Kari's Blasphemy Kitchen: Char Siu Baozi

[kawree]

i love savory buns. no, that's not a euphemism.

i mean okay maybe, but that isn't what we're here for today. anyway, i love bao, and i love nikuman, and dim sum is amazing, and honestly why america has never really gotten onboard with Steamed Pocket Sandwich outside of fuckin. hot pockets. is beyond me. cuz hot pockets, while great for constipation, are about as far removed from the soft steamy heaven of asian steamed buns as you can get.

sadly, america prefers microwave enema tubes, so finding the proper ingredients to replicate something more authentic can be a challenge. today's challenge came not in the form of lack of ingredients, however, as by and large, char siu pork is made with pretty widely available stuff. no, today's challenge is that i absolutely suck at baking from scratch. i have never been good at math, and the last place i want to have to do math is in the kitchen, so unless it comes from a box and all i have to do is add some egg and oil, it ain't happening. so while i had successfully made some absolutely off the hook char siu pork already, i was a bit stumped on what to do about trying to recreate the bun without actually making my own dough.

dough is all fundamentally similar, of course: flour, water, yeast, sugar. some have more than that, but that's the fulcrum upon which all bread rests, so after a lot of digging and comparing bao dough recipes to determine the ratios in which things are put together, i determined that the most likely candidate for a premade bao dough was... pizza dough.

yup. a tube of refrigerated pizza dough seemed the most similar to the bao dough recipes, and i was just as surprised as you are, until i thought about it. i mean, pizaman are a popular snack food in japan, and they're made with the same dough as any other -man, so why not pizza dough? so anyway, that is how we are going to Be White and Bastardize Foreign Cuisine today, cuz just because the US is a racist hellhole doesn't mean we have to eat garbage, so long as we can think outside the box!!!


Premade Pizza Dough Char Siu Bao

ingredients

for char siu
- pork butt/boston butt/thick pork chops would do too
- oyster sauce [if you can't find oyster sauce, see notes below*]
- hoisin sauce [same notes as oyster sauce]
- soy sauce
- honey
- chinese five-spice powder [this is mandatory; you may have to buy it online but this really cannot be substituted aside from individual use of the five spices]
- garlic [minced works best, chopped will do, do not smash]
- ginger [i find paste works best, but grated is also fine]
- dry sherry or mirin or some other sweetish cooking wine
- chili powder or sriracha [optional]
- a grill or smoker for cooking

for buns
- one (1) tube premade pizza dough, any brand will do, i just used the cheap walmart brand for extra blasphemy
- flour [any]
- a steaming apparatus


instructions

slice up your pork. you want it not super thick, longish strips for grilling, or if you prefer to smoke it that's also good. basically just don't make the pork too small. once it's all cut up, set aside to make your marinade.

perfect measuring is for chumps. and bakers. we don't do that here. start with your oyster and hoisin sauce*. if you can't find oyster sauce, you can sub soy and honey, but i don't recommend just doing that if you do have access to either or both. soy + honey are an acceptable stand in in a pinch, but oyster and hoisin are gonna give you a better flavor. eyeball how much meat you've cut, you'll need to kinda estimate how much liquid you'll need to marinate it in.

provided you haven't cut up an entire pig, i find about a tablespoon of oyster sauce is a good place to start, and you can just multiply from there. if you're substituting soy + honey, go about half and half of each. same for the hoisin sauce; you want about the same amount of hoisin and oyster sauce, so if you're substituting, about a tablespoon of soy sauce and a tablespoon of honey.

now the actual soy sauce and honey, for even if you're not substituting. about another tablespoon of soy sauce, and half a tablespoon of honey.

go easy on the five-spice. it can be overpowering if you use too much, so i always just say use your best judgment on this one. A Good Shake is usually all any recipe not for the entire family needs. garlic, however, is an entirely different story. load that shit up. no, more. a little more. yeah, that's probably good. about a quarter as much ginger as you used garlic tends to be a good ratio, in my experience, so do that. now add a splash or two of that sherry or other wine, and throw in a little chili powder or a squirt of sriracha if you like. grinding your own dried chili flakes is not necessary but will give you popeye-arms, so if you're into that go for it.

now mix it all up. make sure the honey is dissolved fully or you'll get uneven sweetness.

throw your pork in a zipper bag and dump your marinade in. squish it all around til the pork is thoroughly covered, and then roll all the air out of it and seal. smush it flat ish so you get as much marinade-to-meat coverage as possible at all times. place in a container or on a tray or something in case the bag leaks at all, and leave it alone at least overnight. a whole day is even better. do not let it marinate more than 3 days or you're gonna have a bad time.

once it's marinated your preferred length of time, grill or smoke the meat til it's... well. cooked. every grill or smoker is gonna be different, so just pay attention lmao. you can do it in the oven as well, but i find that requires more constant monitoring than i have the patience for, for some reason. make sure not to overcook it or it'll be dry, though!! char siu can be devoured at this point just as-is, and i do highly recommend eating some of it right the fuck now. just make sure to put some aside for your bao because i promise you'll regret it if you don't make bao out of this. if there is any marinade left over, boil it and save it to use with your filling, and/or you can also glaze it while it's grilling!


