Bing (bread)

Bing (Chinese: 餠) is a wheat flour-based Chinese bread with a flattened or disk-like shape. These foods may resemble the flatbreads, pancakes, pies and unleavened dough foods of non-Chinese cuisines. Many of them are similar to the Indian roti, French crêpes, Salvadoran pupusa, 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 (可麗餅) and pisa bing (披薩餅) respectively, based on the sound of their Latin names, and the flour tortilla is known as Mexican thin bing (墨西哥薄餅), based on its country of origin.

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 flour bao 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:

The Yuèbǐng (月餅; mooncakes), 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 (老婆饼), which contains winter melon, and the sweetened version of 1000 layer cake (千层饼) 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 (Korean: 전; Hanja: 煎) which often contain seafood.

In Japan, the character 餅 usually refers to mochi (glutinous rice cakes), but is also used for some other foods including senbei (煎餅) rice crackers, written with the same characters as but quite different from jianbing. Most Japanese bing-type cooked wheat cakes, both sweet and savoury, are instead called yaki (焼き), as in dorayaki, taiyaki, okonomiyaki, etc.

The earliest record of the word bing is in Mozi, written c. 400 BCE – c. 300 BCE, where it describes a food. In the Han dynasty, the dictionary Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100) defined bing as pastries made of wheat flour, while the dictionary Shiming (c. 200) defined bing as doughy foods including noodles, fried dough, and steamed or baked bread that food historians consider to be equivalent to pasta. During the Western Jin Dynasty (266–316), Shu Xi [zh] wrote about bing in more detail. He described various types of bing, some with origins in villages or foreign lands. He recommended stuffed buns for spring, what may be a flatbread for summer, what may be a leavened bread for autumn, and boiled noodles for winter. The first recipes for bing appeared in the sixth century agricultural text Qimin Yaoshu.