Last Baking For The Day

[peteyfrogboy]

This is the last baking entry from me today, I swear.

So, it turns out that adding sugar makes the bread rise faster. This was not much of a surprise to me. About 7 hours after I put the dough together, it was all big and bubbly and I figured I may as well get to work making stuff.

Backing up a little, I got the pork chops out of the fridge, that were defrosting from having been in the freezer. I pulled out the first one and looked for the bone I'd need to cut out to make it into stir fry. No bone. Weird. That was when I realized that I did not have prok chops, but in fact had pulled out half a Boston Butt. Since what I really wanted to make was char siu anyway, I did a little happy dance.

Now, when I was growing up, Mom made char siu the way he'd been taught by my dad's mom, which was low and slow. There are a lot of different techniques out there, including a faster, higher heat broiling technique that she has been using to good effect lately. I was too impatient even for that, so I went for the ultimate heresy: the George Foreman grill. I cut the meat into 1/2" - 3/4" slabs for quick cooking and marinated it for a while (soy sauce, sherry, sugar, frozen garlic, fresh sliced ginger, five spice, hoisin sauce) while I was playing with bread.

Back to the bread. I pinched off half the dough and stretched it out into a long rectangle on a floured cutting board. I wasn't sure how much butter I would need, so I melted a whole stick. I mixed about 1/2 c. sugar and 2 T cinnamon and went to town. I spread out as much butter as I could without it dripping off the edges, then sprinkled on the sugar and cinnamon. There were some dry spots, so I poured on some more butter, which allowed me to add more cinnamon, and so on and so forth until I forced myself to stop the death spiral. I put on some of the big fat fancy raisins, rolled it up, and chucked it in the sprayed loaf pan to rise some more.

Now that I had a clear spot of counter, I set up the grill and started cooking the pork in batches. It seemed to cook through quite nicely, and each successive batch was browner as more sugary marinade cooked onto the surfaces of the grill. After I put the last batch on the grill, I poured the leftover marinade in a pan, got it hot, and thickened it with some cornstarch. The sauce went back over the cooked pork.

Grandma may be turning in her grave, but dang if that wasn't the highest flavor-to-work ratio I've ever achieved.

I took out a few likely looking pieces of pork and chunked them up, along with a couple of green onions (sadly, I found no water chestnuts in the pantry). I also used up the last of the frozen shrimp, which I cooked quickly in a pan with little fanfare. All of this I put in the mini food processor chopper thing and buzzed it into tiny bits. A little of the char siu sauce and the bao filling was ready to go.

Somewhere in here I put the covered loaf pan in the oven at 375° for 25 minutes, then another 25 minutes uncovered. More on that later.

I laid out a sheet of waxed paper and started filling bao. I ended up making 18, 14 of which went in the steamer and the last four I put on a pizza stone and baked after taking the raisin bread out. Both varieties turned out well, though of course I'm always more partial to the steamed ones. They're very chewy, perhaps too much so, but that's probably because I was using bread flour. Next time I can use AP flour, but they're still good enough that I'll eat every darn one.

So when I checked in on the raisin bread, the top was nice and brown and it was surrounded by bubbling sugary goo all around the edges. I was expecting a total mess when I turned it out, so I arranged a cooling rack and foil to catch it all. As it turned out, the goo was only at the very top of the pan, and there was very little mess. The goo was tasty, but hot like lava. Ask me how I know. The whole shebang is wrapped loosely in foil now to be tested in the morning because I'm too darn full now.