Thursday, February 12, 2009

Vegetarian Chinese Pau (bun)


Two days back, I was itching to experiment a new recipe - and the first thing that came to my mind was PAU. I love eating pau - especially the vegetarian pau. Unfortunately, there's not much alternatives for that category of paus. The common ones that you can find from restaurants are the char siew (pork) and chicken curry paus. So, normally we'd buy the frozen version of vegetarian pau from Tesco. It's tasty - but one thing that comes to my mind when eating frozen stuffs is the PRESERVATIVES.

And that gives me the joy of making my own pau skin and its stuffing - healthy, delicious and satisfying. I still need to perfect my skills for the pau skin - although my mom said it was nice. The pau skin that I made did not turn out super white after steaming it like the ones that we normally buy from the shop - instead it looks yellowish. I read from somewhere that yellowish pau flour is much preferred than the very white Hongkong flour used for making pau. The type where it is super white contains a lot of bleaching agent in the flour.

I am looking forward to experiment with different recipes for the pau skin - and it's also fun to learn the skill of making pretty pleatings for the pau (like the ones that you buy outside). Although it's too much of a chore, I enjoy making it.

For the stuffing, I used the leftover food that my mom cooked for lunch on that day - scrambled tofu with shitaake mushroom and some green peas with potatoes - it was yummy! It's truly rewarding to cook your own meal. I am planning to do more of that in times to come ;)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

eerr, geeta, recipe pls. would love to try...shobha x

AGAPE said...

hi shobs, I didn't post the recipe this time coz I wasn't too happy with the texture of the pau; and plus the dough was too runny as per the recipe and I ended up adding more flour than what was dictated in the recipe and lost count of how much extra flour I added, lol. Am gonna try doing it again and will post the recipe soon :)