The dough is regular bread dough with baking powder added.
The filling is Mexican meatloaf, mostly pork and beef steak, lightened slightly with bread to hold in its meager fat. It also has egg. I've enjoyed it very much, it's kept me alive, but it is a bit too dense for these buns, I think, so it is lightened up further with vegetable things, sunflower sprouts, savoy cabbage, onion and flavored again with Asian elements this time, garlic and ginger, more chile flakes and honey for sweetness.
I am eating all of these. There are only a few left. These buns are incredibly delicious.
Sauce: Butter in a small pot, spices added to butter to get them going, chile powder, cinnamon powder, black pepper, soy sauce. The fat and spices bubble, then sweet red vermouth is splashed into the pot and a sludge forms, it evaporates, more vermouth is added to have a better sludge, and that evaporates, then chicken broth is doused in the pot, enough to make this. Then, back to square one with a pat of cold butter swirled in to finish with a silky gloss. Cream was on standby but not used. The process is a bit French, that approach. Nothing in the sauce to thicken it, just reduced liquids and spice powders, no starches, but there could be.
Steamed buns with Mexican meatloaf filling and some sort of sauce look good, but char siu bao they ain't. There's a riddle that Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have told, though it may be apocryphal: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know, it's not bbq, but I don't care. Mine is better. Plus my meat loaf is almost entirely pork.
ReplyDelete