Silverknife

Bao is a tasty sweet, chewy Chinese bread, with a consistency somewhere between a dumpling and a doughnut. It becomes something truly transcendent when it's made into char siu (barbecue pork) bao, and stuffed with heavily seasoned savoury glazed pig lumps.

Ingredients (makes about 20, feeds 4-5 people)

1 tablespoon of dried active yeast or 1 sachet of instant yeast
1 cup of warm water
1/4 cup of sugar
4 1/2 cups of plain flour
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1/2 cup of boiling water

If you have dried active yeast (and you really should) first activate it by mixing it with the warm water and sugar and letting it stand for about 10 minutes till the Big Blog O'Gak™ floats to the surface. Then chuck everything in the food processor (or, if you're very dedicated, a mixing bowl) and process or mix and knead until smooth. If you're using horrible instant yeast, just throw it all together and mix as above.

Then put a bit of oil in the bottom of a clean bowl, put the ball of dough in there and roll it around till it's coated. Put it somewhere warm to rise, either covered with a wet towel or sitting next to a pan of water to keep it moist, for 1 hour.

Now, take a lump of the dough about the size of a kiwi fruit, and press it out into a thin circle on a floured surface - it should be about 3.5 inches across. This is when you need to decide what to do with it.

If you're going to make it into char siu bao, put a heaped tablespoon of a nice moist glazed pork mixture in the middle (I'd recommend frying some garlic, a couple of chopped pork chops and scallions till the meat's browned, adding a good slosh of soy, some sugar and 5-spice, a bit of water then cooking it all till the liquid is a thick sauce), then start pleating the edges with your finger and thumb - the bao will form up into a pouch around the meat mixture.

Once you've pleated all the way round the edge you'll be left (hopefully) with a moneybag shape - just pinch the pleats together at the top to seal it. You'll probably overfill a couple and end up with sauce squeezing out a bit - don't worry about it. I do that too and I've got a website and everything.

If you're going to keep the bao as a plain bun, just brush the circle with sesame oil and fold it in half. The sesame oil stops the two halves sticking together so it keeps a pocket which you can put delicious things in at a later date. I usually have a batch of glazed pork ready, fill as many bao as possible then leave the rest as plain buns for future stuffing. Please note: The bao I'm brushing in the picture is actually a bit thick - that one puffed up completely during the second rise and lost its pocket. Make yours about half as thick.

Once each bun is either stuffed and pleated or oiled and folded, put it on a square of oiled foil. Which is a nice phrase to say. Oiled foil. Just don't spoil the oiled foil. With soil.

Sorry.

Anyway, put all the bao (on their oiled foil) on baking trays and put them back in the warm place for another hour to rise again. Then steam them for 10 minutes, after which they will go from soft and squidgy to firm and slightly chewy, and unutterably delicious. I use a pan-top steamer which just sits on top of an ordinary saucepan of boiling water - saves on space and cost. It is a bit small for bao-making, since it holds only 4 at a time, but we just tend to eat each batch as they're done and it paces the meal nicely.

Whether the bao are filled or plain, once they've been steamed they can be frozen with no loss of texture or taste. When you're ready to use them just take them out of the freezer and steam them again for 10 minutes. That'll heat them all the way through to the filling quite nicely.

Labels: bao, barbecue pork, Bread, char siu, chinese, Cooking, Flour, steamed bread, Steaming, Sugar

Image via Wikipedia

Following on from yesterday's entry about skills (specifically the awesomeness of independent skills), we move on to bread. Making bread is a very much maligned skill in the modern world, mostly down to Hovis et al spending millions of pounds convincing us that what we really need is something squishy in a foil bag which doesn't go off for 6 months.

Bread-making has been safely partitioned off into a category of skills which is very useful to those who don't want us to become independent of huge corporate interests. (Namely - the huge corporate interests themselves. And all the politicians they are buying off.) It's a category for skills that "are, in their own way, wonderful things. But they're old-fashioned. They take too long. They're not really practical in the modern world. They're not really economical. They're the kind of things old people do". And so on and so on.

Throughout our lives we have been trained to believe that people fall into neat categories. You're an executive. Or you're a technology geek. Or you're a mum. Or a blue-collar worker. Or a student. Or a tramp. We are made to feel that these divisions are natural, and that when we cross over the boundaries of our category we are made to feel very uncomfortable. That applies even when the boundary-crossing would be an unproblematically positive thing - a mum who joins an open university course, or a technology geek who gets an allotment.

Once we've crossed a boundary, we feel uncomfortable until we have established a new category for ourselves. It's noteable that the people who are made most uncomfortable by us breaking out of our categories are also the people who sell us so much of our worldview - the print and TV media.

