A little behind the scenes, a nice moment for us

Steph told me a few months back, after the nth failed attempt at Char Siu Bao, "if I ever nail this, I think I might actually cry".

Char Siu Bao's been really tough. Steph started learning and testing them about October last year - there's been dozens and dozens of batches of these guys... with a lot of dead ends and set backs along the way. The frustrations we bump into learning a new dish were amplified by an order of magnitude with Char Siu Bao: there's so many garbage recipes online to wade through, and the legit sources out there tend to assume a lot of pre-existing knowledge (e.g. the book for Dim Sum restaurateurs we have lists out 'starter' and 'leavens' in their list of ingredients lol) 

Last Christmas, I picked up the book "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast" (highly recommended, by the way). Steph's always had an interest in Western bread making, and she really dove into that book head first. Forkish does an incredible job explaining the 'whys', and that helped her pick up confidence in working with doughs... understanding different variables, how to adjust when things go wrong, etc.

The Baozi improved, but most Char Siu Bao recipes online include yeast... which proved to be the most pernicious dead end. The Char Siu Bao always ended up too 'Baozi-like', if that makes any sense. Nowhere near as fluffy as it needed to be, and whether the Char Siu Bao exhibited the characteristic cracking seemed almost completely random. They seemed to get closer if she added a larger amount of baker's ammonia, but then they always turned yellow after steaming (a telltale sign of an overly alkaline dough).

We were shooting the shit over a beer one night, and I offhandedly mentioned that, well... what if she used a natural sourdough starter? That'd potentially give some lactic acid to balance the ammonia. So after a bit of searching, Steph found a recipe on Xiachufang (the Chinese equivalent of AllRecipes) for an old-school natural sourdough starter.

It was much better, but it still needed a bit of tweaking. So Steph looked around and picked up an old Cantonese culinary school textbook that contained a recipe for Char Siu Bao using a natural starter... the final recipe of the starter being a bit of a mix of the Xiachufang recipe, the textbook's recipe, and Steph's tweaking. That was much better.

Still wasn't quite there though. The texture was closing in, but there was still the issue with the dough turning yellow. Steph, flabbergasted, told me "I'm just gunna fucking put vinegar essence in here if I have to" - to which I responded, "totally, or I mean, maybe just cream of tartar..." 

That proved to be another turning point (man, aren't I so helpful? lol). At our local wholesale market, they sell special 'Char Siu Bao leavening mixes'. Each one's slightly different, but one ingredient many of them contained was...  potassium bitartrate. I.e. cream of tartar. That got the Char Siu Bao a lot closer.

The very last key to figuring it out was this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FY1pExFk70&feature=youtu.be&t=41m8s

This is a Bite of China, where they interview a 93 year old Dim Sum chef from Guangzhou. There were two bits that really helped - first, where he's checking out the alkalinity of the dough by smelling it. That really assisted in the consistency. Second, he talks about how they need high heat when steaming to crack correctly - using that bit, Steph moved from steaming over a pot to inside the wok with the wet towel setup.

That part - the high heat - was why we had to go into the kitchen to film the steaming. That day, we actually made two batches, and tried to do the steaming outside on our balcony first like we normally do. The wind can make boiling things a bit tough out there though (you might notice that when we blanch stuff on camera often the water's more of a heavy simmer), so when filming our first batch didn't crack correctly.  

So we were really on edge when we steamed that second batch. It's why Steph looked quite nervous near the end of our recipe video - even though she'd had a string of about a week and a half of consistent successes, maybe there was something muffed up about this batch? Maybe there was an issue with the starter? You never know, after all.

So taking that lid off was an enormous relief. A moment of pride. The culmination of ten months of researching, learning, testing, and tinkering... and the first time I'd ever seen Steph cry in our four years together.