Baking Up a Storm: Making Traditional Taiwanese Pastries with the Help of a Century-Old Bakery Brand

TEXT　Hollie Younger

PHOTOS　VISION

The Jiu Zhen Nan's branch in Taipei's Zhongshan District, you can take a han pastry baking class and forge your own flaky han pastry — from national-icon pineapple cakes to mung bean pastry, they'll guide you from dough to delight. With the Mid- Autumn Festival approaching, a time for exchanging traditional pastries like moon cakes, it's the perfect occasion to visit the bakery!

Jiu Zhen Nan was founded in 1890, at the dusk of the Qing Empire and the dawn of Taiwan's Japanese era. Its handcrafted fine pastries have remained a mainstay throughout a tumultuous 136 years of Taiwanese history. Expanding across the island from a humble bakery in Tainan City in the south to a beloved household name, today their pastries remain popular as traditional wedding gifts and afternoon tea accompaniments.

The brand has bakeries across Taipei and major hotspots in Taiwan. Its Taipei flagship store is tucked into the rather luxurious Regent Taipei hotel, which is located just a short walk from MRT Zhongshan Station.

The store offers small, private han pastry baking class right in the heart of the capital (reservations required). Classes are primarily in Chinese, though the teacher can guide foreign tourists through the 90-min process in English (and some Japanese), providing some basic instructions and step-by-step demonstration.

Jiu Zhen Nan embodies the very essence of Taiwan's patisserie culture and its evolution. What better place to learn to make your very own pastries?

Entering the hotel's elegant, sprawling lobby, we find the boutique-style bakery on the first floor (the level below the lobby), flooded with natural light, inviting and refined in equal measure. Our teacher for the day introduces herself as Xiao Mao, meaning"Little Kitten." She is bubbly, patient, and super-friendly.

Traditional han pastries, or hanbing, have a short, crumbly texture. Xiao Mao explains that Taiwan's high humidity lends itself to pastries with lower water content to prevent spoiling. Gooey pineapple jam or paste made with taro – the sweet and starchy purple root – makes the perfect filling.

We begin with a brief introduction to Taiwanese pastries and the brand's histor y and culture, complemented later by a sampling of four mini tasters of the brand's bestselling cakes, accompanied by flowing teacups of honey-scented black tea. Now time to put on our aprons and get baking.

Our task is to create mung bean pastry, or ludou peng. The "peng" comes from the Taiwanese Hokkien word for cake, onomatopoeic to how the pastries "puff up" in the oven. A peculiar culinary discovery for travelers to discover in Taiwan is that beans – yes, beans – are widely used in traditional sweet treats, quite the opposite of Western cuisine. From adzuki beans to kidney beans to mung beans, all can be found paired with tofu pudding, shaved ice, and baked goods.

On this day, we're working with the humble mung bean, a small green bean that's been used in traditional remedies for centuries to relieve internal heat; it's no wonder that it is very popular in subtropical Taipei. Our cake requires us to make two forms of dough following the traditional "laminated pastry" technique, which layers fat and flour to eventually give that "puffed up" effect in the oven.

First, we assemble the "outer dough" or youpi, the Taiwanese take on puff pastry dough. Flour, butter, powdered sugar, and water are mixed, folded, layered, stretched, and rolled until we have two evenly sized balls of springy dough left to rise while we work on the next stage.

The "inner dough" or yousu that we make next contains just flour and butter, yielding a drier, less pliable dough. Once more, we knead and knot the ingredients to form equally sized balls of dough.

We then combine the two types of dough, layering the springier outer dough with the shorter, fattier inner dough until we have four round discs. We pop in tightly rolled balls of mung bean paste, pre-made by teacher Xiao Mao, with just a hint of sugar and butter for sweetness. Once we've folded and molded our four mung bean cakes into their final round, "full-moon shaped" form, it's time to get creative.

Mung bean pastry traditionally have good luck symbols stamped on top in signature red food coloring, but today we get to play with stamps fashioned into heart shapes, floral designs, and even iconic local sights like the Taipei 101 tower and Beimen (North Gate) to make our own designs.

We pose with our final creations for teacher Xiao Mao, who prints out framed photo keepsakes for us to take home. Then, it's time to put them in the oven and watch them puff up. Twenty minutes later, after a delicious hanbing sampling and afternoon tea, our culinary artworks and souvenir pics are ready. Teacher Xiao Mao even lets us sample one of her creations straight from the oven. The pastry tastes best warm, flaky, and freshly baked.

Now that we have created our yummy cakes, we have the perfect gifts to present to our loved ones, offering them something special this Mid-Autumn Festival!

JIU ZHEN NAN (TAIPEI REGENT HOTEL STORE) 舊振南 ( 台北晶華店)

🚩3, Ln. 39, Sec. 2, Zhongshan N. Rd., Zhongshan Dist.

📞(02) 2511-2295

🔗www.jzn.com.tw

🕝Sun-Mon 10:00am-9:00pm