Bing is a wheat flour-based Chinese food with a flattened or disk-like shape. These foods may resemble the flatbreads, pancakes and unleavened dough foods of non-Chinese cuisines. Many of them are similar to the Indian roti, French crêpes, or Mexican tortilla, while others are more similar to cakes and cookies. The term is Chinese but may also refer to flatbreads or cakes of other cultures. The crêpe and the pizza, for instance, are referred to as keli bing and pisa bing respectively, based on the sound of their Latin names and the flour tortilla is known as Mexican thin bing based on its country of origin.
Types
Bing are usually a casual food and generally eaten for lunch, but they can also be incorporated into formal meals. Both Peking duck and moo shu pork are rolled up in thin wheat flourbao bing with scallions and sweet bean sauce or hoisin sauce. Bing may also have a filling such as ground meat. Bing are commonly cooked on a skillet or griddle although some are baked. Some common types include:
Chun bing, a thin, Northern bing traditionally eaten to celebrate the beginning of spring. Usually eaten with a variety of fillings.
Shaobing
Jianbing, a popular breakfast streetfood in China.
Bó bǐng, a thin circular crepe-like wrapper or "skin" wrapping various fillings. This is sometimes called "Mandarin pancake" or "moo shu pancake" in American Chinese food contexts.
Rou jia bing, also called rou jia mo refers to a bing that is sliced open and filled with meat, typically stewed pork or lamb meat. Some variants, such as niu rou jia bing use sesame bread and are filled with beef meat and pickled carrots and daikon, similar to a banh mi.
Hé yè bǐng, used to accompany many rich meat stuffings and popularized by the gua bao, a variation with red-cooked pork belly.
Jin bing is a layered bing that is made with high-gluten flour popular in Northern China. It is also known as zhua bing since its layers can be grabbed at with hands.
The Yuèbǐng, whilst sharing the name bing, is really a baked sweet pastry usually produced and eaten at the mid-autumn festival. Some other dessert bings are "Wife" cake, which contains winter melon, and the sweetened version of 1000 layer cake which contains tianmianjiang, sugar, and five spice or cinnamon. Bings are also eaten in other East Asian cultures, the most common being the Korean Jeon which often contain seafood. In Japan, Senbei is a Japanese rice craker whose name is cognate to Jianbing, and is written with the same Chinese characters.
