Patron Exclusive Recipe #3: Corn and Salted Egg Yolk Steamed Buns (玉米咸蛋黄花卷)

Sup guys, hope you are doing great. This week, I wanna share my recent breakfast fav "flower-shaped" bun with corn and salted egg yolks". So these "flower-shaped" steamed buns are called "花卷" (flower roll) in Chinese because of the way it looks. Some classic flavors include scallion, sesame, brown sugar, etc. There're several ways to roll it, I'm using a simpler method this time and will do more complicated ones in the future.

Now let's begin. 

**Ingredients**

No weird ingredients this time, just the good old yeast dough basics.

Note on portion, this is a small batch, feel free to up the ingredients and make a bigger batch then freeze them.

For the dough:

1. Cake flour (or AP for a chewier texture), 180g.

2. Freeze dried corn/cornmeal, 20g. OK, this may be the only weird ingredient here. Some Chinese steamed buns use cornmeal, and I took inspiration from Christina Tosi's corn cookie and swap it with freeze-dried corn to give more corn flavor, and it worked great. You can get this at Whole Food. If it's difficult to find, just use cornmeal or even plain flour. (Btw, I've been using freeze dried fruit for cake frosting for several years and they are AMAZING! Never messes up with the consistency and great flavor, highly recommended it in pastry and desserts.)

3. Milk powder, 10g. Milk powder is commonly used in Cantonese pastry and buns to give a stronger milky/buttery flavor. You can skip this if it's not handy. And if you want to keep the milk flavor, simply swap the water with the same amount of milk.

4. Yeast, 2g or 1/2 tsp.

5. Sugar, 10g or 2 tsp.

6. Water, 110g.

For the egg yolk mixture (you can think of it as a simple version of the Cantonese custard bun/奶黄包 filling):

1. Salted egg yolks, 4.

2. Butter, 30g. 

3. Sugar, 2 tsp.

**Process** 

1. Take about 20g of water and mix with the yeast to melt it. Then mix in the sugar with the remaining 90g water. Both mix well.

Mix 20g water with yeast.

Mix 10g sugar with remaining 90g water.

2. Pound the freeze-dried corn into a coarse powder, you can do it in blender or food processor. (Skip this step if you're using corn meal or straight up flour.)

Pound into a coarse powder.

3. Toss in the corn powder and milk powder in with the flour, give it a quick mix.

Dry ingredients all in.

4. Gradually stir in the yeast mixture into the dry mixture. Then do the same with the sugar/water mixture.

Stir in yeast mixture.

Stir in sugar mixture.

5. Now you have crumbly bits like this, then knead it with your hands for about 5 minutes.

Now we knead it into a dough.

6. 5 minutes later, you have a relatively smooth dough. Cover and let it ferment for about 1 hour, or until doubled in size.

Now we have the dough, cover well, let it sit and rise.

7. Meanwhile, let's prep the egg yolks. Toss in a preheated oven, 170 degrees Celsius, 10 minutes.

8. After 10 minutes, take the egg yolks out. Break it while it's hot.

9. Add in butter and sugar, keep pressing till you have a paste. Then set aside.

Butter and sugar in, mix well.

10. Come back and check your dough after 1 hour, it should be obviously bigger. 

Doug doubled in size.

11. Flour a work surface, put the dough on it and give it a few presses into a round shape.

12. Then roll it into kinda a rectangle shape.

On a floured surface, press to a disc and roll it out.

13. Toss the egg yolk+butter mixture on it.

On the rolled out rectangle-ish shape, toss on the egg yolk mixture.

14. Spread it out evenly, leave some room on the edge as you don't want things to squeeze out while you roll.

Spread out the mixture.

15. Now gently roll it up into a log.

Roll it up.

16. Cut off the sides without filling. (Keep them and steam them together~)

Cut off uneven both ends.

17, Mark out where you wanna cut it with a bench scraper, about 4-5 cm wide.

Mark out where you wanna cut, mine is not that even in hindsight.

18. Cut them into pieces. OK, you can totally stop here and move onto Step 21 (place in a steamer), you'll still have some really nice tasting and looking rolls. But if you want everything to look prettier, you can follow the shaping method below.

Cut them out, you can move onto proofing from this step if you want to be quicker.

19. Now let's shape them. Use a chopstick to press in the middle along the longer side. Pick it up, fold the bottom ends of both side together and press them so that it sticks. 

20. Then loosen up help the top layer on top of the bun, push both sides in a bit so that the center doesn't stick out too much. You can leave it as it is, or you can press them together as I did in the clip. Totally up to you, personally, I prefer pinching them together. 

21. Place them in the steamer on top of cut out parchment paper.

Steam the scraps too, they're also buns, only smaller, lol. 

22. Now we need to proof them. Unlike char siu bao, most Chinese steamed buns and mantou (the buns without fillings) will need to be proofed over room temp water before steaming to ensure a smooth surface and staying in shape. So get some water in your steaming pot/wok, place your steamer over the water, cover, and let it sit for 20 minutes.

Let it proof over water for 20 minutes.

23. 20 minutes later, turn on the heat directly. We'll let the buns slowly heat up with the water. Steam on high for 8 minutes after the water comes to a boil. For me, it was about 13 minutes in total.

Steaming in action.

24. 13-15 minutes later and turn off the heat (depends on when your water came to a boil, the time maybe longer or shorter). Don't open the lid and let it sit for at least 5 minutes to avoid the buns shrinking due to sudden temperature changes. 

25. Take them out after the 5 minutes sitting. You can eat them now or pack them in air-tight bags and freeze them. They freeze really well. 

26. To reheat: if you put them in the fridge, you can microwave it (in a covered container) for 2 minutes or steam on high for 4 minutes; if you put them in the freezer, no need to thaw, just steam them directly on high for 8 minutes, they'll be as soft and fluffy as they're fresh.  

Final result.

This is an earlier batch.

These're pretty tasty little buns, great for breakfast or afternoon snack. 

If you don't have salted egg yolks, you can skip the filling and roll the dough up, cut it, and do the same proofing+steaming, then you'll have some Chinese corn mantou. Or, you can be creative with what you like to roll inside, like peanut butter, it'll be great! 

So, have fun with it and create your own favorite Chinese style "flower roll".