Taiwan's Pastry Culture: When a Century of Han Pastry DNA Meets the 'Molten' Revolution of Modern Confectionery

30-second overview: Taiwan's pastry culture is shifting from "the burden of gift-giving" to "everyday comfort." The core of Han pastry craft is the layered structure of "oil skin wrapping oil crumble" (youpí bāo yōusū). Through Kuo Yuan Ye's refinement, Jiou Jhen Nan's digital transformation, and Suntone's molten-center technology, this craft has successfully entered the modern snack market. On the surface this looks like a change in flavors — what's happening underneath is a genetic recombination of traditional craft through lower sugar levels and aesthetics.

On Hulin Street in Taipei in 2026, the air is still thick with the rich fragrance of milk and red bean paste. But what the young people queuing are holding has changed from bulky ceremonial wedding cakes to a "molten pastry" barely 5 centimeters in diameter. Slice it open and a golden salted egg yolk flows out like lava, while the shell still maintains the layered texture distinctive of Han pastry. It is not a variation on a Western dessert — it is a successful mutation of Han pastry craft DNA in modern life.

For a long time, Han pastry occupied a "heavyweight" position in Taiwanese consciousness — it was the propriety of engagement and marriage, the offering for deities, the "symbol of prosperity" in elders' mouths.¹ As dining habits grew more refined, this weightiness became a burden.

The Soul Gene: The Thousand-Layer Contest of Oil Skin and Oil Crumble

To understand how Han pastry entered new-style confectionery, you first need to take apart its most fundamental craft gene: oil pastry (yōusūpí).

The soul of Han pastry lies in the distinctly layered, melt-in-the-mouth pastry shell. This depends not on leavening agents or chemical additives, but on the physical layering of "oil skin wrapping oil crumble."² The pastry chef first kneads all-purpose flour, water, and fat into a pliable "oil skin," then mixes low-protein flour and fat into a loose "oil crumble." When the oil skin wraps the oil crumble, and the parcel is repeatedly folded and rolled out, each layer of oil skin has a thin coating of oil crumble in between. In the heat of baking, evaporating water puffs the dough layers apart — forming a delicate structure of hundreds or thousands of layers.³

This structure has enormous load-bearing capacity. It can hold moist mung bean paste, glistening braised pork, and even the "liquid molten center" that is the hardest element to manage in modern confectionery.

📝 Curator's note
The most stubborn genes in traditional craft are often the most elegant solutions to modern problems.

The Refinement Revolution: From "Big Cake" to "One-Bite Dessert"

"We are not just a Han pastry shop!" Kuo Yuan Ye's fifth-generation successor Kuo Chien-wei has emphasized this repeatedly in interviews.⁴ For a century-old brand, the biggest challenge goes beyond technique — it lies in the "fixed impression" lodged in the reader's mind.

Kuo Chien-wei spent time studying in Japan, where he was deeply inspired by how Japanese wagashi integrate traditional craft with modern aesthetics.⁵ Back in Taiwan, he led Kuo Yuan Ye through a bold experiment: shrinking and refining the original outsized mung bean cake, and even collaborating with designers to redesign the cake's embossed patterns. He found that when the volume of a Han pastry decreases, the psychological burden on the audience decreases with it — a Han pastry shifts from "ceremonial gift-giving" to "afternoon tea option."⁶

This trend of "Han pastry-as-confectionery" began introducing a craft that had only appeared at weddings and festivals onto the trays of trendy cafes.

Technical Mutation: When Molten Center Meets Pastry Shell

If Kuo Yuan Ye solved the problem of "form," the emerging brands exemplified by Suntone (三統漢菓子) solved the technical breakthrough of "texture."

Western-style molten desserts often face one problem: liquid fillings tend to seep through the pastry shell, causing the texture to become soft and soggy. Taiwanese pastry chefs used the thousand-layer properties of Han pastry's "oil skin wrapping oil crumble" to create a natural barrier.⁷ This structure can lock in the moisture and fat of the filling while keeping the shell crisp.

Suntone's marketing director Zhou Shi-ya noted that through digital transformation and the island's first molten pastry, they generated annual revenue of NT$200 million in just four years.⁸ They insisted on "lower sugar, lower fat" formulations — a major challenge in traditional pastry-making craft, since fat is the key to maintaining crispiness.

📝 Curator's note
The essence of innovation is allowing the traditional to breathe again under new rules — discarding the traditional is actually the easier path.

Returning Craft to Daily Life: Jiou Jhen Nan's Food Education Route

In Daliao, Kaohsiung, century-old pastry shop Jiou Jhen Nan (舊振南) chose a different path: cultural education. Jiou Jhen Nan chairman Li Hsiung-ching knew well that if the younger generation no longer understands Han pastry, the craft will eventually wither.⁹

The Han Pastry Culture Hall (漢餅文化館), established in 2016, functions beyond selling pastry — it is simultaneously a food education base. Here, young people can hand-shape a piece of mung bean moon cake (綠豆椪) and feel the elasticity of the dough between their fingertips. Li Hsiung-ching once said with weight: "Education can't be rushed — but it must be done."¹⁰ This experience-based transformation has brought Han pastry back from an antique in a display case into something in the hands of young people as living culture.

In 2026, Jiou Jhen Nan even launched a cross-genre "Han Pastry Gelato," incorporating the pastry shell and filling elements of Han pastry into Italian-style ice cream. This apparently contradictory combination is actually the most extreme evolution of the Han pastry gene: it completely breaks the limitation of temperature, allowing the flavor of Han pastry to exist in a more everyday, more fashionable form.

Conclusion: Take Away a Way of Seeing

The reason Han pastry craft was able to enter new-style confectionery is that it learned to "recombine."

When we taste a molten pastry or a Han pastry gelato, what we eat is more than just a dessert — we eat the "sense of layering" that has been transmitted through a hundred years. That sense of layering is time, rolled out across a pastry board by the hands of countless masters. The appeal of Taiwan's pastry culture lies in the fact that it has never refused change — yet it has always preserved that insistence on the craft of "oil skin wrapping oil crumble."

Next time you bite into a pastry and see those layers in cross-section, you might find: tradition and modernity have always been able to coexist. They were just waiting for a "molten" moment to flow together again.

Further Reading

• Pineapple Cake — Another "golden brick" that defines the Taiwanese flavor: the eighty-year trajectory from ceremonial cake to small pastry
• Beef Noodle Soup — The evolution of Mainlander military dependents' village taste memory; together with Han pastry, the two main threads of popular Taiwanese food
• Taiwan's Agricultural Modernization — From traditional agriculture to cultural export; pastry craft is one branch

References