manapua

It's been awhile since I've baked bread, but the weather has been quite summery during the daytime, and I had some time on my hands yesterday, so I finally got around to trying my hand at manapua or char siu bao.

Manapua is a food I had growing up and I really like the baked version.

I used the same bread recipe that I use for anpan.

For the filling, I used some char siu, lup cheong (which I took out of the freezer) and green onion.

While you are waiting for the dough to proof, render the fat out of both the lup cheong and char siu separately, drain on a paper towel.

Chop the lup cheong and char siu separately into a dice and let cool.

Mix each with thinly sliced green onion and put into your dough before the 2nd proofing (at step 10 on the anpan recipe).

I baked these for about 18 minutes.

NOTES: The yeast was past the expiry date and I think I should have kneaded it longer. The dough was a little too wet to handle even if I added flour when I worked with it.

Next time, I would add a little more filling too.

Flavor-wise it was good and still had a nice crumb. I would make this again (with newer yeast this time).