Recipes for Egg Crepe Innards (jianbing 煎饼), part 2 of 4

When devouring a jianbing, the biggest question usually is – just what is that crispy thing in the middle? In Tianjin guozi (果子) is used – usually translated as a Chinese doughnut (youtiao 油条) – but the youtiao recipes were very intimidating.  Plus you need a large vat of oil to properly fry the doughnut, leaving youtiao up to the professionals, methinks.

Lucky for us, we quizzed our favorite jianbing vendor at the east gate of Tsinghua University and discovered jianbing crisps are much easier. She proudly displays a little handwritten sign on the side of her cart: “Self-fried fritter (zizha baocui 自 炸薄脆).”  How does one create a fritter?  Her answer: she goes to a wonton wrapper vendor, who cuts extra-large wonton skins for her.  She heats up super-hot oil then lightly drops the wrapper on the oil (“就烫一下”), whereupon it bursts into this lovely, airy confection.

The other ingredients are fairly standard, except for the Chinese pickled mustard green (suancai 酸菜), which can be purchased in the refrigerated section of most Asian groceries.  Look for a vacuum packed package.  It’s a salty and sour vegetable, delicious in home cooking stir-fried with some pork slivers, and provides the hit of vinegar that cuts the salty-oily-richness of the jianbing. If you can’t find the mustard greens, we think any kind of pickled green vegetable could serve as a reasonable substitute.

Jianbing （煎饼）Innards

• cilantro, chopped roughly; if you are a fancy person, you will just use the leaves and not the stems
• green onion, preferably just the green ends, chopped roughly
• Chinese pickled mustard, also chopped roughly
• black sesame seeds, if you really want to push the envelope
• and of course, a crispy fritter (recipe below)

Crispy Fritter (bocui 薄脆)

Our favorite jianbing vendor in the city makes her jianbing with not one, but one-and-a-half giant crisps. Like our Tsinghua vendor, she fries up giant wonton skins. There’s not a dramatic difference, by the way, between a dumpling wrapper (jiaozipi 饺子皮) and a wonton wrapper (huntunpi 馄饨皮).  Dumpling wrappers, used in the north, are round, tend to be thicker, and are filled with more ‘stuff,’ where wonton wrappers, used in the south, are square, tend to be thinner, and hold less filling.  Because of their relative thinness, it’s better to use wonton wrappers (and they’re more widely available anyways).

Also, we’re creating mini-jianbing since we don’t have a massive crepe griddle, so we scaled down and normal-sized wonton skins did the trick. The joy in discovering how to fry our own crisps was almost embarrassing.

You will need a packet of wonton wrappers, one wonton wrapper per jianbing (or two, if you want that extra level of crunch).  We bought ours fresh from the local grocery for a mere 7 mao (10 cents), and they were soft and irregularly shaped.

In a deep saucepan that is also wide enough to place the entire wonton wrapper flat, pour oil (the best frying oil, of course, is peanut) to about 0.5 inch deep.  Heat the oil to about 350-375 F.  If you don’t own a thermometer, you can tell if the oil is ready by placing a wooden chopstick at the bottom of the pan.  If a stream of bubbles float up in a nice regular fashion, not too fast or too slow, then it’s ready.

Lightly slide one wonton wrapper onto the surface of the oil. The skin will bubble and pop immediately and start to brown.  Personal preference dictates whether you like it very fried (dark brown), or just light enough to be cooked through (pale tan).  We stuck with a happy medium tan. It will only take about 30 seconds or so to cook, so take some peeks and wait until it turns your desired color. Flip over, fry a few seconds more.  Place on a paper towel or rack to drain, and then repeat with the rest of the wrappers.

Yes… there’s more:

We’ve described all the jianbing innards. Next post we’ll go into some gory detail on the batter recipe.  It’s just water and flour (we tried both mung bean and corn flour), but as we learned, it’s awfully tricky to get it just right. At this point, we realized we’re kind of nuts to try making these this at home, since we both live 3 minutes from a jianbing vendor who sells this deliciousness for RMB 2.5.  However, too late to back out. Success, and quite possibly failure, awaits!

But isn’t it worth it?