I Heart Baozi: Chinese Steamed Buns

The last and final food in my special food series is Chinese Dumplings. Last April I was blessed with the opportunity to travel to China with the lovely and very talented Chef Shirley Cheng. Chef Cheng is an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America and every few months she arranges for a hand full students to take a three week culinary tour of China. I was lucky to be on the first school sponsored trip, travelling with Chef Cheng herself. We spent the first half of our trip in Chef's home town of Chengdu. Next, we flew to Xi'an (a sister city of Kansas City) and finished our trip in Beijing. There were dumplings to be had everywhere, but the best were in Xi'an. It is famous for its dumplings and dumpling banquets. Large halls fill with people everyday to be served large steamer baskets of dumplings. The dumplings come in every shape and flavor, actually the two are correlated. The dumpling is shaped to look like the filling.

This is the last, lonely chicken dumpling from our dumpling banquet in Xi'an.

Every morning we had great big Baozi(bao- tze), steamed dumplings, for breakfast. In Chengdu, we spent a day at the Sichuan Culinary Institute where a master chef, and former student of Chef Cheng demonstrated several Chinese dishes including Boazi.

The master Chef shows us the steam bun dough.

First, portion the dough and flatten it with your palm.

Chef Cheng demonstrates how to fill and form the dumplings.
First, spoon the filling onto the flattened round of dough.

Push the filling down with your thumb and draw the edges of the dough up.

Keeping your thumb in the center, pinch the edge of the dough together.

Keep pinching the edge of the dough all the way around until you have closed dough around the filling.

Chef Cheng's perfect dumpling in the steamer.
 Mine looked just like that so it would be redundant to post a picture of it... haha!

For the graduation open house I made some pork and cabbage Dim Sum dumplings with a ginger soy dipping sauce.