The media like to have a limited set of stories about each topic - geek develops a wacky gadget, executive lives for job, tramp arrested for being disgusting. It's simpler in that way to keep our convenient worldview in shape - they can just keep replaying the stories with slight variations in characters or emphasis, and they know we'll enjoy them, and react positively to them, because they've already told us what we like.

Back to bread, which is of course in it's own safe category as a thing that old people and people in the past did, but which doesn't really fit any of our nice modern personal categories. Mums are too busy, technology geeks can't cook anything except stirfry, blue collar workers eat ready meals unless their wife cooks for them, etc. etc. I'm sure you've already gathered my point, and in case you haven't, my point is FUCK ALL THAT. The very fact that we're not expected to make bread is enough reason to do it. If you need more reasons...

1. It's always tastier, at least compared to your basic bag-bread sliced loaf. By a considerable margin.
2. It's cheaper (not dramatically so, but it is cheaper. I did the sums.)
3. At first it's really fun to do. And once the novelty wears off you can make it damn easy - my basic loaf requires about 10 minutes of actual work, interspersed with various periods of waiting in which you can do anything else you feel like.
4. It makes way better toast than any bread you'll buy. Seriously, this toast will make you question your religious beliefs.
5. Once you realise how long real bread lasts, you're going to start getting creepy thoughts about what they're doing to a loaf of bag bread to make it last anything up to 3 weeks practically unchanged. Bread is meant to go off, it is the circle of bread life. Bag bread is the starchy equivalent of Cher. Only it makes marginally better toast. I assume.
6. It is unbelievably hardcore to be able to take some seed dust, a bit of fat and water (at the very simplest level) and make your own tasty civilised food.

A sidenote: Bread machines. Absolutely nothing against them in principle. Some people just can't be bothered with that 10 minutes of work, or believe they don't have time. And the bread they turn out is every bit as good as what you could make by hand. But to me, there's still that niggling thing that you're not actually learning a skill, at least not an independent one. Thrown out in a more primitive society, your ability to pour ingredients and push a button would have no use. Real bread skills work without electricity too.

Breadmaking sites:

Rustico article, explaining all about the science of breadmaking. Really good stuff.
Flour Advisory Bureau (don't laugh) article, with more excellent general tips.
About.com's terrifyingly thorough bread recipe section.

And of course....a basic bread recipe.

Which requires a brief disclaimer. My basic crusty white bread recipe was tried and tested, indestructible, bulletproof and worked every time, literally week after week in a row. Until I broke it. I started mucking about with the volumes trying to get a bigger loaf and just couldn't get it right, the consistency went all to hell. Then I lost the original bulletproof version [sob]. So this is currently recreated from memory, and has only been tested once - it came out pretty much okay but didn't rise all the way. I think that was my yeast though.

Hey, I never claimed bread was always easy, just worth the effort. Try it and see. But first read the Rustico and Flour Board articles. If something goes wrong, they will help you understand what and how to fix it.

Recipe

This recipe uses a mixture of plain flour and bread flour, which I've found gives a consistency I really like (soft inside, good texture, nice crust). You can play with the quantities as you wish once you get the basic idea down.

* 1 tbl of dry active yeast (or a packet of the quick-n-easy stuff)
* 1 tbl sugar
* 1/2 cup warm water

Mix those up in a bowl, and let them sit until a big gob of gunk floats to the top - that means your yeast has bloomed. Meanwhile, whack all the following in a bowl and mix together, or if you're doing it the easy way dump them in a food processor and run it for a minute or so:

* 1 tsp salt
* 2/3 cup milk
* 1tbl butter
* 1 egg
* 2 cups bread flour

Once the yeast has bloomed, pour that mixture into the bowl or food processor with the rest of the ingredients and mix a bit more. Then add 1 and a half cups of plain flour, and either mix or turn out and knead on a floured surface for a good few minutes. This is the important stage, where you're developing vital elasticity in the dough.

Now oil your bread tin, shape the dough into a sausage shape about the length of the tin and put it in the bottom, and put it somewhere warm to rise. If you don't have somewhere warm, turn on the oven for a minute or so then turn if off again (how many times have I forgotten to do that!) and put the tin in there. Preferably put a container of water in there with it, to make sure it doesn't dry out too much.

Give it roughly an hour, then punch it down (literally thump it a couple of times with your fist - if you wet your fist first you don't get dough stuck to it) and give it another half hour to rise again. Then bake it at about 200 on an electric oven, which I think is about gas mark 6. I won't give you a cooking time, the only way to tell it's done is when it's a nice deep golden colour, and if you turn it out and tap the bottom it sounds hollow. It takes somewhere around a half hour usually - your oven may vary.

Then give it at least a full hour on a wire rack or improvised equivalent to cool right through. If you cut into it while it's still warm (and it will be tempting the first time!) all the crumb (the soft inside) will squash and come away from the crust and your bread will be ruined.

Okay that's enough about bread now.