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you wanna dice up your pork nice and small to make the filling. you don't have to mince it or grind it, just dicing it up into little cubes is fine; the buns themselves aren't super large, so as long as the meat is cubed up small enough that you can fit it into the bun and still seal the bun, that's the right size. if most of the marinade was cooked off, you can whip up another little batch of char siu sauce for this, but you should theoretically have some of the marinade left once you remove the pork from the bag. just make sure it's been thoroughly boiled so you're not putting your cooked pork back in raw pork juice. mix your diced filling around to get it nice and saucy, but not like. drenched. if the filling is really wet your bao will end up soggy.


when the time comes to make the bao, spread a bit of flour on your countertop or cutting board or whatever surface you're working on, as well as dust your hands, cuz dough is sticky. i like using rice flour cuz it sticks to everything else less, too. get your blasphemous premade pizza dough and pull off a nub that weighs approximately 50 grams.


pizza dough is very gummy and a bit harder to work with than traditional bao dough, so be careful when preparing the dough to be filled. press your nub of dough flat into a disc, and then press the edges more flat. basically you want the center to be thicker than the edges, because that will create the base the filling sits on. if the base is too thin, the bun will leak filling juice and it'll be a big mess. the pizza dough will want to pull itself back together, especially working this small, so it's kind of an acquired skill to just... pull and pinch and pull and pinch til you get it big enough. it's about the right size when you can lay it across your cupped palm and it makes a little place to set your filling.


spoon in a bit of filling. it's not going to look like enough, but it's gonna be a challenge to pinch the bun closed, so do NOT overfill. you'll find the right balance of how much filling works best, it's just a bit of trial and error. pull the edges up and inward to carefully fold around the filling. you can kind of pull little arms up to pinch together at the top, and then continue doing so until it's all closed around the sides. again, because pizza dough is gummy, it'll take some pinching and twisting to get it to stick together firmly and make a proper seal. it won't be super pretty, it's gonna be kinda lumpy looking, but who cares, it's just gonna go in your mouth anyway. pizza dough won't give you fancy pleats like a traditional baozi, so they're more like nikuman i guess? idk, po-tay-to po-tah-to, it's all delicious.


once your buns are sealed [immature giggling] now you get to steam them [more giggling]! there's any number of methods of steaming food; i like that my rice cooker has a handy steaming basket, cuz it's super easy to clean, but any sort of steamer will work. make sure you lay some sort of paper down first or the bun will stick to the steamer!!! if you don't have parchment paper, cabbage leaves work, too, which is pretty cool, go totally natural hell yeah. place your buns in your steaming apparatus of choice, and steam for about ten minutes. when the ten minutes is up, remove them from heat/turn off your rice cooker but DO NOT open the apparatus and expose the buns to sudden cold air right away, that will make the dough collapse and get tough. let them rest for at least two minutes. i know it's hard, but it will be worth it.


after the resting period, you may remove the buns from the steamer. the bottoms will be wet and sticky [more immature giggling], so you can set them on their sides to dry a little before eating. this is also recommended so that you don't sustain 8th degree burns to the inside of your mouth.


if you pressed the dough right, the bottoms will be a bit thicker than the sides and there should be no leakage, and it'll just kinda look like a little round purse full of mysteries you are about to devour. i recommend devouring by carefully tearing the bun in half and then dipping the corners in a mixture of 2 parts soy sauce to 1 part balsamic vinegar and a dash of honey and/or ponzu.


you can cook multiple buns and then refrigerate them in a covered container [prolly wanna put them on parchment paper so they don't get stuck to the bottom of the container] for prolly up to a week, and just reheat in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time or re-steam for like 3 minutes til they're warm thru. or you can *not* cook them and freeze them! freeze on like a baking sheet in one layer so they freeze individually and don't end up all stuck together, and then you can toss them all into a bag and chuck them in the chest freezer for whenever. one roll of walmart pizza dough made 8 buns.

enjoy your buns of blashemy!!!!