Hey!! This worked pretty well!!
This is a pretty standard bao recipe with minced mock char siu pork and bbq sauce stuffed inside. I was worried it was gonna be too salty, but it turned out quite nice, deffo gonna make this kinda baozi again. I've included a quick recipe for the bao dough below.
I love how fluffy and soft this dough is and I make it often enough to know it by heart. Give it a shot!! Stuff it with anything!!! I usually do some sort of mushroom and bok choy mix, but, seriously, put anything in here, or even nothing, as I did with the buns in the center of the basket as I ran out of filling.
INGREDIENTS
- 300 g Bun Flour
- 20 g Tapioca Starch
- 1/4 tsp. Salt
- 1/8 tsp. Baking Soda
- 255 g Warm Water (110°F-115°F)
- 15 g Granulated Sugar
- 3 g Dry Active Yeast
- 1 Tbsp. Vegetable Oil
METHOD
- Combine sugar and water and bloom yeast for 10 minutes or until foamy. While yeast blooms, combine flour, starch, salt and baking soda in a mixing bowl and mix thoroughly.
- Once yeast is bloomed, add to dry ingredients and add the vegetable oil and mix to combine. Knead well until dough comes together, adding water or flour as necessary, dough should be soft, but not sticky.
- Rise in an oiled and sealed container until doubled in size. I recommend using a container twice the size of the original dough so you know the rise is done when the container is filled.
- Dough is ready to use! I make 14 medium sized buns (two for breakfast for a week) out of this, so I separate them out into 37 gram balls before rolling into 4"ish round disks, fatter in the center before filling with about 2 Tbsp. of filling and closing however you like. You can adjust that as you wish for whatever sized buns you want.
Notes
- This will work with AP Flour, but it works better with Bun Flour. What is bun flour, you ask? I have no idea. My local Chinese grocer had a bag of something called "Wheat Flour (for buns)" so I grabbed it and it works better than AP Flour. The ingredients read "wheat flour". Why it's better is a total mystery. I bet it's protein content, tho. I see some bao recipes recommend cake flour, so maybe lower protein flours are better.