Those who have wandered around downtown Shanghai or Beijing’s Sanlitun recently might have noticed the long queues of people in front of various bakeries and tea shops, wondering what’s so special about their tea or sandwiches. But it is not the tea and sandwiches people are waiting for in the freezing cold – it is their dirty dirty chocolate bread.
“Zang zang bao” (脏脏包), literally meaning “dirty dirty bread”, has become an online craze in China over the past few months. The Chinese chocolate croissant was already named “one of the most popular baked goods in China in 2017” by CGTN (CCTV International) in December, but the social media hype over the bread has carried on well into 2018 and is now making it to the top trending topics on Weibo.
The bread’s name comes from the fact that it actually looks dirty and that is virtually impossible to eat the snack without getting messy. Containing large amounts of chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder, people eating this bread are bound to end up with chocolate stains all over; which is one of the main reasons that sparked the online craze for it in the first place.
Hundreds of people – specifically young women – are recently posting photos of themselves on Wechat and Weibo eating the bread and then having their hands and mouths covered in chocolate, triggered by celebrities and online influencers (KOL) who have previously done the same. Showing off their chocolate-covered faces is another way of being ‘cute’ and playful.
The bread’s recipe originally comes from the Japanese version of the chocolate croissant, and first started gaining attention in China when a Beijing bakery named Bad Farmers & Our Bakery started selling the pastry at limited hours during the afternoons in 2017.
According to the online media platform AI Finance (AI财经社), the trend then blew over to Shanghai, where LeLe Tea (乐乐茶) started selling the buns in June of 2017 with much success – within six months, the tearoom franchise was able to open four additional shops in Shanghai.
The Zang Zang Bao success has now triggered teashops across China to sell their own version of the popular bread. A shop of a franchise called HeyTea (喜茶) in Sanlitun, Beijing, is gathering large crowds of people who are curious to try out its “dirty bread”.
The spokesperson of HeyTea, however, denied to AI Finance that its company has become an ‘internet hype.’ In the end, many companies dislike becoming a ‘hype’, which suggests that there is a peek of interest which will soon blow over. Companies such as HeyTea hope that the Zang Zang Bao will not be a “short-lived glory” but a classic item on their menus.
On January 29, Zhejiang University warned on Weibo (@浙江大学) that fans of the bread should not eat their favorite new snack too often: one roll of Zang Zang Bao holds no less than 450 kilocalories.
But many netizens do not seem to care too much about the calories: “It’s only two bowls of rice,” some said: “I’ve already bought another dirty bread today!”
There are also others, however, who do not understand what all the fuss is about: “What’s so delicious about this stuff?”, one netizen wonders: “It indeed tastes as if it is stuffed with dirt.”
By Manya Koetse
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