Soothing Taiwan’s Sweet Tooth

Chang Tsun-chen, the author of a book on the ins and outs of Taiwanese pastries, has traveled the length and breadth of the country to visit local pastry shops. For her, Taiwanese pastries can be examined from six perspectives: local traits, seasonal cycles, auspicious symbolism, the human touch, the spirit of the times, and religious devotion. The pastries appeal not merely to our tastebuds, but also to our craving for stories.

Religious roots

“How sugar came to be closely allied with pastries has a lot to do with religion,” says Tseng Pin-tsang, a historian of Taiwanese food culture. The world’s earliest record of cane sugar production comes from India, the cradle of Buddhism. Early Indian Buddhist clergy made sweet confections in order to attract believers. After Buddhism was introduced into China, Chinese temples also sought to win over believers with sweet foods. Often they were furnished with kitchens that produced pastries for pilgrims from afar. Tseng tells us that many traditional pastry shops today hark back to their religious roots, with their names carrying the Chinese word zhai (which connotes “Buddhist diet”).

As time went by, another purpose emerged for pastries: besides offering them to deities, we may simply consume them to lift our own spirits. Sometimes pastries serve as ritual offerings. At other times, they are treats in our daily lives.

While inheriting Chinese baking traditions, Taiwanese pastries have undergone innovations in the use of local ingredients. They carry distinctively local flavors.

Social lubricants

In Taiwan, pastries also serve as social lubricants. “Taiwan used to witness frequent armed conflicts between groups with different immigration backgrounds,” Tseng says. “Society was fraught with tensions, yet we have also developed ways to express goodwill, ways that are conducive to social integration.” For example, we give away pastries on major festive occasions, such as the Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Tseng further draws our attention to wedding customs. If your daughter is getting engaged, you will want to start planning for a feast. Your invitees will follow the convention and give you cash in red envelopes. Because you are taking other people’s money, you are expected to express gratitude and offer something in return. So you say: “Our daughter is getting engaged. Would you like some pastries?” Here, the gift of pastries helps strengthen interpersonal relationships by maintaining reciprocal exchanges. Traditional practices like this “constitute our world of rituals and customs, enabling us to cement and reaffirm our relations with others.” Pastries thus play a vital symbolic role in Taiwanese social customs.

In their original form, pastries taste quite plain—just flour and sugar. This photo shows garlic pastries: sweet but with a touch of pungency.

Since ancient times, religions have turned to sweet foods as an effective way to attract believers. Even today we often see pastry shops in the vicinity of temples.

Innovations and influences

Most early immigrants to Taiwan came from Chaozhou, Shantou, Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, and other places along ­China’s southeastern seaboard. They brought with them a rich diversity of pastry-making traditions. In 1895, Taiwan came under Japanese rule, and traditional Chinese pastry chefs here began to adapt themselves to Japanese preferences. Some—such as the owners of Taichung’s Yen Shin-Fa Cookies and Pao Chuan Food Company—traveled to Japan to study confectionery, reinventing Chinese pastries by borrowing ideas from Western patisserie. “Most importantly,” Tseng says, “there were various food competitions in Japan” during this period, and participants had to submit entries that showcased local characteristics. “Taiwanese pastry chefs went to great lengths to achieve innovations” for the competitions. Their creations became “Taiwanese specialties.”

Chang Tsun-chen, a tireless explorer of pastry shops, gives us examples of extraneous influences on Taiwanese pastries. Penghu’s brown-sugar steamed cake was first inspired by a Ryukyuan confection called agarasaa. Hualien’s sweet potato cakes ingeniously combined Taiwanese sweet potatoes with traditional Japanese confectionery. San Xie Cheng Bakery in Tamsui, New Taipei, offers large disc-shaped dabing pies with hard, crunchy crusts that recall Western pastries, owing this innovation to a relative who worked for the British consulate in Tamsui. Yuzhenzhai in Changhua County’s Lukang came up with bite-sized cakes filled with adzuki bean paste to cater to the Japanese fondness for adzuki beans.

Taiwanese sweetness

So what exactly is Taiwanese sweetness like? Chang has this answer: “I think there are two types of sweetness in Taiwan: one is the sweetness of sharing, and the other is that of divine blessings.” A staunch advocate of local pastries, Chang tells us, “Taiwanese pastries are never meant to satisfy just one person. Rather, they’re for cutting into smaller portions, for sharing.” Her words stand to reason. Traditionally, pastries used to be made to order by weight. They tended to be so big that they were too much for one person to consume comfortably.

