The Dialectics of Taiwanese Pastries

Baked for various occasions such as religious rituals, betrothals, weddings, and the Lunar New Year, pastries are integral to Taiwanese culture. They are also an essential part of our collective memory. The sweet, fragrant, mushy fillings of dabing pies—be they pineapple purée or bean paste—never fail to bring a blissful smile to our faces. But when egg yolks, meat floss, or chunks of meat are added, they complement the sweet fillings with differing degrees of saltiness. Each bite unleashes a riot of flavors in our mouths.

While marveling at the subtle accord between different flavors in Taiwanese pastries, we wonder why pastry chefs chose to introduce a touch of salt to their sweet confections in the first place. Writer Chang Tsun-chen thinks this may have to do with historical forces. “In the early days, the majority of pastries tasted of flour and sugar, but as living standards rose, savory ingredients such as meat, egg yolks, and even shii­take mushrooms began to be added,” she says.

Opposite flavors

One of the classic fillings of traditional Chinese-style pastries comprises braised meat and shiitake mushrooms. Diced mushrooms and pork are folded into a smooth adzuki-­bean paste before being wrapped in dough by the pastry chef. Jiu Zhen Nan Foods—an old establishment in Southern Taiwan—uses a secret recipe for its braising liquid. The savory ingredients are cooked in the liquid for six to seven hours, forming a beautiful, if incongruous, partnership with the sweet adzuki-bean paste. Like comic pairs with vastly different personalities in TV dramas, the sweet and savory elements, far from canceling each other out, actually complement and enhance each other.

This wonderful balance between contrary flavors also characterizes another classic Taiwanese confection: mung-bean pastries (lüdou peng in Mandarin, lı̍ktāu phòng in Taiwanese). The mung-bean paste has an exquisitely fine texture, with a soft, elegant scent. The filling, together with the crust, easily melts in the mouth.

These pastries take on a different charm when braised meat is incorporated into the filling. To add variety to the smooth, delicate texture of mung-bean paste, Jiu Zhen Nan dices hind-leg pork, braises the meat for several hours until it fully absorbs the flavor of the juice, mixes it with the paste, and wraps pastry dough around the flavorful mixture. Kimber Kuo, Jiu Zhen Nan’s branding director, observes that hind-leg meat is neither too fat nor too lean: we can enjoy the firm meaty texture while taking in a moderate amount of fat. Combined with mung-bean paste, pork makes the filling chewier and serves to soften the sweet taste of the beans.

Speaking of savory ingredients, one must not forget salted egg yolks, which look gorgeously yellow when contrasted with the pastel color of a sweet bean paste. The salting process gives egg yolks a slightly fatty texture. Far from being cloying, mung-bean pastries with egg yolks in them impart a satisfyingly voluptuous mouthfeel. Salted egg yolks lend themselves perfectly to a tremendous array of sweet pastries, from pineapple cakes to cakes with various bean-paste fillings.

However, while these old flavors take many of us on a trip down memory lane, they may not capture ­everyone’s heart. Kuo remembers that her grandfather was an admirer of traditional meat pastries, but as a child she couldn’t make sense of the union of sugar and salt in these pastries. “My grandfather would say: ‘You don’t get it—this is so tasty!’” she tells us with a smile.

Dabing pies are traditionally made using wooden pastry molds. (courtesy of Jiu Zhen Nan Foods)

Devoted to preserving and perpetuating the heritage of Chinese-style pastries, Jiu Zhen Nan not only sells pastries but also organizes pastry workshops for the general public. (courtesy of Jiu Zhen Nan Foods)

In contrast to mung-bean pastries with diced pork in them, Jiu Zhen Nan’s shiitake mushroom and braised meat pastries contain shredded pork, mixed with a paste made of winter melons and adzuki beans. (courtesy of Jiu Zhen Nan Foods)

Jiu Zhen Nan’s most popular products—mung-bean pastries—have various types of fillings: some contain braised meat, others whole egg yolks. There are also plain ones, with just mung-bean paste inside.

