Steamed Filled Buns (Zheng Bao)

For awhile now I've been lusting after Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More by Andrea Nguyen. I first found out about this book through her blog Vietworldkitchen.com, which I had been following for awhile. Once I found out about this book I knew I couldn't pass up it up. I mean it's entirely dedicated to dumplings! After realizing how easy it was to make the filling for dumplings awhile back (while, admittedly, using store bought fresh wrappers) and at the same time how great it was to have a stock of frozen dumplings for a quick dinner in the freezer I finally bought the book.





















I started off by making a simple, Asian chicken stock consisting of chicken, onion, and ginger that I could use for some of the fillings of the dumplings. Not being one of those good people who slowly accumulate chicken bones in the freezer I just bought a whole chicken and used that. This, of course, left me with an entire chicken's worth of poached meat. Well, let's look in the book for something that I could use this for! Hm....Curried Chicken Bun Filling for steamed filled buns? OK! The filled buns were something I wanted to try eventually anyway so I thought this would be a good use. The recipe has you make a curry paste and cook the chicken with it along with coconut milk. Filling, check. The buns are a risen yeast dough, which slightly intimidated me since I'm, well, not so great baking (odd since I work in a bio lab...). Luckily, I had a professionally trained pastry chef in the apartment to assist! The dough was easy enough to make, but the hard part was shaping them and figuring out how thick to role them since they have a second rise after filling them. For a first try I don't think they turned out too shabby. We thought we had done something wrong at first after we pulled them from the steamer since they looked raw, however we soon realized that restaurants use a special rice flour that makes their buns a brilliant white.

These were good, but both of us thought that the dough could have been lighter and fluffier. Not sure if that was because of how it was mixed or shaped, or if that is just a function of the recipe. I'll either use this recipe again, try adding in some baking powder for a second levener, or try out David Chang's bun recipe from the Momofuku cookbook.

These were a great start! Next filling to try: Char Siu Pork (I think this is the red pork I normally associate with steamed buns)