My EPIC Korean Fried Chicken Bao Buns | Marion's Kitchen

Appreciation moment, please, for this little basket of heaven. We have the fluffiest homemade buns, the crispiest, stickiest Korean fried chicken. This is my version of Korean fried chicken bao. Okay friends, let's make these amazing bao. We're going to start with the homemade bao first. And actually, a lot of you have made my bao recipe before. And if you'd like to skip ahead, you can skip on through to the fried chicken part and get going there. If you haven't, stay with me. Let's do this together. We're going to make the bao dough first. Start off with some flour. Now let's chit-chat a little bit about flour. So I'm just using an all-purpose plain flour. This guy will give you a really beautiful flavour for your bun, good texture. It won't be really white, white, white though. If you want a really white bun, head to your Asian grocer and get the very, very bleached white bao flour. I actually prefer this flour because the bleached one has less flavour to me. So anyway, that's my theory there on the flour. For that, I'm going to add some baking powder, some yeast, and some sugar. Give that a mix. And just want to make a little well in the centre there. For the liquids, we need some warm water, some oil. You can find all the exact measurements on my website, so make sure you head there for that. Some milk. Just give that a mix. Now we get these two working together. Just pour that into the centre there. Just start off with your spoon, mixing. And then when you get to the point where things are kind of getting a bit hectic with the spoon, just release all of that. Get in there with your hands. Once you've got like a ball of dough almost that's formed in there, just put that out onto your bench top. Now just be patient here and you want to give this at least five minutes of kneading. And we'll come back and I'll show you how you test whether the dough is ready or not. Okay, so we've got a nice kind of smoothish ball here. And now when I press my finger here on the side, you can see that sort of bouncing back straight away. That's nice and springy, so I know that my dough is ready to rest. Pop that into a bowl. Cover that up and you want to leave that to rest for 90 minutes or until it's roughly doubled in size. Alright, so let's come back and have a look at what's going on under this tea towel. That's looking good. I love how dough is kind of, you know, they're alive, they're alive. Have a look at the bubbles there and this is quite a nice size. Now you can just tip that or sort of scrape that out onto your bench. I want to knead this again and the idea here is that I'm kind of kneading out all of the big air bubbles. We want some fluff but we don't want, you know, like a huge amount of fluff. A nice respectable amount of fluff. Does that even make sense? I don't even know. Okay, so this is the situation that you're going for. Dough kind of feels very firm because it's had that extra knead. Now what I want to do is roll this out. Just going to do a few rolls and then lift that dough up and just to make sure it's not sticking. Then you're going to get to a point where, you know, it's kind of a bit too large to keep from sticking. Then I come in with some oil. It's just vegetable oil and just oil one side, oil the other side. It doesn't sort of dry out or thicken up the dough. Okay, so we're looking at around about a centimetre thick here. It's looking good and to make sure that we can fold the dough over and once it's steamed, still open it up very easily, we're going to add a little bit more oil here. So all over that surface area. Now to cut your circles out here, you want to use a glass or a cup or a cookie cutter. Mine's 8 centimetres. I find 8 centimetres in diameter is the perfect kind of size for what we're after. So just go in there, peel back that excess. You can re-roll that extra dough. We'll come back to that later. But what we want to do now is shape our buns. Now this is where you got to kind of, you know, have a little bit of technique going on. The more you put your fingers in that dough, the more you're going to get a really lumpy kind of finished result. So you want to try and touch it as little as possible. So just sort of peel one side up and over. Pop that onto a little square of baking paper. And to even out the top so we get as smooth a surface as possible, just get my rolling pin and roll over everything. And there you go. That is a pretty good-looking little shape there. So pop that onto my tray. Keep rolling. And these kind of look a bit smaller than you might imagine. But what'll happen is these will puff up as they rise and then puff up even more when they're in the steamer. So if anything, err on the side of smaller rather than bigger. Now the excess dough, this is like a really forgiving dough here. So just sort of give it a bit of a knead again. Roll it out and go again. That's a lovely little line-up we've got there. What I need to do now, I need to do a second proving. Now pop a tea towel over the top. And you want to let our little friends here rest for about 30 minutes until they get just a little bit extra bit of puff going on. Alright, let's take a look now. Already looking delightful. Now to cook these, you just need a steamer basket set over some water. And pop your little friends in there. Give them some space. Don't overcrowd them. Social distancing, very important. Pop the lid on. Now here's a little trick from me. Let your buns steam