Much as I love bao, especially those stuffed with char siu, I have never made them properly before. All of the recipes I read made them seem very complicated to make at home, and there was always a step of sprinkling baking soda on the dough after it had been kneaded (and then kneading it all again) which seemed like a lot of faff and made no sense to me.
However, I did a ton of research and ended up making bao this evening that looked and tasted as good as (if not better) than those in Chinatown, without all of the fiddly steps that I have grown used to reading about. Rather than make these in the usual ball format, I made them in the bun shape made famous by David Chang, which allows for stuffing after the fact, so to speak.
Makes 8 bao buns.
⅔ cup warm water
2 tsps instant yeast
2 Tbsps sugar
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
1¼ cups flour
3/4 tsp salt
¼ tsp baking soda
Measure the water, sugar and yeast into a bowl or into the bowl that comes with your stand mixer. Leave them to bubble up while you measure the dry ingredients into a separate bowl.
Add the oil to the yeast mixture. Stir to combine.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix well to combine. Scrape out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until a smooth and shiny dough forms. Or use the bread hook on your stand mixer and beat the dough into submission that way until a glossy dough forms.
Lightly oil your hands and bring the dough together into a ball. Place back in the bowl and cover with a damp dish towel. Set aside in a draft free place for 90 minutes. (I use my microwave).
After 90 minutes, tip the dough out onto a very lightly oiled piece of parchment paper and gently press it down into a rectangle about the thickness of a pie crust, a bit less than half an inch.
Using a round cookie cutter or a glass, cut out dough rounds. Set them aside and press the remaining dough together and back into a rectangle and cut out additional dough circles.
Fold the dough circles into half moons and place each on a small square of parchment paper that you have previously prepared. Most recipes specify that one should use a chopstick to make a crease in the dough when folding the rounds in half but I found that just folding them worked fine too.
Place each of the prepared dough rounds on their parchment paper squares in a steamer. Cover with the steamer cover around which you have placed the damp dish towel previously used to cover the proving dough. This will keep condensation from falling back onto the dough.
Place a pan that is just large enough to hold your steamer on the stove top and add an inch of water to it. Bring to a boil over medium heat. As soon as it boils lower the heat to its lowest possible setting and place the covered steamer over the water. Cook for ten minutes.
After ten minutes, turn off the heat and leave everything alone for one minute before lifting the cover from the steamer.
Remove the bao one by one from the steamer, peel off the parchment squares, gently loosen the bao at the seam and fill with the filling of your choice. I stuffed mine with a variation on the Filipino beef dish, bistek Tagalog, and lightly pickled carrot and cucumber.
Yorumlar