I like to experiment with cooking, especially in the weekends. A few weeks ago I made pizza. Not frozen pizza, but a pizza from scratch, dough and everything! Not that it’s that difficult. I made it with lamb meat, champignon and onion. Erh, the pizza that is, not the cha siu bao.

For those who’re interested, here’s roughly the recipe I used (freely converted from a recipe I found with Google):

Dough

• 9 dl flour (hvetemel)
• 2,4 dl lukewarm water (should be milk though!)
• 1 tablespoon dry yeast
• 3 tablespoon sugar
• 1 egg
• 1,5 dl oil

Filling

• Some cha siu (Cantonese barbecued pork)
• Half an onion
• Soy sauce
• Sweet soy sauce
• Potato flour

The original recipe was somewhat different, but I changed it a bit, because I didn’t have milk, and I didn’t have all the ingredients for the filling, so I just made something more or less randomly. Other than that, I mostly did what the recipe described.

1. Mixed one tablespoon of the sugar with the yeast and some of the lukewarm water in a bowl.
2. Added the rest of the stuff for the dough, and mixed it with a mixer. Added more dough untill the dough wasn’t too sticky and wet. (Untill dough pulls away from the side of the bowl.)
3. Took out the dough of the bowl and kneaded it a bit, adding flour so it wasn’t too sticky. “Untill smooth and elastic” according to the recipe.
4. Put the dough back in the bowl, covered with plastic wrap (actually, I used a plastic bag since I didn’t have any plastic wrap), and let it rise for one hour.



5. Chopped cha siu and onion into small pieces, less than 1cm cubes.
6. Fried the onion untill soft. (Not deep fry, just normal fry. Steke.)
7. Added the cha siu. Fried untill somewhat warm. Then added sweet soy sauce and normal soy sauce. (I don’t remember how much I used, I just poured untill it looked about right.)
8. Then I think I added potato flour mixed with water to make the filling thicker (less like water and more like syrup), and poured the filling out into a bowl.
9. I also cut apart some… hmm… “bakepapir”, paper used in the oven for baking stuff, into small squares. You’re supposed to use “matpapir”, which is the paper you use for packing bread for school, but I didn’t have any of that. Baking paper is too smooth, so the dough doesn’t stick as well.
10. When the dough had rised for one hour, I took it out and kneaded it a bit more. Then I formed it into balls, flattened the balls, put the filling in and wrapped the dough around it.
11. Finally I steamed the bao in a wok, since I didn’t have any proper equipment for steaming.

Some things I noticed:

• The baos growed quite a lot when steamed. Even though I thought I made them too small, they were about the normal size after steaming!
• They did taste somewhat different, I think it’s because I used yeast in the dough instead of baking powder, which is more commonly used in cha siu baos. The filling tasted somewhat right, but it was mostly because the cha siu had so much spice on them, so they made most of the taste.
• I put in too little filling. And yet I had trouble closing the baos…
• Except for those points, I was surprised that I the baos turned out so similar to the ones I’ve eaten before!

So, there you have it. Maybe I’ll try to make something else some other time. Dan tat! Not sure if that isn’t too difficult to make, though. I guess I’ll just look up a recipe and see how it looks.