包 Wow! Making Baozi (包子), SUCCESS!

This is a not yet steamed baozi (包子!). Inside hides some tasty delights.

lonely bun!

Yeasty buns filled with savory meats and veggies, they are steamed to perfection and can be eaten whenever you want! In China, baozi are commonly eaten for breakfast, although I have eaten baozi at every hour of the day. Now that I live in Georgia and baozi are not as easily accessible as they were in Beijing [shoutout to that baozi man that made amazing baozi!], I begged my grandmother who has always made the best, delicious baozi to show me how to make them!

There are two major parts in making these baozi. The filling and the dough - it takes forever!
The filling is composed of chopped bokchoy, pork, clear noodles, green onion, shitake mushrooms that have been stirfried with onion. The bokchoy is washed and soaked in salt before it is strained of moisture and chopped and diced. Shitake mushroom diced and stirfried with onion to bring out the flavor before all three are combined with the raw pork. The clear noodles need be chopped into small bits. The purpose of the clear noodles are to soak up the excess moisture inside the bun when it steams so that the inside isn't soupy. Soupy buns are delicious, but dry ones can be just as tasty without being excessively fatty. Soupy buns can also explode all over your shirt and ruin clothes - maybe that's just me? It should look something like this as it's waiting to be wrapped!

this would be delicious, if it were not raw.

The dough is a simple flour and water plus yeast that mostly just takes time (4 hours) to rise. Then, you cut and roll the dough out into small flat circles that are about 4 inches in diameter with centers that are slightly thicker than around, so that the meat won't wa. I raced my grandmother in being able to roll the dough out faster than she could wrap it.

yes i know these aren't round circles. they should be. should!

After they're wrapped, we put them in a waiting zone because we could only steam 10 at a time for 25 mins each.

包 wow! steam us up!

After their 25 mins sauna experience, they become big and puffy marshmellow poofy cuties! This is them right out of the steamer!:


We put them in a rack and let them cool before eating them.

grandmother, as she is taking them and putting them on the rack.

Here is the inside of one of the experimental batches. The more we made, the bigger and fluffier the baozi became! I hope you enjoyed looking at these pictures because I enjoyed making 50 of these baozi in an all day food-speriment with my grandmother... and eating these yum baozis.

click to ZOOM!

Baked Spinach Chips, Epic Fail

After the debacle with the sweet potato chips, I thought I would try a little something easier. Something I don't have to slice, something naturally thin. My food blogs have been talking about using other veggies, like kale or spinach. After viewing what they could look like for a few days now, I got excited and went to buy the ingredients.

what I saw.

I got started, things looked pretty goood.... I covered my spinach leaves with some balsamic vinaigrette dressing before sprinkling a little salt on top. Delicious? I thought so, too!

mm about to be a delight?

Little did I know that I was about to decimate my spinach and in their place, create delicious morsels of vegetables that were STUCK TO THE PAN. In my efforts to save calories, I did not spray the pan and wipe it down with oil. Oil free, the snack said, OIL FREE.

the potential here makes me sad.

I peeled off whatever I could salvage before trying my second batch. This time, I would use foil, but not oil. My eyes gleaming, the now, super shiny tray gleamed in return. Perhaps success would be mine!

So let's recap. I bought spinach leaves. I tossed in some balsamic vinaigrette. I laid them out. I put them on the sheet. I did not put oil, the recipe didn't call for it. I put the timer to 350. I put the sheet in. I set the timer for 7 mins and I stalked around.

I peeked in, the oven's light reflecting brightly off of the foil. My spinach leaves stuck themselves promptly to the foil and did not let go. What I needed was wax paper. This was the key. Too bad I don't have any, so I will concede this battle to the chips. Sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Finding a chip alternative has never been so hard and unsatisfying.

For what it's worth, what I could peel off was delicious and light and paper thin. I'm sure it has almost 0 calories and I will probably attempt to make these bad boys again.