Hello! Hi everyone. Wesley here. Today we’re diving back into our series dedicated to the Bay Area restaurant scene with a shot at yet another item from the Woo Can Cook pop up menu, which is a shredded pork sweet bun, or rousong bao. For those unfamiliar, a rou song bao features (as you might guess) a pantry stable Chinese dried shredded pork or “rousong,” which has been folded into the bao with green onions and mayonnaise. Mayo, of course, being a classic weirdly American staple of chinese baked buns that inexplicably works really well.
Rounding this out, we’ll also be pairing our rousong with a sweet bun dough that has now come up in MANY woo can cook recipes (some may recall our char siu bao, custard bun, and cocktail buns all use this same dough). We will however, be making some small adjustments to how the dough comes together, mainly with the inclusion of heavy cream instead of whole milk, because I have been making and tweaking this dough recipe every week for the last year. Plus, there’s just never not a good time to use heavy cream, let’s be honest. Hope you try it.
Yields 12
INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup rousong
4 green onions
mayonnaise
furikake (or sesame seed
egg wash (one whisked egg plus 2 tbsp water)
INGREDIENTS (dough)
1 tbsp (1 packet) dry active yeast
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 tbsp sesame oil
4 cups AP flour
1 cup heavy cream
pinch kosher salt
PREP
SLICE the green onions thinly, set aside
WHISK the eggs, then combine with all other dough ingredients except AP flour
GRADUALLY add the AP flour to the wet dough ingredients until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, and a cohesive dough forms
PROOF the dough in a cold oven with the oven light on for 4 hours
DIVIDE the dough into 3oz pieces, then roll out into circles with a 6 inch diameter, rotating the dough a quarter turn after each roll
ADD a thin layer of mayonnaise, followed by green onions and rousong
ROLL the dough up into a spiral, then pinch off the top and bottom ends
COAT the buns in egg wash
SLICE the buns in half use a bench scraper, leaving the top end still attached
FOLD the dough ends over each other in a twist pattern
FINISH with furikake (or sesame seed)
BAKE at 375F for 20 minutes until golden brown