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: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lkfWwFIuhJ4.html 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.
@@PaulMab9 When Daniel Humm was on the Rich Roll Podcast, he was talking about the potential for high-end restaurants and soup kitchens to cooperate and an initiative he got going on there, so that might be worth checking out.
Why is like asking "Why pasties?" Eating with one hand when you don't have much time is a human tradition, double points for your container being eatable!
@@romxxii The folks who invented these were probably hard manual laborers who burn like 4000+ calories per day...... so that's probably why. You still see migrant workers eating their lunches out of bloody wash basin sized bowls...
Interestingly this is also why Molassesschriwwelboi (or Shoofly pie in English, there are other Deitsch names as well) is a pie. It was originally a cake sweetened with molasses (the brand of which was often shoofly, hence the name in English) commonly eaten by farmworkers in Pennsylvania, US. It got turned into a pie around the time of the civil war in large part to aid eating while busy or getting to work. Just take a piece and go (why cake I don't know, they seem to like sweets, though to be honest it's a bit like pancakes. We've been having sweet cakes for breakfast for a long time). The nice thing about piecrust though is that they didn't have to cook it all the way through and so you get wet-bottomed version appearing later, especially among the Amish communities. The cake essentially forms a custard on the bottom
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!
I am firmly of the opinion that every culture’s dumpling is the best food they have to offer. Someone should make a restaurant that serves multiple culture’s dumplings
I dunno man, my reaction to "why make a bao big" is "why WOULDN'T you". They sell these, or something very similar to these, at a banh mi/soup/dumplings place near us, and they are amazing.
Grew up eating this in Vietnam! This is like the most convenient handheld food you can get on the streets when you’ve been eating too many banh mi and want something different.
This is the type of Bao that you will encounter on the streets of major Indonesian cities like Jakarta. There are usually three to four types of fillings, but the traditional ones are sweet black beans and chicken. And we call them Bakpao/Bakpau which is the Hokkien term for meat baos even though not all of them contains meat.
You described one of our favorite Chinese restaurants in Manila (Emerald). They also sold Baos for takeout, and dimsum in the daytime. More importantly. Thanks for this recipe, this is one of my favorite foods I miss from home, the last was 8 years ago. And another thing: this would be more awesome if you replaced the egg with a salted duck egg.
Personally, I prefer the boiled egg as seen, rather than salted egg. I mean I don’t like salted egg in general, but in a bao, it gives it a strange sandy texture to me.
I ate lots of this and my freezer has a whole bag of frozen one given by my mother in case I am hungry and in a hurry. Boiled Egg is best for my taste and when you try to microwave it, take out plastic, put it into small bowl and put a wet napkin to cover the entire thing, it will kind of "steam" in microwave and it works with reheat rice.
That chicken bao recipe is really nostalgic, growing up in SF you'd see it a lot. (side note I'm not really sure what you'd call them. In local parlance we'd call them dim sum places since there was a lot of overlap with the food they served, but they were takeout lunch counters that were cheap and had basically no seating except for a table in the back). I always wondered whether the chicken+egg+sausage filling or the really ginger heavy chicken&mushroom(I think they used a mix of shitake and wood ears) was the more traditional choice, thanks for settling it.
I know this! My Grandma cooks Viet food, and this is one of my favorite foods! Our version used black wood ear mushroom, though, and I'm still gonna stick with that.
do you guys have good goubuli baozi from Tianjin? those are really good too~ nevermind all the great Lu cuisine, especially seafood if you're in Jiaodong. (i used to work on the other side of Bohai in Dalian, also an amazing place for fresh seafood, although cooking methods in Liaoning are quite simple.)
Bao as a meal doesn't surprise me because the first time I had bao, my mom and I were at a Chinese supermarket in Philadelphia around lunchtime. They put out lunch items and they looked so good we had to try them. I've been in love ever since, the richness of the pork, the sweet spiciness of the lop Chong and the creaminess of the egg with the slightly sweet bun go so well together!!
