midweek gems #24
Asian bakery style hot rolls + char siu pork steaks + char siu sliders
Hello everyone,
Midweek Gems are back! If you are new to PTFS, these are little bursts of cool, helpful info for all subscribers sent out on Thursdays. We had a hiatus due to my work schedule on the Cooking Thai book project.
Tax season is hopefully done and in the rear view mirror for all of you who live in the United States. Time to celebrate and we have Easter to look forward to this weekend!
Despite my devout parents who raised us on 8 a.m. Sunday Mass weekly, I am a lapsed Catholic. That’s why I tend to forget about hot cross buns, a sweet yeasted bread that makes its rounds during Good Friday in many countries, but is a year round item in the United Kingdom, too.
Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of them. They’re cute but they tend to be heavy. For Easter brunch, lunch or dinner, I prefer something lighter and more fun.
In response to last weekend’s Winning Weeknight Char Siu Pork Ribs recipe, Evvy suggested hot cross buns stuffed with char siu pork. I thought about the idea and spent two days developing recipes for all of you.
💎 Chris’s Hot Rolls Recipe
Here’s my Easter gift to you — a fluffy slightly rich, and not very sweet roll that you can bake in advance and reheat to include in your Easter brunch buffet menu or whatever other meal you plan to serve. The heavenly rolls resulted from a transpacific collaboration with Christopher Tan, a dear friend, Asian baking expert, and PTFS subscriber!
Chris is based in Singapore and has spent decades studying Asian and Western baked goods, among other dishes. He’s written a cookbook series called Nerd Baker, in fact. He teaches too so if you’re in Singapore, catch one of his classes at the Kitchen Society.
I asked Chris to work with me on an Asian bakery-style roll recipe. I suggested using his “Chris’ Hot Rolls” recipe from Nerd Baker 1 as the foundation. We emailed back and forth about translating ingredients and baking conditions in Southeast Asia for cooks in the States and elsewhere (there’s tremendous flour differences, for example). I baked the rolls twice to yield a marvelous recipe for you to play with.
After the first round of testing, Rory said, “These rolls beat out King’s Hawaiian any day!” True. Many people love the commercial qualities of King’s like they love Wonder bread. I’m not judging here but I’d prefer my fluffy yeasty bread with more depth.
I baked Chris’s hot rolls two ways — with white flour, and for wholesomeness, with a combo of white and whole wheat flours. Use organic cane sugar (instead of white sugar) for a rounded sweetness.
You likely have all the ingredients, which are supermarket accessible! Grab the hot rolls recipe at my website.
💎 Char Siu Pork Steaks
You cannot put a pork rib into those rolls but you can put sliced char siu pork steaks in the rolls. Using the Winning Weeknight Pork Ribs recipe, I applied the marinade to pork shoulder steaks, which cooked up in less than 10 minutes.
I could not believe how easy the steak was to make. Rory woke up from a nap to a kitchen full of sweet rolls and char siu pork. I added a Char Siu Pork Steak variation to the ribs recipe, so it’s all here in one place.
💎 Char Siu Pork Sliders
Putting the rolls and pork together, you get a phenomenal little sandwich for your Easter table or heck, any time of the year. If you’re going to bake your own bread, you need the stuff inside to be easy and believe me, this one’s simple:
Make Chris’s Hot Rolls from my website’s recipe
While the rolls bake, make the char siu pork from this PTFS recipe
Assemble the sliders: roll + marinade “sauce” + char siu pork + cucumber
Thank you, Evvy, for suggesting these recipes that will hopefully find themselves in everyone’s repertoire!
Coming on Sunday is a super vegan char siu ditty that’s just as versatile. Join us behind the paywall, if you’re not already a paid subscriber.
These look like fun but I am really looking forward to the vegan recipe(s).
I do eat meat but only sporadically and only if it's organic meat (which would be a challenge here for pork. As far as I know no pigs are raised in this area at all, organic or not.)
Anyway, almost all my non-local guests are vegetarians. Plus, I do love vegan food.
Apologies to the Kinks:
'I'll be lazing until Sunday
Lazing until Sunday
Praying that the Sunday will come soon.'
Bob and I roasted a pork shoulder in the pellet smoker today. We used Andrea's (@andreanguyen) char siu recipe. I found its consistency to be a nice glaze, but also thought it to be a bit thick as a marinade so I divided the four pound batch in the chart and thinned half with two tablespoons of white wine. I glazed with the other half toward the end of the three hour cook. It was very good!
We loved the Asian "hot cross" buns, too. I was a little cautious where the recipe directed adding the egg yolks to the hot mixture. I wonder if the word hot should be substituted with the word warm. I had envisioned cooked yolk before the bread dough had started the first rise! It was fine though and we made sliders with the pork and some coleslaw.
And yes, I put a handful of craisins in both the buns and the char siu glaze. I owe everyone an explanation! Once upon a time my brother was into honeybees. Big time. He had several thousand hives that he rented out for cranberry pollination. Cranberries are one of a handful of crops that must be insect pollinated. The native American fruit was matched well with our native bumblebee, until... cropping became so dense that bumblebee colonies, typically 120 to 180 bees, were too few in numbers. Enter managed honeybee colonies that eclipse bumble bee populations of a hundred with tens of thousands. It's just what a cranberry grower needs for tens of thousands blossoms! You may be interested to learn that the poor cranberry plant doesn't produce nectar and that along with its white color fails to attract honey bees. Bees would rather be anywhere else than on a cranberry bog! Beekeepers overcome this challenge by force feeding sugar syrup to promote brood development and then cutting food back just before the cranberry bloom. Growers for their part hold off the bloom by flooding the bogs and putting the plants under water. All of these manipulations are quite predictable and allow beekeepers and growers to negotiate exact bloom dates. The beehives are moved from afar in the dark of night when the plants reach the ten percent bloom. Hungry honeybees fly out into the morning sun totally disoriented and eager to feed their burgeoning brood. The first thing that they see are the cranberry blossoms onto which they descend and that's how the beekeepers entice them to transfer pollen from blossom to blossom. Tens of thousands of honeybees bombard the bogs for... about three days. After that they tend to fly over the bogs to a better source such as fields of dandelions that can be as far away as two to five miles.
Now you know why I love cranberries and their dried form "craisins." They are the synergistic product of Mother Nature's industrious little dust mops and her forgotten flower child who lacked sweetness to attract honey bees.