Youtiao is a popular Chinese breakfast food consisting of fried breadsticks made with yeast and served with warm soy milk. It can also be stuffed with meat, cut and placed in broth, or eaten as a sandwich. Youtiao is traditionally about 30-40cm long and is best served chilled. It is often sold by street vendors, but KFC in Beijing also offers it as a breakfast option. The origin of youtiao dates back to the Song Dynasty, where it was created as a symbol of protest against a corrupt leader.
Youtiao, or tu tiao, is the Mandarin name for a type of fried Chinese bread stick popular as a breakfast food in China. These breadsticks are made with yeast and fried in pairs connected in the middle, resulting in a puffy bread with a crunchy outside and soft inside. The breadsticks can be served whole, stuffed with meat or cut and placed in broth.
When served as a breakfast food, particularly in northern China, youtiao is usually paired with warm soy milk, in which the bread stick is dipped. It is also often placed inside sesame flatbread and eaten as a sandwich. Additionally, it can be included in rice porridge or spare rib soup, or filled with prawns, pork, or beef.
Although homemade recipes for youtiao may suggest a shorter length of breadsticks, traditionally these breadsticks are about 30–40cm long and are usually about 3cm wide. This bread is best served chilled due to its tendency to become hard or stretchy if left too long. Youtiao also contains flour, water, sugar, salt, baking soda and vegetable oil.
In China, bread sticks are often sold at stalls by street vendors. Street vendors typically add alum — crystals of potassium aluminum sulfate — to their recipes, however, in order to enhance the puffy, crunchy exterior of their breads. Alum should generally be avoided, as it often causes digestive problems.
Youtiao is so popular in China that in 2008, the American fast food restaurant KFC located in Beijing included it as a breakfast option. Although the price of the breadsticks was three times that of the average street vendor price, KFC advertised that their youtiao was alum-free.
The original creation of youtiao dates back to the beginning of the last millennium and the Song Dynasty. The corrupt leader of China, Qin Gui, allegedly on the advice of his wife, executed a loyal general, Yue Fei, who was loved by the people. In anger and protest, a cook fashioned a pair of breadsticks into roughly personal shapes, braiding them together and deep-frying them, symbolically boiling the chief and his wife in oil.
This tradition of origin is where the Cantonese name of youtiao comes from: tu zha gui, which literally means “deep fried devils” or “deep fried ghosts”. Youtiao has a less appealing literal translation, meaning “oil” or “stick of fat” in Mandarin. The closest English comparison to youtiao is the doughnut-shaped cruller.
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