Chicken & Egg Big Bao (鸡球大包)


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Cantonese Dai Bao! An excellent, fluffy baozi that’s meant to be an entire meal in one hand. 0:00 – Why make a Bao big? 1:17 – Fillings 2:57 – Dough overview …

24 replies
  1. Chinese Cooking Demystified
    Chinese Cooking Demystified says:

    Hey guys, a few notes:

    1. Talking to Steph’s Dad Dawei, he was saying that a common breakfast for dock workers in Guangzhou back in the day was two Dai Bao (followed with a claypot rice for lunch). Makes sense, dock workers need a lot more energy for their day than an accountant. But for us – clocking in at ~700 calories per – I think one is probably enough.

    2. These keep phenomenally. Follow this recipe in its entirety (i.e. steam the buns), and keep the remainder in either the fridge (preferably) or the freezer. These’ll last ~3 days in the fridge, and, like, months in the freezer. To re-steam, steam the baozi for 5 minutes if coming from the fridge, or 25 minutes if coming from the freezer (no need to thaw the Baozi).

    3.
    When steaming, a bamboo steamer is quite important as it’ll allow the steam to pass through the lid. If you steam using a metal lid, the steam will condense and drip down onto the baozi.

    4. Speaking of which, our steamer is quite big. If you have a smaller steamer, you might only be able to fit one big bao on it at once.

    5. As a completely random aside, during testing I (Chris) ended up eating a… lot of Dai Bao. Because the baozi’s so big, I enjoyed eating half the baozi as is, and the other half with a bit of LGM black soybean chili drizzled onto it. Douchi goes well with these flavors, in my personal opinion.

    6. I’m a little worried that the visual of how to shape the wrappers into a ball was a bit too brief/unclear. While the ball-shaping process wasn’t in our uncut video this time, we also show it in the beginning of the uncut video for the peach baozi we did about a month ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkfWwFIuhJ4

    7. In the aftermath of COVID, I feel like I hear a lot of echoes of people in the west doing a bit of soul-searching as to where the F&B industry can go from here. From what I can tell from my standpoint over on this side of the Pacific… it seems that many smaller, more nimble family-run restaurants were able to weather the storm, while there was a small extinction event of sorts among famous, high end restaurants. I do wonder if Cantonese zaulau can provide a decent model for high end restaurants in the west? I’m certainly not an industry guy and my personal preferences are probably clouding my judgement a bit, but it feels like many high end restaurants in the US at least are somewhat detached from the communities they reside in (and if you look at the history of fine dining, originally that was very much by design). Feels like it’d be both more inclusive and potentially more profitable to hit a diversity of income strata. That said, Dim Sum seems intrinsically scalable in a way that a lot of high end western food just plain isn’t.

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  2. A Dedow
    A Dedow says:

    I'm constantly entertained and intrigued by all the "hot pockets" I see in literally every world culture I come across! Bao, pasties, pies, papusas, etc…it's so amazing!

    Reply
  3. nyee1
    nyee1 says:

    Growing up in smaller city Canada, we would make the road trip to Vancouver a couple times a year to stock up on all things Chinese that were not locally available (pretty much anything other than rice and lap cheung). Dad would always drop into one of the Chinatown restaurants and buy a couple of dai bao for us to share in. Can't say it was my favourite, but it certainly has become the memory icon of those station wagon trips. Haven't had one in over 40 years.

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