Happy Lunar New Year! Hoping that everyone who does celebrate it had a wonderful time, and lots and lots of good food!
Since it fell on a Tuesday this year, I ended up celebrating Chinese New Year early over the weekend at home. While in previous years we would usually make dumplings (my favorite is 韭菜, garlic chives) in store-bought dumpling wrappers, over the beginning part of the pandemic, I started learning how to make different kinds of dough and flour-based food. So I made over 80 dumpling wrappers from scratch, and sat down with my parents to make our dumplings. They were so delicious, and we’d made so many that we have lots left over for future meals!
While I was preparing the dumpling wrappers, I also decided to try to make something new, from my mom’s suggestion – 割包, gua bao! These are fluffy, white, and soft bao buns that are folded in half to hold glazed pork belly, pickled mustard greens, and topped with cilantro and crushed peanuts. They’re extremely extremely good – but we’ve never been able to have them at home before! While my mom handled everything inside the bao, I looked up how to make the bao bun outside, and got to work.
Anything with yeast in it stresses me out, since in all my previous experiences with it, I’ve had no idea how to handle it. Plus, since it’s a pretty cold environment, the time I have to give it to rise is always way longer than given in the recipe, so I have to guess when the dough has risen a certain amount or not.
But this time, it was perfect! I set up a space heater just for my batches of dough and set them on top of our actual heaters as well. It sounds a little silly, but I think was the perfect way to make the dough actually rise.! In the end, after lots of anxious pacing around the steamer, I opened up the lid to the most delicious-smelling fluffy white bao. I couldn’t believe it! That day, we ended up with 20 bao. Even though it was midnight by the time that they were done, my mom worked some magic and put everything together to let us try one. It was the best gua bao I’ve ever had, and made for even more amazing food to share with my family for Lunar New Year.
