Baked Pork Bun - Chinese

A friend in the neighbourhood make very delicious pork buns. She made the pork bun in the style of the ‘Seremban Siewpao’, a well known pork bun franchise in Malaysia.  The first time we tried this buns was when we were invited to her place for tea. On another occasion, I made a special request for her to bring some  when we invited her over for barbeque.  I love these pork buns, they have a nice perfect combination of crusty pastry with soft and juicy barbequed pork fillings.  Inspired, we decided to make some.

Note: Seremban a city about 50km south of the capital city Kuala Lumpur, and ‘Siewpao’ is the Chinese word for baked bun

We researched on a few recipes and found one that is close to what we have in mind. The recipe is from Lily Ng's blog. She has very good Asian recipes. 

Making this bun requires two types of dough, i.e. oil dough and the water dough. The dough are made separately and later combined. For the oil dough, I use lard which is much better than shortening. Lard is both natural and tastier. Whereas shortening contains artificial transfat.

To make the Chinese pastry, the oil and water dough are cut into 20 grams and 40 grams pieces respective. These are folded together and rolled flat. It is then rolled like a Swiss roll and rolled flat again. This is repeated three times. This is how the pastry is made flaky. When it is done, the combined dough is cut into two. Each piece of the dough is then rolled flat again, and the pork fillings is wrapped with the pastry (photo on the right). The main ingredients for the fillings are the barbequed pork (Char Siew), shallots, green peas, soy sauce and oyster sauce.

The buns are baked in the oven for 10 minutes. They are then glazed with egg yolk and baked for another 15 minutes.