Yu Jan Shin Foods is the inventor of the flaky butter pastry (naiyou subing) that we now associate with Tai­chung City’s Dajia District. The shop’s third-generation owner, Alan Chen, says that people in Central Taiwan often have flaky pastries made when they’re getting married. When pastries are distributed to every household in a community, you know that the bride’s family wish to share this sweet moment of their lives with each and all.

“Many pastries were invented for the purposes of religious rituals,” Chang further explains. As sacrificial offerings, pastries are mediums through which we communicate with our deities. Varying with the seasons and festive occasions, the pastries traditionally displayed on altars all carry auspicious meanings. We share them with family and friends after the rituals, hoping that by so doing, we’re disseminating the blessings of the gods.

Taiwanese pastries are complex to make. They have their own aesthetic logic.

Mung-bean pastries (lüdou peng or lı̍ktāu phòng)

The phòng in lı̍ktāu phòng, the Taiwanese name for mung-bean pastries, is derived from the puffy look this confection acquires during the baking process. Seemingly a timeless classic, lı̍k­tāu phòng were actually invented by accident.

Located in Taichung’s Fengyuan District, Old Xuehuazhai is where mung-bean pastries were first created. The founder of this historic shop, Lü Shui (1880–1969), learned his craft from Chen Chu, a pastry master from Shantou in Guangdong Province. Lü was fortunate enough to win the admiration of a local gentleman called Chen Dequan, who helped fund the opening of his pastry shop. Lü Hongren, third-­generation owner of Old Xuehuazhai, tells us about the invention of mung-bean pastries.

The richly textured, multilayered flaky pastry of lı̍ktāu phòng is made by methodically folding and rolling together alternating layers of “water dough” (flour mixed with oil or fat and water) and “oil dough” (flour mixed with oil or fat only). The fillings comprise mung-bean paste along with other ingredients such as tiny chunks of dried pork. “Taiwanese pastries typically have thin skins and hearty fillings. The fillings are all already processed—they’re almost edible [at the start of the baking process]. So the most important task for a Chinese-style pastry chef is to bake the pastry itself.” Because charcoal fires were hard to control, chefs had to keep watch all the time, flipping their creations from time to time to ensure the pastry was evenly baked. “But there were always some that got skipped over.”

Not flipping pastries in the oven allows them to puff up, and where the dough does not touch the baking tray, it comes out as white as snow. Lü Shui saw commercial potential in the pleasing appearance of those pastries he had neglected to flip over, and embarked on a series of experiments, eventually achieving the perfect roundness of a ping-pong ball. His wife casually referred to these puffy things as “lı̍ktāu phòng” (literally, “mung-bean puffs”). From there, the name has traveled far and wide. In 1925, when Taiwan was under Japanese rule, lı̍ktāu phòng outshone many Japanese-style delicacies at a pastry show in Taichung, winning a bronze medal.

Today, all pastry shops in Taiwan stock lı̍ktāu phòng. ­Every shop has its signature filling and prides itself on its own baking techniques. Of all Taiwanese “mooncakes,” mung-bean pastries are probably the best known.

The pastry of lı̍ktāu phòng is given its rich texture by layering two kinds of dough, one made with flour, fat and water, the other with only flour and fat. The filling comprises mung-bean paste, dried meat, and other ingredients.

Lu Hongren, third-generation owner of Old Xuehuazhai, reveals that the idea of puffed mung-bean pastries arose accidentally from the chef forgetting to flip some of his creations in the oven.

Mung-bean pastries are not flipped during the baking process, allowing them to puff up in the oven.

Pineapple cake (fengli su)

The Taiwanese for “pineapple”—ônglâi—sounds like “arrival of good fortune,” giving pineapple cakes an auspicious aura. These are classic choices for gifts, affectionately called “gold ingots that bring in foreign currency.” Pine­apple cakes have their origins in Taichung. It was Yen Shin-Fa Cookies that first added an innovative touch to them.

Yen Jung-ching, fourth-generation owner of this Tai­chung pastry shop, recounts the stories of his great-­grandfather Yen Ping, who laid the foundation for his family’s pastry-­making traditions, and his grandfather Yen Shu-mu, who honed his baking skills in Japan. It was the latter who invented what we call “pineapple cakes” today. Yen Jung-ching identifies the prototype of pineapple cakes as the traditional pineapple dabing pie. His grandfather came up with the idea of reducing this large disc-shaped pie to a much smaller square piece, and in an innovative move, opted for a butter-­based crumbly pastry while continuing to use the traditional pineapple and winter melon purée for the filling. “Pine­apples have relatively coarse fibers and a tart, astringent taste. Back in Grandfather’s times, people liked more exquisite delicacies. Adding winter melon gives the pineapple filling a finer and smoother texture, which reflects the preferences of that era,” says Yen Jung-ching’s sister Yen Hsin-ping.

