My new crush... crispy Chinese pan-fried pork dumplings | Marion's Kitchen

Check out that beautiful bao bun on the top, the fluffy, the chewy, and then we're all crispy on the bottom, my friends. This is my version of Chinese pan-fried pork buns. So the key to these pork buns, it's all in the dough, my friends. This is my foolproof version for making the ultimate fluffy, yet chewy, yet crispy dough for your pan-fried buns. I'm starting off here with some cake flour. Now, the cake flour has a lower protein than all-purpose or bread flour, which gives it more of a softer cakey, if you like, texture to the dough. You can use all-purpose here, but I find it's not quite as light and airy. To that, we want to add some sugar. And then to get just the right amount of fluff and rise and texture and all the things, we want to add in two sort of raising agents here. One is baking powder and the other is yeast. Just give that a mix. Now, for the wet ingredients, we just need some water and some oil. Just give this a mix. You can start off with a spoon and just work that in until it sort of comes together a little bit like this. Now, you'll need to get in there with your hands. It kind of looks a little bit dry to start with, but don't add any water just yet or extra water. Just kind of keep working away at it with your hand. And then when it just comes together like that, you want to take it out and start kneading. Now, every time I make this dough, it's slightly different. It depends on the brand of your flour, the humidity in the air. But if you start out like this and you kind of get things... Things are looking a little bit sticky, like on the palm of your hand or on the board here, you know you need to add a little bit more flour. It should just sort of come together nicely without sticking everywhere. Just a little bit more flour here. And then now, we just got to put in a little bit of hard work, 10 minutes of kneading. Now, once you're slightly out of breath from kneading, you can tell that your dough is ready because it's come together really, really smoothly. But also when you kind of push into it a bit, it pops back out. So sort of more elastic-y, I guess, than when you first started. So that's looking good. I'm going to pop this back into my bowl. Now, just cover that with a tea towel. And you want to let your friend here rest for about an hour or until it's doubled in size. So in the meantime, let's get on to making our juicy pork filling. And there's a couple of things here that I do that might be a little bit different or seem a little bit weird. But it will result in a very juicy, very lovely kind of luscious filling, if you like. So I'm starting out with some pork mince. Now, here's the thing. I'm going to add a whole bunch of liquid here. It's going to look like too much liquid. But it won't be because that liquid is going to come out inside of our bun and keep things really juicy and yum. So first up is Chinese Shaoxing wine. Some soy sauce. I want some ginger here as well. And then here's where it gets a little bit odd again. But I'm going to crumble in a chicken stock cube. One, for some flavour. And two, because I'm also going to add some water, which is kind of pseudo making a chicken stock in the dumpling mix or the bun mix. It's kind of like half dumpling, half bun, this recipe. Which is a good thing. I mean, buns and dumplings, like two of my favourite food groups. Now some water here as well. And as I said, this kind of looks a bit soupy, but that's okay. Because we're going to get that kind of juiciness inside the bun. So don't worry, there is nothing to the madness. Now we need some herbs here. So I'm going in with some spring onion. Now the key to like next level bun filling is the attention to detail. So I don't want big lumpy bits of spring onion in my bun. I want some really beautiful, fine little sprinkles of spring onion if you like. So I'm just going to thin these out a bit. Now I also want some coriander here as well. Now the final bits and bobs here. Some sugar. And a little dash of white pepper. Now you want to give that a really good mix. I want all of those liquids to almost like be soaked up by that pork. You'll see it all kind of comes together in one big sticky mess. Okay, so now we can get back to our dough. Alright, so you can see this guy is a lot bigger than when we saw him last. And I can smell that yeast, you know that yeasty bread kind of smell. That's always so comforting. Alright, now what do we need to do now? We need some flour on our bench first of all. Tip your dough out. Sort of scrape the dough out. A little bit more flour on top. Such a lovely soft dough since it's had time to rest. Okay, so we just do a couple of folds here. It's almost like we're knocking a bit of the air out. Roll it out first. Fold it over. Roll it out again. And this time I want to roll this dough out to a nice big rectangle. Okay, now roll into a cylinder. Just try and even that cylinder out a little bit. And then cut that in half. And then into some nice sort of even rounds as much as you can. About 20 pieces is what you're looking for. Now take yourself a piece of dough and a little bit of flour here. And first of all get yourself a nice round shape. And then the real trick I think to folding these guys beautifully and getting a nice even edge all the way around is to treat it like a dumpling wrapper. So try and roll out the edges a lot thinner than the center of the circle of the dough. All right, so you can see here like I've sort of got that little round or mound in the center and the edges are a lot thinner. So now we can go in with some of our filling. Now this might take a little bit of practice but it's kind of the same idea as when you do a soup dumpling. So start out with a pleat here and then just keep gathering those pleats around the filling if you know what I mean. Just keep folding around and around gathering the pleats with your right hand if you're right-handed. And you can kind of get to the point where you know sort of seeing that little hole with the filling in the middle. Keep going and then when you get to the end kind of like gather everything up and just give it a really good twist. If you sort of have too much dough there you can kind of pull it off or just sort of pat it down. And there you go, that's one very cute handsome little bun. So satisfying. All right, now just keep going with your dough and your filling. So there you go, you have your tray of beautiful buns all sitting there perfectly. Oh, so satisfying. Now how do we cook these guys and we get that crispy bottom and that beautiful fluffy top? Well, what you want to do is you want to get your pan nice and hot. Add some oil. Now just add those into the oil. You want to hear a little bit of a sizzle. Now you just want these to cook for a couple of minutes until you see a lovely little crispy bottom there. Okay, so that's the kind of thing that you're looking for here. Just that really lovely deeply golden crispness. Now add in your water, just be careful. You don't want to splash and burn yourself here but you want water up sort of about halfway up each of those buns. Now turn the heat down because that bottom is really lovely and golden but I don't want it to burn. So turn it down and let those guys steam away for about 12 minutes. All right, so you want to kind of keep an eye on your little friends here. Like don't abandon them in there. I can see now that a lot of that liquid has evaporated. I've still got a little bit of stuff going on in the bottom but I'm going to take the lid off. Steamy, I like it. And now I just want to let this go another couple of minutes just to really kind of solidify that lovely crispy kind of slightly sticky kind of situation going on the bottom here. So these are looking really good. I think just so lovely and fluffy and amazing. Now just grab them out and gently get them onto your serving plate. All right, just one final little bit of decoration here. I want some black sesame seeds. And wow, I mean is that a plate of like so much deliciousness or what? I mean I'm just too excited. Look at those lovely plates, that pattern and then all of that like crispiness on the bottom. This is really going to be joyful. I'm very excited. Okay, I'm going to get in with a little bit of chili oil. So I like a bit of chili oil, a little bit of soy sauce here. And we need to get in here. Oh my goodness, that is ridiculous. It's just ridiculous. Let me tell you what's going on here. So you've got like this crispy crispy beautiful texture but then you've got this really fluffy chewy kind of dough going on and that filling is so juicy. It is literally just... I'm literally dying. I'm dead already. I'm going to eat this whole frying pan and I am not going to be sorry. Yum.