Savory Pies: Chinese Steamed Buns with Barbecued Pork Filling

Apr 11, 2008 A decent dish; I'd be willing to cook it again. Although the filling was a tad too sweet, I nevertheless got used to it and ended up liking it more than the filling of some buns I've bought in restaurants. The dough was a little dry, yeasty, and bland, not quite as sweet as most buns, but not really bothersome. Like another reviewer observed, the directions are incorrect. I cut the dough recipe in half without changing the quantity of meat and even then I ended up with a bit more dough than I needed. In step one, the yeast-flour-water mixture never bubbled. In step four, follow the directions and put only two tablespoons of filling in each bun. (I was tempted to put in more. I was wrong.) If you use enough dough in a bun so that you can put in, say, two heaping tablespoons comfortably, the bun will end up uncomfortably large. And you'll also end up with an imbalance between meat and bread in each bite. I also learned that one should make the dough thinner than one thinks. (The dough rises a lot.) But the hardest thing about making buns is getting the dough to be a uniform thickness on all sides. I guess I just need to practice how to make a bun with a good balance of meat and dough everywhere. Following my revised recipe makes two _main course_ servings. If you freeze the buns before steaming, they freeze well. Incidentally, it took me 2.5 hours to cook from start to finish.

—Mark P 

View the original article here