In 2009 Sunnyhills, an international brand with roots in Nantou, started a new trend in the pineapple-cake market by championing the natural fibers and slightly sour taste of local pineapples. Yen Jung-ching says that at one point even he was seduced into producing the same kind of pineapple cake. However, he eventually regained confidence in his family’s classic flavors when his loyal customers said they actually preferred “sweet, mushy,” fillings.

Nowadays we’re pampered with a dizzying array of pineapple cakes, created from the secret recipes of local pastry shops. Some put in egg yolks, while others replace pineapple with various other fruits. Some make their pastry milky; others prefer an eggy ­flavor.

Yen Hsin-ping, who has perhaps tasted more imperfect pastries than anybody, gives us this good advice: “Freshly baked pineapple cakes are oversaturated with fragrance. I recommend waiting one or two days. Have the cake with a cup of tea, and slowly savor the scent of natural butter blended with powdered milk, so you can discover multiple layers of flavor and relish the aftertaste of the cake lingering in your mouth. That’s real bliss.”

Freshly baked pineapple cakes have uneven edges, giving them an artisan look.

Old Xuehuazhai adheres to the tradition of using lard for the pastry of pineapple cakes to produce a biscuit-like crunchy texture.

Yen Jung-ching, fourth-generation owner of Yen Shin-Fa Cookies, is sticking with the traditional flavors of pineapple cakes that his loyal customers love.

The filling of a traditional pineapple cake is a perfect concoction of pineapple and winter melon.

Flaky butter pastries (naiyou subing)

Are you puzzled by the differences between flaky pastries (subing), maltose pastries (maiya bing), and suncakes (taiyang bing)? Alan Chen is the third-generation owner of Yu Jan Shin Foods, where flaky butter pastries (naiyou subing) were first dreamed up. He tells us that the late Taiwanese historian Lin Heng-tao (1915–1997) established that suncakes were derived, at one remove, from flaky pastries.

According to Lin’s research, early immigrants from across the Taiwan Strait brought with them not only statues of Mazu to worship but also Fujian-style sesame-seed cakes that had been presented as ritual offerings to the sea goddess, which served as food for the voyage. These gradually evolved into a circular shape, which is symbolic of perfection.

Disc-shaped flaky pastries were popular in coastal ­areas of Central Taiwan. Subsequently they spread along the mountain line of the railway to places further inland such as Fengyuan, which was well supplied with goods and endowed with the requisite natural resources. It was there that subing eventually inspired the invention of maltose pastries.

Maltose pastries can be regarded as a more immediate forerunner of suncakes. Documentary evidence tells us that a pastry chef named Wei Qinghai invented Taichung’s famous suncakes as a variation on maltose pastries.

Located near Dajia’s Jenn Lann Temple, Yu Jan Shin Foods opened its doors in 1966. Alan Chen says that his grand­father Chen Jizhen wasn’t actually trained to make pastries, but thanks to the indefatigable work of three generations of the Chen family, the shop’s flaky butter pastries have become one of the “Three Treasures of Dajia,” the others being Mazu, and hats and mats woven from triangular club-rush.

Holding one of his flaky butter pastries in his hand, Alan Chen explains that these have undergone five incarnations. The first were traditional flaky pastries sold by weight. The second had a standard size. For the third edition, lard was replaced by natural butter to cater to the needs of vegetarian customers. This innovation gave rise to the name “flaky butter pastries.”

The fourth incarnation took into account the rising public awareness of healthy eating, substituting oligosaccharides for the usual sugars. The flavors were as rich as ever, but healthier. The fifth version is an improvement on the pastry-making process itself. Seeking to address the problem of the puff pastry easily flaking off, the family gained inspiration from the hexagonal configuration of honeycomb cells and developed a firmer “honeycomb pastry.”

The ingredients of traditional flaky pastries—lard, flour, and malt sugar—are uncomplicated, but Yu Jan Shin Foods is very serious about these apparently simple treats. It was thanks to an oracular poem that Chen Jizhen obtained at the local Mazu temple—followed by six consecutive affirmative answers from the goddess through the casting of divination blocks—that the Chen family devoted themselves to the pastry business in the first place. They have never lost sight of their covenant with Mazu.

Measuring 15 centimeters in diameter, classic flaky butter pastries are ideal for sharing with family and friends. Yu Jan Shin has also worked with an airline to launch mini butter pastries suitable for in-flight meals, at a size of 6 cm.

The crust of the fifth edition of Yu Jan Shin’s flaky butter pastries is inspired by the structure of honeycombs. It is less brittle.