Laojia Charcoal Grilled Pepper Pies are Good

Laojia Charcoal Grilled Pepper Pies (老佳碳烤胡椒饼) on Burmah Road is the first in Penang to offer genuine Taiwanese 'hujiao bing', essentially oven-baked pies filled with peppery minced pork and scallions. These pies, with sesame-studded crusts, are baked in charcoal-fired, tandoor-style ovens. The pies are slapped onto the hot walls of the ovens and cooked for 15 minutes. Pried off the walls of the tandoor, the cooked pies have the crusty texture of a thin pizza base.

In China, hujiao bing is identified with Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian Province, which was why Taiwanese vendors often labelled the product “Fuzhou hujiao bing” (福州胡椒餅) or Fuzhou pepper pies.

The origin of hujiao bing is shrouded in the mists of antiquity, but it’s easy to see its Near East-Middle-Eastern origins. Persian and Turkish traders have been settling in the ancient cities of Hangzhou (then the capital of Jiangzhe, which included Fujian), Quanzhou and Fuzhou since the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty in the 13th- and 14th-centuries. At the time, Kublai Khan’s Mongol Empire stretched across vast swarths of the Euro-Asian continent, and the use of the Indian-origin oven - known variously as the Hindustani tandoor, the Persian & Hebrew tanūr, the Arabic tannūr, and the Turkish, Kazakh & Uzbek tandir - stretched from one end of the Silk Road to the other.

By the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD), Fujian played host to the Ming Imperial Navy, and the port of Fuzhou was the launching base for a series of expeditions (1405 to 1433 AD) by Admiral Zheng He which sailed as far as the Horn of Africa. Large communities of Turks, Persians, Arabs and Indians lived in Fuzhou, which explains the existence of the tandoor-like oven there.

But the Fujianese-Chinese are non-Muslims, and started stuffing their pies with minced pork - a meat never used by the Persians, Turks or Mughal-Indians, who are Muslims. The main seasoning used was black pepper, an important spice from the Indian sub-continent.

The hujiao bing was brought over to Taiwan at the tail-end of the Chinese Civil War when 2 million of Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek’s retreating Nationalist forces crossed the straits to escape to Taiwan, as Mao Tse Tung’s Communists took over China. As the refugees moved en masse to Taiwan, they inadvertently brought along with them their food culture - the tandoor-baked Fuzhou pies, among them.

This shop on Burmah Road is owned by Kiong Chee Siang, an enterprising Penang-Hokkien (he's not Fuzhou/Hockchiew) who simply loves hujiao bing.

RM5.50 per piece