Perfect balance

How come some people can’t embrace this fusion of sugar and salt? Most of them would simply say they’re “not used to it,” or “it’s weird.” But actually the combination is by no means rare in Taiwanese cuisine.

“People with Chinese heritage are used to combining many different food ingredients to bring out various tastes and textures,” says Tseng Pin-tsang, an associate research fellow in the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. For example, mothers may put in rock sugar when braising meat, or add granulated sugar when cooking sweet and sour pork ribs. Likewise, savory ingredients are added to sweet pastry fillings to make the sweetness more interestingly complex.

How, then, do pastry chefs strike a nice balance between sugar and salt?

Food writer Chen Jingyi avers that sugar and salt are different by nature. “Salt is the groundwork. It provides strength for the unfurling of flavors. If there isn’t enough salt, flavors will seem to float. Sugar, on the other hand, is the buffer. When food is very spicy, salty, or sour, adding sugar helps soften the flavors.” But Chen also mentions that we are easily cloyed by foods that contain nothing but sugar. A sprinkling of salt will help reduce the cloying sweetness.

In a nutshell, the slightest tilt in the balance will result in a disappointing pastry. If we fail to pin down the ambiguous relationship between the sugar and the salt required for a pastry, their union will be “disgusting,” Chen says. She uses winter melon meat pastries to illustrate how difficult it is to achieve the balance. “Savory ingredients have fat. Fat envelops the salty taste, so the degree of saltiness changes according to the medium to which salt is attached. This ultimately affects the flavors of sweet and savory pastries, as well as the harmony of these flavors in the mouth.” The successful marriage of sweet and savory ingredients has always had to rely on a pastry chef’s technical skill, precision of taste, and culinary ingenuity.

Savory cake (xian dangao).

Five-nut pastry (wuren su).

Winter melon meat pie (donggua roubing).

Salted egg yolk pastry (danhuang su).

The fillings of Zhuqian pastries are carefully mixed by hand. Machine mixing tends to melt the fat, affecting the subsequent baking process.

Zhuqian pastries

Hsinchu’s Zhuqian pastries were invented more than a century ago when Hsin Fu Jean’s founder, Wu-Zhang Huan, hit on the idea of putting crispy fried shallots, pork fat, and other ingredients in a pastry. (Zhuqian is Hsinchu’s old name.)

Manager Wu Canzhong gives us a tour of Hsin Fu Jean’s kitchen, where several workers are busy stirring fillings with their hands. This is one of the manual processes that the company has hung onto despite technological advances. “If we stir the ingredients by machine, we aren’t able to feel the temperature of the lard, and excessive stirring will result in greasiness,” Wu explains.

Like its production processes, Hsin Fu Jean uses time-­honored ingredients that have been passed down from the older generations. Very little has been changed to suit modern palates. Pork fat is one of those things that have been changed. Wu says that traditional Zhuqian pastries were treasured for their mouthfeel and the satisfying explosion of fat in the mouth, so chefs used to put generous chunks of pork fat in them. In response to the growing demand for healthy eating, Hsin Fu Jean is now using much smaller pieces of fat, cutting it by machine rather than by hand. The resulting pastries are no longer greasy, but still retain their original rich aroma.

Complete with their fillings, the small, disc-shaped pastries are put in an oven preheated to 300°C under the supervision of a chef who has several decades of baking experience. After 15 minutes, the pastries are removed from the oven, and a meaty fragrance permeates the room. Wu tells us they have to be allowed to cool completely to acquire their characteristic crumbly texture.

When we open the packaging of a Zhuqian pastry, what greets us first is the soft scent of pork fat. With the first bite, we take in the rich aroma of sesame, followed by that of crispy fried shallots. The pork fat, which used to take center stage, now blends in perfectly with the candied winter melon inside the pastry. These multiple layers of fragrance are key to the abiding popularity of Zhuqian pastries among Hsinchu people.