The big bao is pretty common here in the Philippines as a cheap meal/snack. It’s pretty common to find them in convenience stores, street food stalls and chinese fast food They’re way more common than the smaller ones.
They’re also pretty common in Indonesia too, but we don’t usually make a savory bao tho, we love sweet bao filling like sweet red bean, mung bean or even chocolate lol
The flexing through food surprised me when I saw it on another vlog. (Not in response to size of the bao but the introduction of the expensive restaurant) So to celebrate an anniversary of this man’s many factories, he held a banquet. There was SO much food & displayed incredibly and beautifully. If you could’ve dreamed it and it was expensive- it was there. All laid out in elaborately decorated dishes with hand carved items from fruits and veggies. Oddly- there were so many cooked lobsters 🦞 laid out beautifully and most people there didn’t care for lobster. 🤔 So you serve like 50 and about 5 people actually like them. But it was to show wealth and prosperity at the celebration- flex 💪. It was mind numbing. Then when I saw one of the daughters get married in the family- just WoW 😲! Stages- costumes- performers- their life this far turned into a movie- their traditional wedding was mixed with a Western wedding. So there was I suppose outfit changes and oh boy the photos! There was such an elaborate area setup for what looked like a movie scene but it was for standing in to take selfies..?The food again- like the banquet but even more over the top! And it never stopped! It was amazing.
It's amazing that 20 min of steaming cooks the meat and the dough so perfectly! I'm too nervous, I'd still pop a thermometer in there to make sure it's 165°F anyway
Our local 7-11 stocks these, but in the Philippines our standard flavors are bola-bola" -- basically a pork meatball-- and "asado", our own take on the Chinese char shiu. Fun fact: asado is Spanish for "roast" or "barbecue", and you can't get more Filipino than using Spanish words to describe Chinese cuisine. We also get egg, but it's usually salted, and usually just a slice or even a wedge depending on how stingy 7-11 is feeling.
In Malaysia there is big bao’s extra larger cousin named “Francis Yip”… one bao is enough for two people.. some shops even named it “Dolly Parton’s Bao”
My mom actually made these for me, when I was growing up, and she still makes them to this day. Her version skips the chicken, so they're a bit smaller. But everything else in it really makes for an amazing breakfast food.
When I was younger, I never really liked Dai Bao (or Da Bao) because of the boiled egg. I never really like the texture of cooked yolk. However, as I get older, I found it hearty, nutritious and tasty. Most important of all, it has the smallest carbs to protein ratio of all the bao! Unlike some other bao, the first bite will get you some good portion of meat. And the different ingredients make it hard for you to know what your first bite is going to be, is it the laap coeng?The egg? or the chicken?
In the Philippines that size of bao is the most common. It's called siopao (pronounced shawpow) in Filipino... I don't know where the name comes from. It's commonly eaten for lunch. One and something extra on the side usually. Two if you're really hungry. The most common fillings are pork asado (braised pork with sauce) and bola bola (meatballs), and almost always with a half or whole salted duck egg. Another difference is sometimes the pleated side is on the bottom to give the top a round shape.
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.
So psyched for this video! 大包 are one of my favorite orders from Cantonese dim sum restaurants here in the States. Would you guys consider doing a video on 小笼包 in the future?
Eh eventually we'll do xiaolongbao, it's just hard to find the motivation because actually a lot of the recipes in English are pretty solid :) Woks of Life has a pretty definitive recipe: thewoksoflife.com/steamed-shanghai-soup-dumplings-xiaolongbao/ There's a couple slight tweaks we'd make to that personally, but they'd basically just be tweaks. We'll probably cover 生煎包 first.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified I’ll definitely look into that, thanks for the recommendation! Can’t wait for your video either. Really enjoyed the video, can’t wait for your next one!
