Baozi: Chinese Steamed Buns

Name: Baozi: Chinese Steamed Buns with Egg and Green Onion
Prep time: 2 h
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 2 h 30 min
Cuisine: Chinese cuisine
Ingredients: Wheat flour 2 cups (260 g); Instant dry yeast 5–6 g (½ packet); Sugar 2 tsp (9 g); Salt a pinch; Warm water 180 ml; Vegetable oil 1 tbsp; Green onions 2 bunches; Eggs 5–6; Garlic 1–2 cloves; Sesame oil 1–1.5 tbsp; Soy sauce 1 tsp; Fish sauce 1 tsp; Rice vinegar to taste; Five-spice powder ½ tsp; Soy sauce, rice vinegar to taste; Brown sugar, garlic, ginger to taste

☆ 4.4

2 h 30 mins

Chinese cuisines are famous for all kinds of filled dough dishes. Around here, most of them get lumped together as a kind of dumpling, which doesn’t come close to capturing how varied they are. They can be made from any dough, unleavened or yeasted, and cooked by frying, boiling, steaming or even baking.

Bao, or baozi, are generally understood to be filled steamed buns. Though, I admit, they do look like unusually shaped dumplings or Georgian khinkali. The main differences are shape and size. They’re made small, almost like meat dumplings, or very large, barely fitting on a plate, so you have to hold them with both hands to eat them.

The dough is yeasted, which is probably why they’re thought of as steamed pies or buns. The filling isn’t always meat. Mushroom and vegetable fillings are common, and there are even sweet ones made from a special kind of bean. I really love a filling of green onion fried with eggs, and that’s the one my daughter and I made.

They say you can buy ready-made frozen bao in stores that you just thaw and steam. But making them at home is no trouble. All it takes is the will and a knack, which comes quickly enough. Spend an hour or two making the dough and simply learn to roll and fold it. The skill sticks fast, and after that you can shape really cute buns.

For obvious reasons, most people prefer meat in baozi. I like a meat filling better in jiaozi: they’re easier to shape and use unleavened dough. I go for eggs fried with green onion and spices. You can try chicken, pork, pumpkin, vegetables and so on.

The yeast dough takes about two hours, and it’s very simple, with no enrichment. Just wheat flour, yeast, a little sugar and salt, water and vegetable oil for elasticity. While the dough rises, there’s time to make the filling and to practice shaping; you can use a plain unleavened dough for that. It’s easy to learn, and the skill sticks quickly.

A homemade recipe for Chinese steamed buns filled with green onion and eggs.

Ingredients

5–8 buns

Wheat flour 2 cups (260 g)
Instant dry yeast 5–6 g (½ packet)
Sugar 2 tsp (9 g)
Salt a pinch
Warm water 180 ml
Vegetable oil 1 tbsp

Green onions 2 bunches
Eggs 5–6
Garlic 1–2 cloves
Sesame oil 1–1.5 tbsp
Soy sauce 1 tsp
Fish sauce 1 tsp
Rice vinegar to taste
Five-spice powder ½ tsp

Soy sauce, rice vinegar to taste
Brown sugar, garlic, ginger to taste

Step-by-step recipe

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Yeast dough

Chinese baozi steamed buns are a staple of street food stalls and restaurants. On practically every corner you’ll see an open-air stall with huge multi-tiered bamboo steamers. In cafés and restaurants, the buns come to the table in small wooden steamers; that’s the standard way to serve them. For home cooking, we need a simple yeast dough plus green onions and eggs. By and large, the yeast dough is a lot like pizza dough.

Sift 2 cups of wheat flour (260 g) into a bowl and add a pinch of fine salt, 2 tsp sugar (9 g) and half a packet of instant dry yeast. Mix the dry ingredients.
As a rule, a whole packet is meant for 0.5 kg of flour, and two cups is just about half that.

Add 180 ml of lukewarm water mixed with 1 tbsp vegetable oil. Cover the bowl with a towel and leave it somewhere warm for 45–60 minutes, then punch the dough down and leave it somewhere warm again for the same time.

Egg and green onion filling

To fry the eggs you need a skillet, or better yet a Chinese wok: it’s round-bottomed, which makes it easier to fry a small amount of filling.

Fry the garlic: pour sesame oil into the wok; it has a distinctive aroma and flavor. If for some reason you don’t like them, use sunflower or olive oil. Finely chop the garlic cloves and fry them in the hot oil for 1–2 minutes.
Meanwhile, wash and sort the green onions. Slice them with a knife, the usual size, as for salads.
I usually use only the green tops in my cooking, but the white part works for the filling too.
Crack the eggs into a bowl, making sure no bits of shell get in. Mix the green onions with the eggs and beat with a fork.
As soon as the garlic has fried in the oil, pour the egg and green onion mixture into the wok. The eggs set quickly, so stir the hot mixture fairly vigorously with a wooden spatula. Add 1 tsp each of soy sauce and fish sauce to the filling. There’s no need to salt it; soy sauce is salty enough. Also add a little rice vinegar to taste; you want a faint sourness.
Add ½ tsp of five-spice, or more, to the filling.
The main spice in the filling is five-spice powder. It usually contains ground cinnamon, cumin, cloves, anise and Sichuan pepper. Quite often some of these get swapped out, and licorice, star anise, fennel and so on turn up in the mix. It’s a very fragrant blend, typical of many dishes of Southeast Asia.
Keep frying until almost all the moisture has evaporated. Then let the filling cool to room temperature.

