Duck-Fat Sesame Shaobing

Nanjing's Hui Muslim community, concentrated around Gongyuan Street and Qijia Bay, built their own parallel food economy around the city's love of duck. While Han cooks rendered duck fat as a byproduct of making pressed and salted duck, Muslim teahouses — prohibited from using pork lard — adopted duck fat as their shortening of choice. The renowned teahouse Xin Qi Fang Ge on Gongyuan Street established the benchmark form of the duck-fat shaobing by the 1930s. The writer Zhu Ziqing, in an essay on Nanjing collected in his published works, recalled that freshly baked shaobing were fragrant and flaky the moment they left the oven — one of the dish's earliest literary traces. In 2016, the Nanjing Catering Association named it one of the Ten Most Representative Nanjing Snacks.

A flake-shatter of golden sesame crust gives way to nine soft fat-laminated layers, each faintly savory with duck fat that carries no pork sweetness — only a clean, poultry-inflected richness. The exterior shatters like a cracker while the center remains barely yielding, placing this simultaneously in the register of cracker and bread.

The flakiness is achieved through lamination: water dough and oil-fat dough are folded together repeatedly, creating alternating layers. When baked at 200 to 220 degrees Celsius in a cylindrical clay oven, steam from the water-dough layers inflates the gaps while the duck fat melts away, leaving airy pockets between crisped sheets. Duck fat has a lower melting point than lard and a higher proportion of oleic and linoleic acids, making it melt more readily in the mouth and producing a less dense, more brittle crumb. The sesame seeds on the outer surface undergo Maillard reaction and lipid oxidation at high heat, generating complex nutty-toasty aromatic compounds.