While studying in Hong Kong on a fellowship in the early 1990s, I traveled to Dali, a town in southwestern China. There I experienced bao like none that I had ever tasted before. They were diminutive, the size of golf balls, filled with juicy ground pork and encased by remarkably spongy, slightly chewy dough. The game changer was not the filling, which I could get my head around, but rather the dough.
In raw form, it sat on the bun maker’s counter as an active, somewhat mischievous blob. The ecru-colored dough was alive with yeasty goodness. At home, I’d been delighted by bao made from overly white, cakey, sweet dough. This dough looked different and, as it turned out, produced superior bao. It was the first time that I’d ever detected wheat flour’s natural savor in bao. Additionally, the Dali dough wasn’t cloying and it allowed the filling to really pop. There were 10 bao per order, and my friends and I enjoyed multiple orders daily during our weeklong stay. That Dali bao quickly became my benchmark for perfection, and it had to do with the dough.
When I returned to the U.S., I began looking for similar dough in commercial Chinese steamed bao but did not find it until I started experimenting on my own. I quickly discovered that bao dough was tricky to master, despite the fact that just a handful of ingredients went into it: wheat flour, leavening, liquid, fat and sugar.
Bao dough is akin to Western bread dough, the difference being that the cooking method is wet steam heat. For the most part, when bao dough is steamed into plain buns or rolls (the kind you’d tuck a slice of roast duck or pork belly into), they puff up nicely and cook to a wonderful fluffy finish.
The problem arises when the dough is stuffed to make filled buns. Whether the filling is raw or cooked, it introduces moisture into the bun during steaming and can cause the dough to cave in or wrinkle after cooking. Imagine my devastation on the occasions when that happened after hours of working and waiting.
The preventive measures prescribed in cookbooks, such as carefully lifting the steamer lid after the buns are done so that moisture doesn’t drip back onto them, failed me. Plus, that’s not what I observed at dim sum houses and street stalls in Asia, where professional cooks lifted their steamer lids with little care, steam wafting up from below, to serve you a hot bao.
Over the years, I’ve test-driven recipes from many Asian cookbooks, including some devoted to the craft of making Chinese doughy treats. Along the way, I’ve tried dough using starters and employed potassium carbonate solution and Chinese baking powder sold at Asian markets, but the results were either not as light as I wanted or ended up tasting metallic. I’ve kneaded baking powder into the dough at the end in an attempt to achieve a lofty rise; it worked but the bao surface became dimpled.
I’ve carted flour home from Singapore and purchased Taiwanese flour from 99 Ranch that featured bao photos on the packaging. Low-gluten American cake flour and renowned White Lily flour milled from soft winter wheat have found their way into my bao dough experiments. These bleached, low-gluten flours yield bright white dough that unfortunately tasted flat.
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