02.17.07
Gong hay fat choy!
Happy and Prosperous New Year! It is the year of the Fire Pig, and to celebrate, we made cha siu bao, known to dim sum aficionados far and wide as steamed barbecued pork buns. It’s traditional to make meat dumplings — wor tip (or chiao tzu, or in Cantonese gau ji), what most Westerners know as potstickers — for New Years, but we figured cha siu bao would be a somewhat easier and still meaty and symbolically rich and delicious alternative.
We didn’t have a New Year party of our own, but some friends were having a Zombie Valentine’s Day party (like zombies, true love never dies, right?) and we figured they would go over well there, too, so we prepared the filling last night, and the dough this morning, and took both to the party along with our steamer, and I made and filled the buns, and my Belovedary steamed them fresh for the partygoers right then and there.
My hands, forming the dough into a round ready for filling.
I used Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s recipe from her 1995 The Dim Sum Dumpling Book, and although I have used Barbara Tropp’s from China Moon Cookbook in the past with pretty good results as well, I think I like Lo’s better: they are more like the oldschool Cantonese versions I have eaten in a lot of Hong Kong style dim sum houses, and I prefer the texture and seasoning of their filling.
Filled bao are placed on the steamer tray, on top of squares of parchment paper to keep them from sticking to the tray.
I did vary my technique a little from the one Lo recommends in forming the buns. I did not pinch them entirely closed, but pleated them almost-shut. It’s a little riskier to shape the buns this way because there is a greater possibility that the buns will open as they steam, and it is also quite likely that the filling may bubble over and stain the outside of the bun pastry a little when you leave them vented like this, but I think that the texture of the pastry is nicer this way, so if I think I can get away with it, I usually leave my bao with a little hole on top when I put them into the steamer.
You can sort of see them in there, steaming away. Howdya like my big shiny stainless steel steamer? It has two tiers, and if I fill both I can cook 16 bao in there at one time! I wanted one big enough to steam whole fish and chickens, and as a bonus I can also cook bao or steamed dumplings for a crowd with ease.
One warning about Yin-Fei Lo’s recipe: there is a numerical discrepancy between the number of buns worth of filling the filling recipe is meant to make (5), and the number of buns worth of dough the dough recipe is supposed to make (8). I recommend simply filling the buns a little less full and making 8. It works fine. Although if you end up with extra dough, you can always just make steamed bread buns (unfilled) and eat them solo. They are quite tasty that way, and I have always found steamed breads to be wholly comforting, with their soft yet slightly chewy quality and the silkiness of the steamed gluten.
Bao! Note the hull breach on the bun at 11 o’clock. I should’ve pinched the pleats together harder. Ideally, they should all look more like the one at 6 o’clock, but I confess I am not exactly in the business of making bao with sufficient frequency to turn them out that way uniformly. (As is patently obvious.) They still taste fabulous, though, no matter the leaks.
Another thing about Yin-Fei Lo’s recipe, or any bao recipe really: make sure you’re making enough. For one thing, people can pack away astonishing quantities of steamed buns. You’d be amazed. They’re addictive. They’re also tasty cold, or reheated (steam them to warm them up and renew their texture) so you need have no fear of leftovers.
Also, the process of making bao is — even for someone like me who is accustomed to spending a fair bit of time in the kitchen — a fairly labor-intensive and time-consuming one. This is true of all dim sum dumplings. Let’s just say there’s a reason that most Chinese cooks don’t cook their own dim sum, but rather go out to eat it in the teahouses whose raison d’etre these dishes are. Because bao doughs will be steamed and a wet dough would simply turn to mush, they can be fussy and require a lot of kneading because they require you to develop a great deal of gluten with only a very small amount of liquid to help you. This is often daunting to Western cooks, particularly if you’re not used to the whole process of working dough to develop its gluten… and even if you are an experienced bread baker, these doughs are a very different animal and you can sometimes knead by hand for 20-30 minutes before you really start getting any elasticity into the dough at all. (A sturdy mixer with a dough hook is a huge help in making bao dough — I think I would refuse to make it if I did not have my big gay lavender KitchenAid to do the heavy kneading for me.) Then there is the forming the dough rounds and the filling and pleating the buns. And the filling is cooked separately, beforehand, as well.
So if you’re going to do it, make enough to make it worth your while! I made 6 batches’ worth of Lo’s recipe, for a total of 48 bao. Tomorrow I plan to cook up another 6 batches’ worth of filling since I still have more cha siu to use up, which I will freeze in 2-batch portions, so that the next time I want cha siu bao I will have that part of the work already done. (The doughs do not freeze well, though the bao themselves, once cooked, will freeze pretty well and can be easily reheated by simply removing them from the freezer and popping them into the steamer until they’re hot all the way through.)