Vegan-Chinese Steamed Buns - Home Made from Scratch!

One of the neat things we have enjoyed eating lately are steamed buns. At a booksale back east we found a great book called The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking by Barbara Trott. After looking at it for awhile, we realized it was a keeper, being a thorough introduction to Chinese cooking techniques, ingredients, tools, and with many recipes to try out - or at least borrow the basics from and substitute our own variation. Both of us love improv...

Anyway. We made a lovely batch over the summer and then hadn't quite settled down to the point where we were ready to make a new batch. A couple of nights ago I made a small batch of red bean paste. I cooked adzuki beans down to softness, drained them, pureed them with a tablespoon of sucanat and a tablespoon of barley malt, and then heated this puree over low heat until it became thick and drier in consistency - more a paste than a puree. We had this in the fridge and were just waiting for the right day to make the buns. This morning it turned out to be! The dough was made in the morning, allowing for a long slow rise. It's been wonderfully clear and cold the last few days - a total treat!!!!!! - and we let the dough for the buns rise near the sliding glass window. Like basically everything about this rental, it's subpar - a window allowing for lots of draft, but in this particular instance, this was very helpful as I wanted cooler temperatures to delay the rising and get some extra flavor going. By afternoon, we were ready to make the second filling and begin making the buns. The second filling was comprised of minced onion, garlic and ginger root sauteed till nearly transparent to which we added shredded carrot and thinly sliced cabbage. I added some homemade seitan, which is a chewy, somewhat meat like food that you make by mixing vital wheat gluten with spices, herbs and a bit of water (along with a little shoyu and brewer's yeast) and then boiling in a bath of shoyu, water and spices for an hour. It's really quite good and we like making it now and again, sometimes sauteeing it and adding it to pizza, shaving it for sandwiches, or adding it in thin strips to stir fry instead of tofu. It's great!!

Once the two fillings were ready, the dough was split into two pieces, rolled out into two ten inch logs, and cut into a total of twenty pieces of dough. I use a small piece of dowel that shawn cut for me to roll out the disks to be stuffed with filling and be pleated into the fabulous steamed bun! I used my fingers to press out the inch thick discs of dough into a flattened disc and then the dowel to roll, from the outside in, the little wrappers. The wrappers are unique in that you leave a bit of thicker dough in the center of each disc that will serve as the base of the bun when you pleat it closed. Once rolled out into roughly 4.5" discs, you add about two tablespoons worth of filling to the middle of the disc, right over the thicker area of dough, and by a clever motion with the fingers (which I am still learning to do with more agility) you pleat up the dough, by the time the pleats close over your thumb, you twist them in a counter clockwise motion in order to seal the bun. They look like sweet little satchels, and really are, in the best ways. Full of tasty filling!

From this point, it's time for the final rise. It took about an hour today. Depending on ambient temperatures, it can go much faster. I placed the buns in the steamer baskets to rise, leaving about two inches of space between them, which after rising was reduced to about an inch. While the buns were snuggling up for their final rise, I got the water going for the steam bath and had it rip roaring for placing the baskets over the pot. They steam on high for 15 minutes, then cool down in situ for 5 minutes and voila, are ready! We made a simple dipping sauce with shoyu and white vinegar along with a bit of minced garlic and fresh ginger and a tiny bit of stevia to sweeten slightly. Makes a perfect and very simple dipping sauce.

The sweet red bean paste that I made was only mildly sweet. I used unrefined sugars to lightly sweeten the already naturally sweet adzukis. We both loved the way they steamed up, a nice firm paste filling that was a little sweet, but went really well with our dipping sauce. The cabbage, carrot and seitan filled buns were superb! We ate them all up with great relish!! Yummmmy!

The evening was an exploratory cooking adventure as we are having a few people over on New Year's for a Happy 2010 Chinese Food Day! It's a potluck and we're trying out some recipes we want to make for the day. These will definitely be on the menu. They are great fun to make, time consuming enough to engage your senses fully and really allow you to settle into the process of creating them. It's great fun to see the beautiful burnished buns come out of the steamer and the steamed dough is fantastic, picking up a little nuttiness from the bamboo steamer and just tasting delightful. Very fun meal to make and EAT!!