So. I believe I told you that I planned to try out David Chang's Momofuku pork buns. And I did. Chang is clear that you can't halve the bun recipe, otherwise there isn't enough dough for the dough hook in the mixer. But I went for a smaller portion of the pork belly which has to chill anyway before you slice it, so it seemed appropriate to do in batches.
So I went with 1/3 the pork belly recipe which calls for an overnight marinade in a salt/sugar mixture. Then you put it into the oven and roast it. According to the cookbook, you do it on high heat and then low and the recipe that he posted in ... a magazine a few years ago says the reverse. I decided to go with the book, except I didn't third the recipe. So you can see this charred thing that came out.
Here is the cross-section of the pork belly. It's from Heritage Farm. When I tried a slice, it was charred-tasting, but like something familiar, like the crusty edges of some Chinese barbecue. It didn't horrify me. So we saved it.
In preparation for putting the buns together, I slices up some pork and then warmed it in a pan.
The steamed bun dough takes some commitment, or at least a movie or two. You start off by putting all the ingredients into your standing mixer -- yeast, room temp water, bread flour, sugar, dried milk powder, baking powder, baking soda, and maybe some salt. Then you let it go for eight to ten minutes. Long live the dough hook!
Then you put it into an oiled bowl covered with a towel in a warm place -- the oven. You let it rise for 1 1/4 hrs.
Then you punch it down, cut the dough into halves, then each half into five. Then each of those five into five little balls like you see here. I'm not very good on the equality of the dough.
You let those rest a half hour while covered with plastic wrap. And while it's resting, you go and cut up parchment paper into fifty 4x4 inch little squares. We ran out of parchment paper, so I used deli paper, which seemed nearly as good. It's rather nice that the deli sheets are at least twelve inches in one direction, so that was nice.
Then you take each dough ball, flatten it with your hand, and use a rolling pin to make it about a four inch oval. You take a greased chopstick -- I was using lard as my grease of choice -- and fold the dough over so that the chopstick is in the crease. I wasn't very good at this part or the making-it-even part. You put each folded dough piece onto one of your pieces of parchment, cover with plastic wrap, and then ... yep, let it rest another half hour.
When that's all done, you turn on your steamer and when the water is boiling, steam the buns. If you put too many, they will bulge onto each other. If you keep steaming buns and the water gets too low, you'll have trouble getting the buns off the parchment pieces in that they come off easiest when the parchment is completely wet. This makes some sense to me since I remember growing up that all steamed buns come with paper at the bottom and it always ripped off part of the bun.
However, Chang calls for taking off the paper now and then you can freeze them. But he doesn't say anything about freezing them on a sheet pan and then putting them into a freezer bag, so I wonder just how much he really knows about freezing these buns. Well, we will see when I have to defrost some.
I was pretty nervous about opening the buns but they opened easily. Hooray!
So, take one bun. Open. Add slices of pork belly (contrary to what the book says, I put two, not three). Add quick pickled cucumbers, a swipe of hoisin, and thinly sliced scallion. Eat. Yum.
Folded bun!
Then I took some duck leftover from thanksgiving and heated that up. Add the same ingredients. Dot with sriracha. Eat. Good, but the pork was better.
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