When Zhuqian pastries first established a foothold in neighboring Miaoli, pastry chefs there placed even greater emphasis on the scents of pork fat and fried shallots. The massive chunks of fat they used seemed almost to burst out of the crust, and one could smell the shallots even with the packet fully sealed. In sharp contrast to Hsin Fu Jean’s Zhuqian pastries, which now exude an exquisite elegance, the meaty pastries of Zhunan in northwestern Miaoli continue to be known for their exuberance. In the same way, other Chinese pastries, after being introduced to our islands, began to be adapted to local contexts and took on different shapes and characteristics.

Hsin Fu Jean has launched these smaller Zhuqian pastries to cater to the modern preference for low-fat healthy eating.

Zhuqian pastries must be allowed to cool completely to acquire their flaky texture.

Having sprinkled the pastry dough with white sesame seeds, the chef is getting ready to transfer the Zhuqian pastries to the oven.

Drama in the mouth

Curry was introduced into Taiwanese food culture in the Japanese colonial era via the navy at Keelung Harbor, which was then a major link to the wider world. Along with shacha sauce, curry was incorporated into a distinctively local pastry.

A five-minute drive away from Keelung’s Miaokou Night Market, Dashin Pastry Shop on Zhongchuan Road starts to send out waves of curry aroma in the early morning. The day’s first batch of curry pastries are sitting on the racks to cool. On the second floor, diced pork—the heart and soul of curry pastries—is being cooked at a furious pace.

Here, hind-leg pork, with its even texture, undergoes a complex process of braising and stir-frying that helps seal the savory flavors in the meat. It is then set aside to cool and dry before being combined with mung-bean paste. Next, a curry-flavored “oil dough” (made from flour mixed with oil or fat, without added water) is wrapped around the fillings and molded into the desired shape by the chef, who then stamps a red logo on it. Finally, the pastries are transferred to the oven, the heat having been carefully adjusted according to the weather of the day.

This apparently straightforward procedure belies first-­generation shop owner Chen Chaozong’s extraordinary ingenuity. From the braising liquid and the proportion of the bean paste to the recipes for the curry and the oil dough, Dashin has a secret formula for everything. Even Chen’s son Jianhong has had to work terribly hard to learn the craft.

And yet it is thanks to these secret formulae that Dashin’s creations have become so indelibly intertwined with local people’s sense of home. The pungent aroma of curry makes our mouths water even before we sink our teeth into the pastry. At the first bite, we sense a lively duet between the flaky crust and the velvety texture of the mung-bean paste. Then the savory taste of the meat comes to the fore, only for the scent of the spices in the curry crust to prevail once again.

If a bite happens to contain more bean paste, we bask in the powerful scent and sweetness of mung beans. If the next mouthful has more meat, we’ll feel that the bean paste has retreated into the background to give way to the savory flavors of the braising liquid and curry. It is as if a rambunctious culinary drama is unfolding on our tongues.

Pastry lovers will be immediately spellbound by these delicious treats, and even those who aren’t particularly fond of traditional pastries are likely to be enthralled. During our visit, we come across a customer who wants to buy 15 boxes of curry pastries. He has driven here specially from New Taipei’s Ruifang District just to get these Lunar New Year presents for a friend in Yilan. Full of excitement, he describes to us the magical power of Dashin’s curry pastries: “My friend didn’t use to eat pastries, but after tasting the curry pastries from this shop, he puts away a whole boxful of them at a time.”

When we ask what exactly is so charming about the fusion of sweet and savory in the curry pastries, he gives us a mysterious smile and says: “Eat one, and you’ll know!”

After a complex cooking process, the glistening, juicy meat has fully absorbed the flavor of Dashin’s secret braising liquid.

Crispy fried shallots used to be the main savory ingredient in curry pastries. As living standards rose, pork began to be added.

Chen Jianhong, second-generation owner of Dashin Pastry Shop, has worked extremely hard to acquire his father’s pastry-making skills. He hopes to preserve and pass down the delicious flavors of his family’s curry pastries.

Being mixed by hand, the fillings of Dashin’s curry pastries look uneven. Each bite promises a different combination of wonderfully rich sweet and savory flavors.