Travels in Tianjin: the birthplace of the egg crepe (jianbing 煎饼)

Most people do not think of Tianjin as a tourist destination, but I went recently and loved it. First, you get to be harmonized (hexie‘d 和谐) on the express train, and the female attendants wear luxurious red wool pillbox hats decorated with the party emblem. Secondly, Tianjin is the birthplace of the egg crepe/pancake (jianbing 煎饼), known as jianbing guozi 煎饼果子 there.

Imagine if Jean-Georges Vongerichten, in this passage from a New York Times travel piece by R.W. Apple and requoted in Evan Osnos’s New Yorker blog, had eaten his jianbing in Tianjin instead of Shanghai (which indubitably is NOT the birthplace of jianbing).

There were crepes at other stalls – delicate cong you bing, or scallion pancakes, and ji dan bing, a kind of breakfast burrito. To make that, a short-order wizard spread batter on a drum-shaped grill with what looked like a painter’s spatula, broke an egg on top, added a dab of fermented soybean sauce and threw in some chives, coriander and mustard-plant leaves. The whole process took just a minute. Then he slapped either a salty cruller called you tiao or a piece of crisply fried bean curd skin across the finished product and rolled it up like a scroll. Mr. Vongerichten, in seventh heaven, pronounced it “the best breakfast in the world.”

There is a profusion of jianbing variations, as the discussions on Chowhound and a great Timeout article demonstrate, and they inspire much love around the internet, including many a Youtube video.

In Tianjin, jianbing are ‘handled’ a great deal more than their Beijing brethen: vendors use their fingers to flip the pancake; crack and press down the crispy fried dough in the center; fold up the crepe and shove it into the bag. They also tend to put the sauces (fermented wheat paste tianmianjiang 甜面酱, whipped red pickled tofu nanru or hong doufuru 南乳／红豆腐乳, and chili paste lajiang 辣酱) on half rather than the entire surface area of the crepe-bing.

The one at the top of this post was one purchased for RMB 3.2, made with two eggs and a batter based on buckwheat flour, pushed very thinly. The fried dough (guozi 果子) in the middle was fried a deep brown, so the whole thing was unbelievably light interplay between the crunch and nutty buckwheat.

This one was stuffed with what is typically translated as fried crullers (youtiao 油条). The crullers were a bit past their prime. It had the mouthfeel of the Michelin Man.

This store, Huangji 黄记, had an astonishing variety of batters. They had batters made of the following combinations: corn, millet and broad bean, millet and mung bean, purple rice, sticky rice, peanut, five grain, pea, buckwheat, black soybean, mung bean, and barley and oatmeal. Their bing were made extraordinarily large, the guozi were pale and light, and the jianbing were served in paper bags, stuffed into plastic bags.

They only had sticky rice (nuomi 糯米) and five grain (wugu 五谷) at noon, so that is what we had. The sticky rice batter was extraordinarily chewy, somewhat like moffles.

All the workers were wearing Home Depot aprons.

We wish we had time to go to Zhao Shibo’s jianbing guozi shop, which has received many rave reviews on Dianping, but alas and alack, time, stomach space, and knowledge of the city prevented further jianbing consumption.