custom handed down from the Central Plains (中原). Households used to start at Laba (腊八), the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, turning out large and small steamed cakes together with flower rolls, gourd-shaped dry buns, fried dough and baked flatbreads. The paper says the breads smell of flaxseed oil, fenugreek and new-season wheat, and that Barkol is an important spring-wheat area whose flour is high in protein and gluten.
Huazhuangzi Village (花庄子村) in Huayuan Township (花园乡) has the best-known New Year breads in the county, and the county held its first New Year bread festival there before the 2023 Spring Festival. That summer Xinjiang Daily found 74-year-old villager Zhang Guiying (张桂英) making large steamed cakes in the village's new workshop, where New Year breads are now made all year round.
How it is eaten
Barkol's New Year breads are a fixed part of the New Year's Eve dinner and other festivals, and stand for a life that keeps rising, according to the Xinjiang news platform Shiliuyun (石榴云). Yang Yanyun (杨艳云), representative bearer of the Xinjiang regional intangible-heritage item for Han traditional festival wheaten-food making, has for 20 years started at 4 a.m. to have baked buns and steamed cakes ready before people go to work.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.