Name: Shaobing (Layered Flatbread)
Prep time: 1 h 15 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 1 h 35 min
Yield: 8 servings
Cuisine: Chinese
Ingredients: 250 g plain flour; 130 ml warm water; 15 ml neutral oil; 3 g salt; 90 g plain flour; 60 ml neutral oil; 2 g salt; 2 g five-spice powder; 1 tbsp malt syrup; 30 g white sesame seeds

Ingredients

8servings

Water dough (shuiyoupi)
plain flour250 g
warm water · about 50C; it half-kills the gluten and keeps the dough soft130 ml
neutral oil · straight into the dough15 ml
salt3 g
Oil paste (yousu)
plain flour90 g
neutral oil · heated until it just shimmers, then poured on60 ml
salt2 g
five-spice powder · optional; ground Sichuan pepper alone is good too2 g
To finish
malt syrup · slaked with 1 tbsp water and brushed on; it is the glue for the sesame1 tbsp
white sesame seeds · optional — the yousu shaobing in the photograph has none30 g

Steps

Water dough: salt the flour and mix in water at about 50C. Hot water half-disables the gluten, so the dough is not tough and rolls very thin. The 15ml of oil goes into the dough itself.
⏲ 8 min
Cover and rest 30 minutes. The gluten has to slacken before it will roll thin — and that if dough fights you as you roll you should rest it rather than push harder is in Dough and Gluten.
⏲ 30 min
Oil paste (yousu): heat 60ml of oil until it just shimmers. Off the heat, pour it onto 90g of flour and stir at once; it becomes a thick paste. Mix in the salt and five-spice. No water goes in at all.
⏲ 3 min
Let the paste cool only until you can handle it. Chilled solid it cracks as you roll and the layers break. A croissant needs its butter cold; this needs the opposite.
⏲ 10 min
Roll the water dough out thin, about 30x40cm, and spread the paste over it thinly and evenly with a hand or a spatula. This is the whole thing — anywhere you leave bare, two sheets of dough bake into one instead of two.
Roll it up tightly from the long side into a cylinder and cut into 8. If the cut face shows rings, it is right.
Stand each piece cut face up, press it flat with your palm, then roll it into a 1cm disc. The cut face has to be the one you press, so that the layer edges end up on the sides.
Brush the outside with the slaked malt syrup. If you are using sesame, press it on now. Rest 15 minutes.
⏲ 15 min
Into an oven preheated to 220C for 18-20 minutes. These are traditionally baked stuck to the wall of an oven, so they want strong heat from below; preheating a tray in there gets you closer (What Your Oven Is Actually Doing).
⏲ 19 min
They are done when the outside is deep gold and the layers have started to split and lift. What browning needs is in Browning; here the malt syrup brings that reaction forward.
Cool 5 minutes before serving. Straight from the oven the inner layers are still wet with oil; as it cools that oil settles and the shattering texture appears.
⏲ 5 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Sesame shaobing. What most people picture is the version crusted all over with white sesame. Use the sesame in the list above; the malt syrup wash is the glue. The photograph is the plain yousu shaobing, which is the other name ko.wikipedia gives this bread.
Filled. Minced pork and spring onion, red bean paste, or spiced dried radish are all common. With a filling you do not roll the piece flat — you gather it around the filling and press it out.
Regional. Jinyun shaobing from Zhejiang is baked against the wall of a barrel oven and stuffed with pickled greens and pork; Kaifeng's gaolu shaobing and Shandong's mati (horseshoe) shaobing differ again in shape and filling.
Pan-fried. Instead of an oven, a thin film of oil in a heavy pan and both sides browned. The layers still work, but you do not get the dry oven-baked surface.
How it is eaten. Split and stuffed with Youtiao, served alongside mutton soup, or filled with sliced braised meat like a sandwich.

Tips

Cooking the flour and oil together first is the whole dish. Dough and Gluten says of a croissant that its layers survive only if the butter stays cold enough not to melt into the dough. The yousu paste is the inverse: the oil is deliberately fed into flour beforehand. The flour particles hold the oil where it is, so it cannot migrate into the dough — and it stops two sheets bonding into one through gluten. There are two ways to keep layers apart, and cold is only one of them.
That is why it shatters instead of puffing. Butter is about 15 percent water. In the oven that water turns to steam and the steam pushes the layers apart, which is how Croissant and Pain au Chocolat end up hollow. The paste has no water. There is nothing to push, so the layers simply sit separated, and they crumble rather than lift. Not better or worse — a different object.
It is not Roti Canai either. That one oils a dough and stretches it thin in the air, then folds it. Both build layers, but there the stretching does the work and here a flour paste does.
Do not refrigerate the paste. Set hard, it breaks into pieces as you roll and the layers break with it. Handleable-warm is exactly right.
Press the cut face. Slice the cylinder and the layer edges face up and down. Press that face and the layers end up on the sides; lay a piece on its side and you press the layers back into one.
The malt syrup is colour, not sweetness. On a savoury bread, sugar on the outside is there to bring the browning reaction forward and to hold the sesame. Rather as Soboro-ppang uses two doughs, the inside and the outside are doing different jobs.
Three minutes in the oven the next day. Moisture works into the layers and they go limp. 180C for three minutes brings them back.

The basics behind this dish

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