Night market
- Hualien
- Daily 18:00–00:00
Known forScallion Pancake · Taiwanese Fried Chicken · Sweet Potato Balls
In the kitchen
How it’s prepared
The bun is a flat white steamed mantou. After steaming it is split along one side and opened like a pocket, which is the usual explanation for the 割 (“cut”) in its name. The star filling is soy-braised pork belly: shallots and garlic are fried first, then the pork goes in with soy sauce, sugar and rice wine and simmers slowly until it yields to a fork. Some shops braise the fat and lean cuts separately so customers can choose.
To order, the hot bun is opened, sliced pork goes in, then stir-fried pickled mustard greens and cilantro, and last a dusting of ground peanuts, sometimes mixed with a little sugar. Each bite is salty-savory, tangy, herbal and faintly sweet. Some shops also sell sishen soup (四神湯), and a bun with a bowl of it is a familiar pairing.
Origins
History and origins
Gua bao is generally traced to coastal Fujian, where both Fuzhou and Quanzhou are named as its home; in Quanzhou a similar snack is called ròujiābāo, “meat between buns.” Most accounts say it reached Taiwan with Fujianese immigrants. According to research by Chen Yu-jen of National Taiwan Normal University, as reported by Taiwan Panorama magazine, pork was a rare treat and most wheat had to be imported, so the bun was eaten mainly by merchants at set times of year, such as year-end banquets and Earth God worship, and only became an everyday street snack in the 1970s. English Wikipedia places this under Japanese rule, which the Panorama article does not state. The earliest Taiwanese record the article cites is a 1927 diary entry by the gentry member Huang Wangcheng that mentions “tiger bites pig” for a year-end banquet. These accounts rest on a small body of research and the details remain thinly documented.
In Taiwan, gua bao is a customary treat at weiya (尾牙), the end-of-year feast held around the 16th day of the twelfth lunar month, when businesses thank the Earth God for the year. Two folk explanations circulate: the bun looks like a plump coin purse, hinting at a full wallet; and its nickname hóo-kā-ti (虎咬豬, “tiger bites pig”), usually explained by the open bun looking like a tiger's mouth around the pork, is said to sound like “bite down on good fortune” in Hokkien. These are folk meanings rather than documented history. In the 2000s, David Chang's Momofuku restaurants in New York helped popularize the “pork belly bun” in the English-speaking world, and the name gua bao is said to have caught on around 2009 through New York shops such as BaoHaus.
