Sugar Onion Crispy Pancake

Sugar Onion Crispy Pancake

　　Sugar Onion Crispy Pancake is a snack from Chaoshan. It originates from Futan Village in Chendian Town, Chaonan District, Shantou City, Guangdong Province, which is also known as Yatan, hence many people call this snack “Yatan Sugar Onion.” It consists of a round crispy pancake wrapping around long strips of sugar onion, and its shape is very much in line with its name. The sugar onion is long with many small holes running through it, resembling multiple scallion holes lined up and stuck together. It is snow-white in color, hence the name “sugar onion.” The crispy pancake is cooked on a griddle, also white, and is a very thin round flatbread. Sprinkle the sugar onion with sesame seeds, wrap it in the pancake, and it’s ready to eat.

　　Sugar Onion (also called Onion Sugar): It is made from white sugar and maltose through special processing. A small amount of flour is mixed with the sugar, which is then steamed for a long time to gradually remove moisture and turn it into syrup. It is then repeatedly refined to achieve a chewy yet crispy texture, and finally shaped into a rectangle with holes like onions. Sugar onion is very crumbly. When eaten, it is crisp, sweet, and fragrant. Compared to other famous tea-time snacks across China, sugar onion has its unique advantages and distinctive local characteristics.

　　Spread out a crispy pancake, place a piece of sugar onion on it, sprinkle with crushed peanuts and sesame, roll it up, and you can enjoy this famous and distinctive Chaoshan delicacy.

　　Pancake Wrapped Sugar Onion, also called Sugar Onion Pancake, is a nearly disappearing Chaoshan delicacy—a sweet fragrance that might even be missed in your dreams. Nowadays, with all kinds of modern, refined candies flooding the market, let us ride the wings of folk songs and revisit this ancient, rustic candy treat.

　　Let’s start with the sugar onion. The main ingredient for making sugar onion is white sugar, which is first boiled in a pot into syrup and then cooled to the right temperature before being pulled and beaten while hot. The action of pulling the sugar is very similar to that of making hand-pulled noodles in the north, but sugar is more elastic, so one end needs to be fixed to provide leverage. When I was a child, I often saw it done by hooking the middle of the sugar strand onto a nail fixed on a wooden utility pole. After pulling the strand longer, the two halves were hooked together again and pulled upward. This process of repeated pulling and beating, continuously incorporating air into the sugar, continues until it turns into a white, hollow, rectangular sugar strip. Then it is cut into short segments about the length of a pinky finger, becoming the crispy, sweet, and fragrant “white sugar onion.” As the name suggests, sugar onion is a block of sugar with holes like an onion and as white as the onion’s white part.

　　Sugar onion is delightfully crisp and crumbly, melting in your mouth without sticking to your teeth—it’s simply delicious. The only downside is that eating it tends to leave sugar crumbs everywhere, which led to the creation of the Pancake Wrapped Sugar Onion.

　　Speaking of pancakes, many people might think of the thin wrappers used for wrapping Peking duck. But Chaoshan-style pancakes are even thinner—about ten of them stacked together are about as thick as one Beijing pancake. Chaoshan pancakes are not made by rolling dough with a rolling pin either, but are created using a special method. The pancake maker holds a thin layer of dough in one hand, smears it onto the hot pan, and then lifts it back—the thin layer of dough that sticks to the pan solidifies into a pancake, which is then lifted off with the other hand and stacked aside. This smear, lift, peel, and stack motion is repeated quickly and skillfully.