Daring Cooks: Char Sui and Char Sui Bao

Our Daring Cooks’ December 2011 hostess is Sara from Belly Rumbles! Sara chose awesome Char Sui Bao as our challenge, where we made the buns, Char Sui, and filling from scratch – delicious!

Another chance at some Chinese cooking this month.  This is a two part challenge.  First we had to cook the Char Sui (a barbequed pork) and then we use the leftovers to create Char Sui Bao ( a filled bun ).  I love both of these so it sounded like a fun challenge.

The first part of the recipe was making the Char Sui.  It was a very simple recipe.  You simply marinate some pork tenderloin and cook in the oven or on the grill.  Since I am still pretending it is not winter here in Minnesota I decided to grill the pork.  The recipe does tell you to allow the pork to marinate from 4 hours to overnight.  I was only able to do 4 hours.  The pork tasted very good but I do see how it could have benefited from a longer marination time.  I made a bunch of this pork and loved using some of the leftovers for sandwiches.

A few days later I decided to tackle the Char Sui Bao with the leftovers.  The challenge provided recipes for baked or steamed.  I love these little buns but have never had them baked.  Not really sure how authentic a baked bao is but since I didn't really have the equipment to easily steam a bunch I decided to try them baked.  The dough is a yeast dough but only takes a few hours rising time.  They are real simple to put together - just roll out a small circle of dough and use it to wrap a small amount of pork filling.  I loved these - I won't say I liked them better than steamed but they were different - much more like actual bread than a steam bun.  Both good - just in different ways.

This was a great challenge - my only problem is how to get the red color out of my towels and off my cutting boards :)  If you would like to try out these recipes on your own check out the Daring Cooks recipe archive.

Daring Cooks: Moo Shu Pork

This months Daring Cooks challenge was Moo Shu Pork.  I love Moo Shu,  I had made it once in the past but did not make the "pancakes" so it sounded like fun to try to make all the parts.  The challenge even had a recipe for hoisin sauce so I decided to make that as well.

The recipe came together easily.  It is like a lot of Chinese cooking where most of the time is spent preparing and cutting all the ingredients and the actual cooking is a small part of the whole process.  The hoisin recipe was very easy - just mix the ingredients.  The hoisin was much runnier than most I have seen before but it tasted very good.  The ingredients were also much different than a bottled hoisin I had (where the main ingredient was sugar).  For the Moo Shu I did use a standard green cabbage since I had just gotten one from our CSA and I also used a mix of white mushrooms and the black mushrooms.

The most interesting part of the recipe for me was the making of the pancakes.  They are just flour and water but the technique is the interesting part.  I did follow the alternate #2 directions from the recipe.  For the technique you form two small 3" pancakes, then you coat one side with oil, press the two pancakes together and roll them to form one 6" pancake.  You cook this is a dry pan then you separate the two pancakes.  They come right apart where they were oiled and you have two very thin pancakes that are nice and delicate and cooked nicely.  I was a little scared of this technique and my first set or two came out a little thick but after I got the hang of it they were not hard and came out very nice.

Thanks to Shelly of C Mom Cook and Ruth of The Crafts of Mommyhood for this months challenge.  I loved it.  If you would like to follow along and try out this recipe it can be found in the Daring Cooks Recipe Archive.