Jan’s Char Siu Bao Battle: Take One
So after doing a “char siu bao” (bbq pork bun, the ones you see at dim sum) in Google, I found a few recipes that looked promising. Out of about 3 that caught my eyes, I picked the one that seemed the easiest for my first experiment.
To the left is my first char siu bao {csb}. It looked a bit squished because I had to pull the bun apart so I can take a photo of the inside. Anyways, after i got home last night, I started off by preparing the filling. The sauce is pretty simple to make: water, soya sauce, oyster sauce, sugar, ketchup, corn starch, dash of white pepper, cooking wine and sesame oil. I used hot water to dissolve the corn starch so there won’t be any lumps then set it aside while I work on cutting up the char siu (bbq pork). I’m a slow chopper so it took me about 10-15 mins to cut up about 2 cups of the pork. The recipe actually asked for a bit of onions too but I’ve never seen onions in the csb from the restaurants so I left it out (plus I don’t think I can stand another 5 mins of chopping). It is a good idea to use a non-stick pan to cook the filling as the sauce thickens up and might stick to the pan. After heating the pork for about 2 mins, I added in some wine, then the sauce mixture I prepared earlier. It thickened up almost instantly, probably because of the corn starch in the mixture. I cooked it for another 3 minutes or so before removing it from the heat and tossing it with some sesame oil for flavour. It smelled really nice! After it cools, it’ll thicken more and are ready for use. To speed up the cooling, I set it in a cold water bath.
For the buns, the ingredients are equally simple: flour, sugar, baking powder, water, milk, and oil. Since the recipe was in Chinese, I had a bit of trouble understanding one part on the dough making and this probably caused the first screw up. Anyways, I did what I think is logical (in terms of dough making) and got the dough together. After letting it rest for about 1 hour, and dividing the dough into smaller portions, I rolled out each one and filled it with the pork filling. Once the water is boiling in the wok, I added the buns in there with a steamer and steamed it for 20 minutes. Here’s another mistake: for the first batch, I didn’t know that the timer should start after the water reboils (aka when you see steam coming out) so the buns wasn’t as puffy as the second batch.
Here are a few more things that I noticed and will need to improve in the next trial:
- The dough has this pale yellow colour, I’m not sure where it is from since I’m using all-purpose flour, sugar and milk which is all white in colour. I think it might be the oil? I will try to use a lighter oil next time (will need to do some hunting around the house/store).
- The steam makes the top (crust) of the buns very dry and tough. The ones you get at the restaurants are very soft and sometimes will stick to your fingers. The crust is very thin, but will need to improve on the texture abit.
- The dough did not rise that much (partly because I might have misunderstood a small part of the recipe) and it’s not as fluffy as the “real” csb. Next time I’ll try to make it with yeast and see if that’d help. Or maybe adjust the amount of flour to make it lighter?
I’m giving this char siu bao a 7.5/10 because I didn’t like how the dough turned out. I’m going to use the same filling for the next attempt since this one seems pretty good.
CSB Experiment: The dead wok story
My dad killed the wok because before I add the last batch of buns for steaming, he said he’d help me add more water to the wok first (to ensure that you don’t run out of water since they evaporates as you steam. I asked him if he was sure he added the water and he said yes. So I loaded the steamer with the buns, set the timer for 20 mins when I see steam coming out then went to my room to get ready for bed. I came back to the kitchen 20 mins later and found that there’s no more steam coming out of the wok and the bottom is bright red. There was no more water and the heat is melting the bottom (or almost melting it). The buns were done but it got this brownish colour at the bottom (it looked like it was baked) from the heat. The wok is destroyed so now I have to wait till mom gets a new one before I can start steaming again.
