Anyone ever tried to make a giant char siu bao?
December 28, 2018 7:35 PM   Subscribe

A natural way to cut down on the time needed to make char siu bao is to make them larger. So I'm wondering if anyone has ever tried making them super large. Say 9 or ten inches wide. It'd be like a pie only steamed. Would it work?
posted by storybored to Food & Drink (3 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
This previous FPP has a lot of information on bao, and the comments describe the giant (like you're looking for) but awkwardly named "Amy Yip Bao", about 5-6 inches wide.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:44 PM on December 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


Well, there are giant soup dumplings, and in Korea, looks like there are restaurants selling giant steamed buns (scroll to the bottom), so I'm sure it would work. Especially since the pork filling is already cooked before putting inside the buns.

You'd have to get the bun-to-filling ratio right though, to make sure that your filling to bun ratio isn't too high. And this would mean increasing the thickness of the bun.

On preview, looks like CrystalDave has it.
posted by suedehead at 9:45 PM on December 28, 2018


It seems like if you just tried to grow them proportionally in all directions you'd have a sort of square-cube law issue with filling-to-bun ratios and/or cooking evenly. Either you'd have to make the bun so thick that it doesn't cook through very well (and overwhelms the pork entirely in bites around the periphery) or make the bun thin and have an enormous glob-o-pork in the center, with some bites unbreaded. It seems like expanding only the horizontal dimensions and leaving the vertical alone is best. I assume that's kind of what you mean by a pie-like shape (you could even cut it into narrow pie-like wedges, although serving it without losing the char siu would be tricky) , and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't cook OK --- the surface exposed to steaming grows in proportion to the volume needed to be cooked, so it should work with roughly the same cook time.
posted by jackbishop at 9:36 AM on December 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


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