Pai Bao (排包)
October 19th, 2011Bread isn’t really one of the staple foods in our home. We don’t really have toast for breakfast, and we never have sandwiches for lunch. Growing up, I had way too many sandwiches for lunch, and as an adult now (with a mini fridge and microwave in my shared office), I much prefer hot lunches. However, I do have a bit of a weakness for Chinese buns, especially fresh coconut buns (雞尾包) fresh out of the oven. I always pick one up every time we’re at church early to lead worship b/c the buns are always fresh out of the oven at the Chinese bakery down the street from our church.
One of my (and my dad’s) fave buns is “pai bao” (排包). There’s just something about tearing off pieces of this soft, fluffy bread that’s just so comforting. A couple of months ago, I came across a recipe for making 排包 at one of my favorite food blogs.
Here’s the original recipe - http://en.christinesrecipes.com/2010/11/pai-bao-hong-kong-sweet-buns.html
The recipe looked really intriguing, especially since this recipe calls for a special type of ingredient called 湯種 (ie. bread flour paste). What exactly is this bread flour paste? Well, many years ago, a Chinese bread cookbook was published in Taiwan that specialized in using this specific type of paste, which was supposedly the secret ingredient for making Chinese breads soft and fluffly. The book was extremely popular, and everyone wanted to try making bread with this type of paste.
The only problem with this paste is that it makes the dough very sticky, which makes it hard to knead the dough with a stand mixer. So, this recipe strongly recommended using a bread maker for kneading. I hummed and hawed about getting a bread maker just to try out this recipe, but finally caved when breadmakers (and glass digital kitchen scales!) were on sale at Canadian Tire this weekend :P This blogger is from Australia, so her ingredients are all in weights instead of volumes (just like most UK and HK recipes).
So, equipped with my new kitchen gadgets, I embarked on making my very first batch of 排包. Getting all the ingredients together and getting the breadmaker to knead the dough was the easy part (I’m so glad I bought it!). The hard part was getting the dough to proof. This recipe calls for two proofings. Because the weather is so cool now, it was hard to get the dough to proof properly (well, at all!). The flavour of the bread was exactly like that of store-bought 排包, but b/c the dough didn’t proof properly, it wasn’t that soft or fluffy :( I also forgot to brush the egg wash on the dough until half-way through the baking, and since we were in a rush to go over to my BIL and SIL’s for dinner, I stuck it under the broiler to speed up the process of browning… but left the broiler on for a bit too long :( Gah! It was OK, it wasn’t burnt, but it does look a bit more golden than it should.
Now that I’ve done some research on how to better proof my dough, I’m on my second try of making 排包. Hope it turns out better than the first time!

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