Duck fat shortbread
If the dough is mixed with oil, it will have a crispy effect when baking. Traditional Chinese baking mostly uses lard and essential oil to make shortening, and Nanjing adapts measures to local conditions, and there are schools that use duck fat instead, and the baked cakes made are quite distinctive. Its popularity is no less than duck blood vermicelli soup, and it is often eaten by passers-by in a hurry to carry bread while walking. Duck fat shortbread is both popular and famous, and was featured in Discovery's Nanjing documentary.
The mainstream duck fat shortbread is baked on the wall of a coal oven, and the skin is browned and coated with white sesame seeds, giving it a crispy texture. The inside is layered, and the texture is slightly soft, not the crusty texture of peach shortbread. Baked cakes are distinguished by their shape, with long shapes being salty and round shapes being sweet. Both of them have a face fragrance, sesame fragrance, and a faint oil fragrance, and all kinds of flavor types are astringent, and they are never greasy when they eat more.
Nanjing's baked cake stalls are distributed in the streets and alleys, especially in the old towns such as Nanhu. The level of each restaurant is very close, and if you want to taste the top level, the key point is not the choice of restaurant, but the timing - the freshly baked pancakes taste the best, and the aroma of burnt and flour is particularly rich. Overall, it's not wise to spend 30 minutes queuing at the legendary cake stall in Laomendong.
