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My fam­ily love Chi­nese style bbq pork buns (char siu bao).  I had made a roast pork the night before last and wanted to use up some of the left­overs.  Of course my pork wasn’t roasted in the tra­di­tional Chi­nese bbq style, but with the addi­tion of a sauce mixed into my roast pork, I felt I could get away with it. For the bun dough I used the mas­ter recipe from my copy of Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day.

Ingre­di­ents:

Bun dough:

Mas­ter Recipe here.

Roast Pork:

2 cups of roast pork diced (I used left­overs remember)

Sauce:

(Adapted from The Chi­nese Kitchen by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo)

For the Fill­ing (make while the dough is ris­ing):
5 table­spoons low-sodium chicken stock
1 tbsp oys­ter sauce
2  1/2 tsp sugar
2  1/4 tsp tapi­oca or corn starch
2 tsp ketchup
1  1/2 tsp dark soy sauce
Pinch ground white pep­per
1 tbsp oil
1 small onion, cut into 1/4-inch pieces
3/4 cup bar­be­cued pork, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 1/2 tsp Shao Xing rice wine or gin
1 tsp toasted sesame oil

In a small bowl, com­bine chicken stock, oys­ter sauce, sugar, tapi­oca starch, ketchup, soy sauce, and white pep­per; set aside.

Heat a wok or pan over high heat for 40 sec­onds and add oil. Coat wok with oil using a spat­ula then add onion. Lower heat to medium, and cook until onion turns light brown, about 2 min­utes. Raise heat to high, add pork, and cook, stir­ring, for 2 min­utes. Add wine, and stir to combine.

Stir the reserved stock mix­ture and add it to the pan. Cook, stir­ring, until the sauce thick­ens and turns brown, 1 to 1 1/2 min­utes. Add sesame oil, and stir to com­bine. Trans­fer to a shal­low dish. Cool to room temperature.

Assem­bly:

Pre­heat oven to 375F.

Once the dough has risen for the first time I took small pieces of it and flat­tened it to the size of a small saucer using floured hands so it didn’t stick.

Then take about one heaped table­spoon of the pork fill­ing and place in the cen­ter of the dough disc.

Gather up the sides of the dough disc to form a ball shape enclos­ing the fill­ing.  Be sure to seal the fill­ing inside of the dough or it will leak out.   I placed my buns with the gath­ered seam side down and brushed with a beaten egg to give them a glossy finish.

Place buns on a sheet pan dusted with some flour and bake in the oven for approx­i­mately 15–20 mins depend­ing on your oven.

I served mine with a plum sauce for dip­ping which was a great compliment.

***As I said before, these are a quick cheats way to make pork buns, so if you are look­ing for the tra­di­tional char siu bao, then this recipe prob­a­bly isn’t for you.  It was really a way of using up our left­overs and enjoy­ing the pork in a dif­fer­ent way to how it was first served up.

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There is noth­ing quite like the smell of bread bak­ing.  Unless of course it’s cake or cook­ies bak­ing.  But bread fills the house with that mor­eish, yeasty fra­grance you just can’t get enough of.  Recently I pur­chased a fab­u­lous book titled “Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day.”  You start with a basic dough from the mas­ter recipe that can be kept in the fridge until you want to bake some­thing.   At which point you take some of the dough and add your flavours, shape, bake and eat!  This week I have really been hun­gry for Tan­doori Chicken so decided to make that and what bet­ter to accom­pany this meal than some tasty gar­lic naan bread.

Mas­ter Recipe

3 cups of luke­warm water
1 1/2 table­spoons gran­u­lated yeast (1 1/2 pack­ets)
1 1/2 table­spoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 1/2 cups unsifted, unbleached, all pur­pose white  flour, mea­sured with the scook and sweep method.

Mix­ing and Stor­ing Dough

1.   Warm the water slightly:  It should feel just a lit­tle warmer than body tem­per­a­ture, about 100 degrees F.  Warm water will rise the dough to the right point for stor­age in about 2 hours.  You can use cold tap water and get an iden­ti­cal final result;  then the first ris­ing will take 3 or even 4 hours.  That won’t be too great a dif­fer­ence, as you will only be doing this once per stored batch.

2.  Add yeast and salt to the water in a 5 quart bowl or prefer­able, in a reseal­able, lid­ded (not air­tight)  plas­tic food con­tainer or food grade bucket.  Don’t worry about get­ting it all to dissolve.

3.  Mix in the flour — knead­ing is unnec­es­sary.  Add all of the flour at once, mea­sur­ing it in with dry ingre­di­ent mea­sur­ing cups, by gen­tly scoop­ing up the flour and lev­el­ing it off with a knife.  Mix this in with a wooden spoon, or high capac­ity food proces­sor (14 cups or larger) or mixer fit­ted with a dough hook attach­ment.   If it get’s too dry you can reach into the dough with very wet hands and press the mix together but don’t knead.  You are fin­ished when every­thing is uni­formly moist.  This will yeild a dough that is wet  and loose which will prob­a­bly con­form to the shape of the container.

4.  Allow to rise.  cover with a lid but not air­tight.  Do not use screw top jars as the gasses will not be able to escape and the jars could explode.  Allow the mix to rise at room tem­per­a­ture for approx­i­mately 2 hours.  The top may begin to col­lapse in on itself, this is ok.  Longer ris­ing times up to 5 hours will not harm the result.  You can begin using any por­tion of the dough after this time to make your breads.

When you wish to bake some bread, DO NOT KNEAD.  Just shape your loaf in 30 to 60 sec­onds and you are ready to bake.  It is best baked on a pizza stone with some corn­meal sprin­kled on it to pre­vent your loaf from sticking.