for 12 minutes. And then, don't open the lid, turn the heat off. And just let them sit in the steamer basket for another 5 minutes. And that will give you the fluffiest, most evenly cooked bun you've ever seen in your life. Trust me. Now is the moment of truth everyone. Oh, I get so excited about this bit. Whoa, look at those. My little babies. Okay, pull these out. Use tongs at home. Don't try this at home. These are very hot but I happen to have asbestos hands so that's fine. So just lift them out. And then keep going with your next batch. Now let's check out just how fluffy these guys are. So if you just have a look in here. Because we did that oil slick on the top of our dough, we can open them up really easily. Look at that in there. And then let's have a look at just how fluffy these are. Just makes you want to dig right in. But that is a beautiful, really light crumb in there. Perfect. So now you've got your lovely array of buns. Just waiting for any kind of filling that you can imagine. And the filling I'm imagining today is Korean fried chicken. Sticky, crispy, all the things. Let's do it. All right, chicken first. So I've just got some chicken thigh. Nice little bite-sized pieces here. And I want some salt. And some pepper. Now give that a mix. And the secret here is really simple. I mean, it's literally just leave it alone for 15 minutes. And you'll notice a huge difference in the tenderness of the chicken and that salty flavour. Through the meat as well. So be patient. And in the meantime, we can make our sticky, spicy sauce. So for this one, I want some Korean gochujang chilli paste. I mean, this guy is like one of my favourite pantry ingredients. Beautiful kind of smoky, chilli kind of flavour. Lots of umami going on as well. It's not too spicy. It has a really beautiful red colour. And some sugar. Soy sauce. Using apple cider vinegar. I like that extra little bit of fruity kind of character that that has. But even just a regular white vinegar would be fine too. Some ketchup because I'm kind of like a ketchup girl. I like it. It's umami, salty, tomatoey, all the things. And then a nice hit of garlic here too. All right, give that a stir. And then you just want to heat this up until it just gets slightly thicker. Like five minutes or so at a little bubbling kind of pace. Now, you should have something that looks like this. Lovely colour, sticky, glossy, shiny, all the things. All right, now without further ado, we are getting to the part that I love best, that I know you know I love best, and that's frying the chicken. Yes! The coating on the chicken is really simple here. Just some cornflour or cornstarch if you're in the US. And dredge your chicken in that flour. And I want this to be a really light coating. The idea is that we just want the barest kind of crispy crackle of coating around the chicken that will soak up all the sauce at the end. Okay, so sort of these guys, a bit of a pat down. Chicken pat down. Okay, now into some hot oil. You want to keep these guys moving around, kind of flip them over. And they'll take about 4 or 5 minutes, about 4 minutes really. They're not that big, the pieces. What you're looking for is a really lovely golden colour. So keep them moving in there until you get that. Okay, chicken is currently looking pretty amazing. It's smelling so good in here too. Frying chicken, it's a joy forever. This is the kind of situation you're after, that beautiful colour and that crispiness. Now, I like to do this in batches so that the oil temperature doesn't drop too much. So go in with your next batch. This is going to make sure the chicken's nice and crispy during the batches. Once you have a tray full of beautiful fried crispy chicken, now we go in with the special sauce. Grab yourself a brush and go like Orvangone here. That gloss and the shine, oh my goodness. Alright, so this is pretty much like a work of art. But let's get it in the bao bun and we're going to be even more excited. Well, I'm going to be more excited. I don't even know how I could be more excited. Grab yourself a bao bun. Now, if you've had these sitting around for a while, that's cool. You can either pop them back in a steamer for a little bit, like you know, about 15 seconds or so. Or you could just like nuke them in the microwave. 10 seconds, done. When they're nice and warm, they're nice and soft. When they cool down, they get a bit firmer. So open these guys up. I just saved a little bit of that sauce from when I was brushing the chicken. So I'm just going to spread a little bit of that on the base. I want some slices of cucumber. A piece of our chicken. And there you go. A few more of those. And there you have it, friends. Bao buns, sticky, crispy chicken. Oh my goodness, all the things are right here. I cannot wait to get in here. I'm very excited. I think I've said that a million times how excited I am. I really genuinely am excited. Okay, oh my goodness. Nowhere to start. That whole situation, so ridiculous. I mean, the chicken itself has that really lovely kind of crispy sticky thing going on. And that fluffy bun made so much better because you made them yourself. So satisfying. Oh my goodness. This one. Amazing. I'm done, literally. I can quit. No more videos. This is it. The ultimate. So good. If you've got any comments or questions, pop them below. And if you enjoyed the video, why not hit that subscribe button plus the little bell one. That way you'll get notified every time I release a new video. Thanks guys.