So it all began something like this via instant message...
June 26th
- Tele: So Savory wants to do Asian night
- me: Asian night? What would we be eating on Asian night?
- Tele: I don't know. He just wanted Asian food.
- me: I don't know any Asian dishes though.
- Tele: Stickybuns!
- me: Stickybuns are Asian? (Thinking to myself-"A stickybun is something warm and gooey with cinnamon and sometimes covered in a thick frosting and nuts. You get that at a bakery. This is so not Asian. What is my husband speaking of?")
- Tele:Char Siu Bao
- me: Stickybuns & porkbuns are so not the same thing.
- Tele: sticky pork buns
June 27th
- Savory: Has Tele talked you into making Cha Siu Bao for Sunday yet?
- me: He sent me a recipe link yesterday. I didn't realize that was his way of asking me to make. Then he came home and said that you were both thinking of asking me to make the pork buns.
- Savory: lol
And so be began my journey. I have never eaten a pork bun. I have never seen a pork bun. I have never been to Dim Sum. So I had to do research. No time to go eat this Asain food so the research must all be done on the internet and via further chats with Tele and Savory. I found that Savory prefered his steamed with a little honey baked in. Tele prefered his baked. Well alright, we are off to a start. Baked, I can do baked (I worked at a pretzel shop for 3 years). Steamed, I do not know a thing about steaming. (Tele apparantly did. Whew, one less thing I have to worry about. He can teach me on cooking day.)
I ended up combining 3 seperate recipes to make my one dish. I found a food blog with a recipe that I felt would work well, but I needed a dough that could be seamed and baked. I was not sure that her dough recipe would work well both ways however she had other elements that I would definately use. Her site was extremely detailed and that was a bonus (remember I do not know what this item is that I am making). I do believe that she made her life a little more complicated than necessary by cutting out individual little wax paper squares to set the buns on, I chose to just set mine on one large wax paper sheet. I used her site for the details and the filling as well as how to bake the Pork Buns. She didn't have a recipe for how to roast the meat either as she bought hers pre-roasted. The next order of business was to find a versatile dough recipe that would work well both steamed and baked. I found just such a dough recipe. This recipe ended up being an extreamly simple recipe to make. The dough did work well both steamed and baked. The dough was sweet to the smell, but not to the taste. I then found the Chinese barbeque pork recipe on the same site as the dough.
This dish came out very well. Tele and Savory seemed to enjoy them very much. I absolutely loved them. Both the steamed ones and the baked ones were excellent. My 1 year old baby loved the roasted meat and was eating as I was shredding it! There were a lot of seperate steps to get the dish done, but over all it was actually all very simple to do. You must think ahead however as the meat needs to marinate over night first, then get roasted, cool, shredded and then heated on the stove with the rest of the filling ingredients. I felt like the dish was well worth the work put into it and am glad that these two silly guys talked me into making it.
Because this was all a bit confusing, here is a list of the links I used for the different parts.
- Roasted Meat I did not use any variations, just the Basic Steps 1-5 replacing 6 with shredding the meat rather than cutting into bite sized pieces. I did end up using Pork Tenderloin because it was all my Sam's Club had available 30 minutes before closing.
- Dough and How to Steam Buns
- Meat Filling and How to Bake Buns
You already know that Tele owned up to cheating by making Egg Drop Soup (Thank you, it was excellent!). But what you didn't know is that Savory made Stir Fry (Also, thank you. It was tasty). So now what I want to know is how did I end up cooking for 2 days while they ended up cooking for 15 minutes! I think I shall be much more suspicious next time they "assign" me a dish to cook.