Chinese pork and vegetable bun

One bright winter afternoon, I stumbled upon an interesting blog, by a lady called Kiki. She created plenty of recipes on fine food. The pictures looked so good, I decided to translate some of the recipes and try them out. One of the interesting recipes I found was her meat-and-vegetable bun (bao zi), which my husband had very fond memories of when a friend of ours treated us to their dinner at home. So I went all the way to buy a bamboo steamer, and a pot specially for steaming (that was so hard to find, I finally stumbled on it at a thrift store!) With just one try, I became fully convinced that those fashionable stainless steel steamer pots are just no substitute to the time-tested bamboo steamer. The bamboo steamer allows good circulation of heat without trapping the moisture, making it perfect for steaming fine food, such as Cantonese dim sum. No wonder it's not gone out of fashion! This is what I got at my first attempt with my new toy.

Recipe: Chinese steamed pork and kappa cabbage bun (make 6 buns of 2"-2.5" diameter)


Ingredients:


For the bun
- 1 cup all purpose flour (125 g)
- 2 tablespoon (TB) white sugar (25g)
- 1 teaspoon (tp) baking powder
- 1 tp instant yeast
- 1/4 tp sugar, for activating the yeast
- 3/4 cup water


For the filling

- 6 oz minced pork

- 2 leaves of kappa cabbage, finely chopped and drained of water
- 2 TB dried mushroom, soaked and chopped, then drained
- 1/2 tp salt
- 1/4 tp sugar
- 2 tp cooking rice wine
- 1 TB sesame oil
- 1 tp fresh ginger finely chopped
- 1 TB oil


Procedure:
1. Fry kappa cabbage and mushroom in 1 TB oil to bring out the aroma and dry out the water. Let cool. Then mix thoroughly with minced pork, cooking rice wine, sesame oil, ginger, salt and sugar. Stir in one direction for a while until the mixture becomes elastic. Set aside.
2. Mix flour, baking powder and sugar thoroughly in a bowl. Heat 1/4 cup of water to 40 degree celcius. Add yeast and 1/4 tp of sugar to the warmed water, and let sit for 30 seconds. Then add water with yeast into the bowl of flour mixture. Mix to form a dough. Slowly add in another 1/2 cup of water. Then knead just until dough is very soft, smooth and elastic but not sticky to hand. Do not over-knead. Because baking powder is used, work immediately to form the buns once the dough is ready. Partition into 6 pieces of equal size. Roll out each piece into a round palm-sized sheet about 1/4" thick. The dough from this recipe is rather elastic, so it can be stretched quite a bit without breaking. Add about 2TB filling to the center of the sheet, and close it up on top to form a bun about 1.5" diameter.
3. Let sit for about 20-30 minutes in a warm place to let the dough rise. Dough will grow by 1/4" diameter. Then steam on high heat for 30 minutes. When done, they expand to about 2"-2.5" by diameter with a slightly translucent skin.