Raohe Pepper Bun

The pepper bun, hu jiao bing, is the icon of Raohe Night Market in Taipei's Songshan district, its defining version sold for some four decades by the Fuzhou Ancestral Pepper Bun (Fuzhou Shizu) stall at the market's temple entrance beside Cihyou Temple. The stall's founder learned the craft as a teenager from a Fuzhou master and, after several years' apprenticeship and military service, set up on his own; the stall has since earned repeated Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition. The dish descends from the Fuzhou bakers who came to Taiwan around the 1949 Mainlander migration, who adapted their homeland's clay-oven meat buns to Taiwanese pork and spring onion. The construction is distinctive: a pork filling seasoned heavily with white pepper and a little soy, bound with chopped spring onion, is wrapped in a yeasted dough that is stuck directly to the hot clay wall of a vertical tandoor-style oven and baked for a few minutes until the crust chars and crisps while the inside stays juicy. The stall-side theatre of the baker slapping the buns onto the oven wall and prising them off with a spatula is part of the experience. The white pepper, not black, is essential, it gives the warm, numbing heat that defines the bun, and the spring onion collapses into sweetness in the bake. Raohe's is the benchmark, but the pepper bun has spread across Taiwan's night markets.

A round, charred, blistered crust that cracks open to a rush of steam and a juicy, peppery pork filling threaded with sweet collapsed spring onion. The white-pepper heat builds at the back of the throat; the crust is half-crisp, half-chewy. Eaten scalding hot.

The pepper bun's character comes from the clay-oven bake and the white pepper. A moderately enriched yeasted dough of flour, water, yeast, a little oil and salt is proved, then portioned and filled with a mixture of fatty minced pork, chopped spring onion, a heavy hand of white pepper, soy, sugar and sesame oil. The filled dough is shaped into a ball, the top brushed with water and dipped in sesame, then slapped onto the hot clay wall of a vertical tandoor-style oven, where it bakes by radiant heat from the wall and the embers below for 5 to 8 minutes. The intense, direct heat chars and crisps the outer crust while steaming the filling inside, the sealed dough trapping the pork's juices so they braise the meat, and the spring onion collapses into sweetness. The white pepper, used generously, gives the characteristic warm, slightly numbing heat that distinguishes the bun from a plain pork bake. Without the clay oven the result is a baked bun, not a pepper bun, the char and the even radiant heat cannot be replicated in a home oven, though a very hot pizza stone approximates it.