胡椒餅Pepper Bun

Many older shops start with a fermented old-dough (老麵) base, rolled into small discs. The filling is mostly pork, and it varies from stall to stall: diced lean pork with pork belly at some, hand-cut fat with coarsely ground lean at others, hind-leg slices mixed with ground pork at others still. It is marinated in soy sauce, sugar, rice wine and a generous amount of pepper (a few add five-spice or curry powder). Scallions go in just before sealing so they stay fresh and slightly crisp. The bun is closed, brushed with water and pressed into white sesame seeds.

The rounds are then stuck one by one to the inner wall of a cylindrical charcoal-fired oven, anywhere from about 200 to 350°C depending on who you ask, and baked for roughly 10 to 20 minutes, with a spritz of water to stop them scorching. The crust comes out thin and crisp, the inside chewy, with the juices and scallion perfume sealed in. Let it cool for a minute before biting in; the juice is scalding.

Pepper buns are generally credited to Fuzhou in Fujian: Taiwanese vendors sell them as “Fuzhou pepper buns” and many of the older stalls were founded by people of Fuzhou ancestry, but nobody knows who first made one. Chinese Wikipedia traces the snack to a wall-baked Fuzhou scallion-and-pork pastry (蔥肉餅). Fuzhou also has a baked flatbread called guāngbǐng (or jìguāng bǐng), said to be named for the Ming general Qi Jiguang, whose troops were given such bread to carry while he fought pirates in Fujian. One press account compares an old Ningxia stall's old-dough method to it, but whether the two are actually related is not documented.

The bun is believed to have come to Taiwan with Fujianese migrants, though exactly when is unclear. A 1982 newspaper report cited on Chinese Wikipedia says that after the war most of the shops still making this wall-baked pastry were in Taipei's Wanhua and Dadaocheng, and one Ningxia stall says it opened in the 1950s, which would make it more than 70 years old. As for the name, the usual explanation is that the pastry picked up a great deal of pepper after arriving in Taiwan. A popular alternative is that “Fuzhou bun” sounds like “pepper bun” in Hokkien and the name drifted, but Chinese Wikipedia notes that the two sound little alike and finds no evidence for it, so treat it as hearsay. Today pepper buns are sold across the island, and the stall at the entrance of Taipei's Raohe Street Night Market, once a Michelin Bib Gourmand pick, is famous for its queues.