Cantonese-style roast pork buns (char siu gua bāo)

The last few weeks have been rather busy at work. But hopefully today’s recipe for pork buns will in part make up for my tardiness in posting. At this point I should note that these are nothing like the pork buns at Momofuku. Unlike Momofuku’s more famous ones, where the filling is made of pork belly and copious amounts of salt and sugar (sorry if I just ruined it for you), these use roasted pork shoulder (admittedly not the leanest cut either), flavored Cantonese-style with dark soy sauce, hoisin, garlic, and Chinese five-spice powder.

There are two components to this dish. Both are independent of each other, and while neither is especially complicated, you can make them on different days to reduce the work (and stress). One is the sweet and garlicky roasted meat known as char siu, a classic of Cantonese cuisine (known as chāshāo in Mandarin and chāshū in Japanese, although the latter is often braised.) The other is the steamed bun or bāo. After consulting some Chinese friends, it would seem that bāo-包-is a generic term for any kind of wrapper. So this is also a char siu bāo. Gua is a bit more complicated. According to my colleague Qiang Yang, this type of sandwich bread is originally from Fujian province where it is called Ge Bao (割包). In Taiwan, the same bread is called gua bao, but is written as 刈包. (I don’t speak any Chinese, but even from my spotty knowledge of Japanese kanji the meaning is pretty clear: 割 means to cut or separate and 刈 means to cut. However, as you’ll see, there is no cutting or slicing involved in making this bread.) That etymological digression aside, both components are taken from a book I’ve mentioned previously, the excellent Asian Dumplings by Andrea Nguyen. Few cookbooks I know of combine such vast scope with minute detail as successfully as this one. One final note. The buns go well with lots of other fillings – both sweet (I’m thinking anko here) and savory – so feel free to experiment.

Ingredient note: This recipe requires Chinese five-spice powder, something I did not have on hand as I’d never had occasion to use it before. You can buy it at any Asian market, but this is potent stuff that you rarely need more than a teaspoon of at a time. So rather than buying a jar that you have no hope of ever finishing, I suggest making your own. Its easy enough if you have the ingredients on hand, although – confusingly – the proportions are not exactly set in stone as a quick search on the Internet revealed. So I sent out an SOS to Rachel over at Food Refuge, who generously responded with the recipe given below (which I’ve slightly tweaked).