How to shape baozi

Looking back, there’s nothing hard about it at all. You need a knack and a bit of experience. I learned to make buns of acceptable quality and looks in about an hour. Just knead a plain unleavened dough and practice with it: roll it out and wrap something about the size of a portion of filling in it, a walnut, for example. I plan to improve my skills from here.

Roll the dough into a long log and cut it into pieces about the size of a small egg.
Roll each piece of dough into a circle about the size of your palm. Make the edges 2–3 times thinner than the middle, or it will be very hard to form the top of the baozi.
A silicone mat is very handy for rolling out dough: the dough hardly sticks to it. If the dough is too soft, knead in a little more flour. By the way, a small rolling pin is best for rolling out rounds; it’s far easier to handle than a big traditional one.
Keep in mind the dough is yeasted, so it will rise a bit more, if only slightly. The size of the rounds decides the size of the finished buns. Don’t make them too small; these aren’t dumplings. A normal diameter is 5–6 cm, no less. You can, and should, make them bigger.
Place a round of dough on your palm and put a heaping tablespoon of filling on it.
Fold over 1–1.5 cm of the edge, tuck it in slightly and press it against the next section of the edge. Keep turning the dough and filling in your hand and pleat the whole edge this way. Hold the top of the filling down with your thumb so a hole stays open at the top.
The rest, as they say, is technique. The whole shaping process boils down to pleating the edge of the dough like an accordion, tucking it slightly inward, while turning the ball of dough and filling in your hand at the same time. This way the edge forms slanted accordion pleats, which gives you a crimped top with a small hole. It’s like pinching khinkali, but with the pleats twisted at an angle.

Steaming

A Chinese bamboo steamer is an inexpensive gadget: one or more baskets stacked on top of each other with a single lid on top. It sits on an ordinary pot of water; you just need to match the diameter.

Pour 1 liter of water into the pot and bring it to a boil. Line the steamer with a cloth or a special liner. Arrange the baozi on it with enough space from the sides and from each other.
Set the steamer on the pot in place of a lid. Depending on the size of the buns, steaming takes 6 to 15 minutes. We steamed ours for 8 minutes, which was sure to cook the yeast dough through.
Be careful: steam is very hot and completely unpredictable, and it can give you a nasty burn.

Serving

Serve the buns in the steamer or move them to a plate. Make the sauce. To my taste, the ideal sauce is soy sauce mixed with rice vinegar, plus brown sugar, garlic and grated ginger, in proportions to taste.
You can also add a sesame chili oil sauce. Being a fan of spicy food, I just add a hot chili pepper to the plate.
Serve right away, while they’re piping hot. Dip the baozi in the sauce and enjoy.
Like any other steamed dough, the buns lose their charm as they cool, turning dense and dry. If they’re small, they’re usually eaten with chopsticks.

Calories and macros

195 kcal

100 g

Protein7.6 g16% of kcal
Fat6.9 g33% of kcal
Carbs23.9 g51% of kcal

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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To Get It Right

Other fillings

Baozi with meat: ground pork or chicken. For a meat filling I prefer jiaozi: they’re easier to shape, and the dough is unleavened.
Vegetable: pumpkin, mushrooms, other vegetables.
Cool any filling before shaping, just like the egg one: a hot filling softens the dough, and the edges become hard to pleat.

No fish sauce or five-spice

In baozi you can skip the fish sauce and use a little more soy sauce instead. Five-spice is easy to mix yourself: ground cinnamon, cloves, anise or star anise, and Sichuan or black pepper, a little of each.

Wheat flour only

Baozi are made with ordinary wheat flour: the yeast dough is elastic and holds the pleats. Dough made from rice flour alone doesn’t rise properly and tears when you pinch it.

Making ahead

Cooled baozi turn dense, so reheat them over steam for 3–5 minutes before serving. Shaped raw buns can be frozen on a board and then packed into a bag; steam them straight from frozen, a few minutes longer.

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Questions and answers

What is baozi?

A Chinese steamed bun made from yeast dough with a filling: meat, vegetable, mushroom or sweet. In China, baozi are a staple of street food; they’re steamed in huge bamboo steamers and served right in them.

How are baozi different from jiaozi and dumplings?

In the dough and the shape. Baozi dough is yeasted, so you get a bun, while jiaozi and dumplings use unleavened dough. The top of a bao is gathered into slanted pleats with a small hole, and baozi are bigger: the dough rounds are at least 5–6 cm.

How do you make baozi without a bamboo steamer?

Any steamer works, or a metal steamer insert set over a pot of boiling water and covered with a lid. Line it with cloth or parchment so the buns don’t stick. And bamboo steamers cost 10–20 times less than electric ones.

What are sweet baozi?

The best-known sweet filling is a paste made from a special kind of bean, red adzuki beans. The dough for sweet baozi is the same.

How many baozi do 2 cups of flour make?

5–8, depending on size. The dough is cut into pieces about the size of a small egg: the bigger the buns, the fewer you get.

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