@@ChineseCookingDemystified I’ll definitely look into that, thanks for the recommendation! Can’t wait for your video either. Really enjoyed the video, can’t wait for your next one!
This is one of my favourite breakfast dishes to pick up! In Vietnam we use quail eggs instead with an addition of a couple slices of char siu and salted egg york.
Damn, I miss grabbing one of those every morning on my way to university. Thinking of the street food makes me so emotional, especially Dabao and Malatang.
Thanks for such a wonderful demonstration! Just wanted to ask for one point of clarification - in the written recipe it notes 2g of baking powder but in the video it references 1 tsp ( which is about 4g I think)? Can you let me know which is the correct amount? 🙏
im wondering if you can take a historical tour in Hawaii's manapua. they are bao about that size in this video but are filled with locally available products, and possibly provide an insight to why locals joke that the stuffing for manapua is cat and the history of the manapua man?
I grew up in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s. My favorite of the food trucks that used to park where Telegraph Ave runs into Bancroft sold big baos like that, with chicken, egg, and shiitake filling. So tasty! Thanks for showing how to make one of my favorite childhood foods.
Love you guys. I’m enjoying my Macau childhood memories before coming to Europe because of you. I know a lot of recipes but there is sometimes little details that you thoroughly explain and other recipes that I couldn’t find without you. Thank you
These are the most common version of Bao over here in Indonesia, in street food or chinese restaurants, the bao are more or less this size. I remember when smaller bao started to be sold here and thought the shop was holding out on us.
Any suggestion if I want to replace yeast with sourdough starter? What I'm thinking is I'd sub out around 5% flour plus 5% water with 10% starter (100% hydration, 50:50 whole wheat and rye) and I think I'll replace baking powder with baking soda (4:1 powder:soda) to counter the acidity. Should I go higher or lower in any of that? I might tried it without filling first to see how that goes, that'd make a Mantou, right?
I'd love to know where you bought your big, metal reinforced bamboo steamer from?!?! What are the dimensions? I've been looking on Amazon off and on for years and have yet to find one like yours. Thanks so much! ❤
In the Philippines they call it Sio Pao or Siopao(Cantonese maybe?) But normally the filling sold in the Philippines is not very good as they cut it with corn starch, TVP, sugar, artificial flavorings etc to make it cheaper cost. Only way to do the good one is to make at home.
Surprised you went with a cake flour mix here and not making your own. I feel like cake flour products can vary depending on the manufacturer, would like to know if you have your own ratio that works. If I'm not mistaking, cake flour is just AP mixed with baking soda and maybe corn starch? Thanks for sharing, I've struggled making good dai bao dough in the past, but looks like there are some techniques I can use from this video!
"Why make a bao so big?" This is not a question I've heard of, ever. But thanks for the history lesson LOL. I always get these, because I only ever needed one for a meal and the different fillings make them less boring.
I like big Baos and I can not lie! You other brothers can't deny that when an aunties walks in with an itty bitty plates and a round thing in your face you get sprung! Pull up tough cuz you notice that chicken was stuffed deep in the doughs she's rollin' I'm hooked and i can't stop staring Oh baby, I wanna get dat steamin' Bao stuffed deep in my guts!
I used to eat big pao all my life in Malaysia. Now that I am older, I can only eat half a char siu pao or one siau long pao (miniature dragon pao). Want a really big pao? .....Well at least only in Malaysia. Try Yip Chi Mei pao.. super big .... probably 3 times the size of big pao.
There was a place that sold a big bao in Northern ireland full of quail eggs.. when I was a kid mom always bought me one. Pitty that place shut down. 😐
You guys used a cake flour for the dough.. I thought cake flour doesn't work because of its very low protein content and difficult to develop a gluten but I'll try if it worked for you.
that's childhood right there. although last time i had a good big bao was at 渣華樓 (great local dimsum place nera City Garden gone since around 2003 i think?). thanks for the nostalgia trip~
