🍽️ Hohhot Baked Wheat Cake

Flaky baked cake, perfect with mutton soup.

Hohhot Baked Wheat Cake is a traditional baked flatbread of Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, and the star of the Green City's breakfast tables. White-flour dough is layered with oil pastry, rolled thin, and baked against the oven wall, hence the name bei zi. The result is crisp outside, soft inside with clear layers; savory versions are salted and oily, sweet ones filled with brown sugar. Hohhot people eat it in many ways—stuffed with braised meat, egg or spicy strips—but the most authentic is to break it into a bowl of mutton soup. Filling and hearty with a rich wheat aroma, it suits the dry, cold climate of this grassland city. At Hohhot morning markets, queues form at fresh-bake ovens; a flaky cake with hot mutton soup is the city's most solid morning taste and shows the classic Inner Mongolian pairing of wheat bread and lamb broth.