Hello! Today is part 3 of the Four Great Traditions of Chinese cuisine: Huaiyang. So far we've cooked Lu and Sichuan, and Cantonese is yet to come. Huaiyang represents the eastern part of the country, including the city of Shanghai. It's characterized by more sweet-flavored foods, in contrast to the spicy cuisine of Sichuan.
I decided to go with baozi, which are filled steamed buns. Vegetable steamed buns are sometimes eaten for breakfast, which sounds like a delicious way to start your day. While making these I kept thinking of an episode of the Amazing Race where a Chinese father and daughter are setting out early on a leg in China, and the dad insists on stopping to buy a bag of steamed buns for breakfast. Definitely worth it!
The first step in making the dough is activating the yeast by dissolving it in warm water with sugar. The yeast helps make the dough nice and light and fluffy.
The next step is to make a dough from flour, baking powder, sugar, oil, and the activated yeast. It's mixed and kneaded into a smooth ball, then left to rise for about an hour. The pictures above show the dough before and after proving.
Next, I prepped all the ingredients for my filling: shiitake mushrooms, napa cabbage, carrot, scallion, and thin rice noodles. The recipe I used called for cellophane noodles, which are made from bean thread, but I figured these were close enough. I don't think the recipe really even needed them. The veggies and noodles were mixed together with soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, Shaoxing wine, and more sugar (hence this cuisine's tendency towards sweetness).
Once everything is prepped, the dough is rolled out into a log, then cut into pieces. One at a time, the pieces are rolled into a circle with the middle thicker than the edges.
Once flattened, the circle of dough is filled with a healthy spoonful of the filling, then pleated and pinched until sealed at the top. The picture above is only the second one I attempted, and not the best-looking one. I got a little better as I went on, but I am far from perfecting the technique. At least nothing burst open. I think the yeasted dough is more forgiving than a dumpling dough, since as it cooks everything just kind of pushes together, rather than separating.
You can see some of the buns above look better than others. Each bun is placed on its own little square of parchment paper, which helps to separate each bun when placed in the steamer. Since I don't have bamboo steamer baskets, I had to use a regular steamer pot, and ended up crowding my buns in there to cook 2 batches instead of 3. The parchment paper let me place buns up next to each other without sticking.
After about 15 minutes of steaming, they're big and fluffy and ready to eat! I served mine with a soy sauce-Shaoxing wine dipping sauce and some chili oil, but they were excellent on their own as well.
The hardest part of this dish was shaping the dough into circles, which wasn't really hard, but did take quite a lot of time. If I make these again it would probably be on a weekend, maybe cutting the recipe in half. This recipe made 14 buns, which was a lot, but I'm not complaining. They were a great texture and super satisfying, so definitely a success in my book.
Recipes Used: Vegetable Baozi
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