Steam Pao & BahKua

Today is Chinese New Year's Eve, so tonight I am having Tuan Yuan Fan ( 团圆饭 @ Reunion Dinner ). As we are all foreign students away from our home land, almost all of us have a reunion dinner with our group members, or close friends.

Our group is of course not excluded from this "tradition". So as usual, almost each of us prepared a dish for the night. And this time I chose to make Pao ( 包 ) to match with WeiMin & SyihYing's Kou Rou( 扣肉 ). Thus we have Kou Rou Bao ( 扣肉包 ). For those who don't know what I am talking about, or need a recipe of homemade Kou Rou, kindly click here.

Before & After : Yeast

Prepare papers while waiting for the first rising of the dough.

Before & After : Dough first rising

Before & After : Pao second rising

After steaming

Oh my! Oh my! How can we not have BahKua ( 肉干 ) in CNY!!! Erm, well, I don't have it for 5 years in a row at least. But this year, I won't want to miss it.

Marinated minced pork

So after all I will have time while waiting for the dough to rise. I prepared my ingredients for my homemade BahKua based on LilyWai's recipe. Well, I did modify the recipe, as usual. As I don't have all the ingredients. I substituted the rose wine with my own wine (the wine bought from airport --- DOM), the white pepper to black. I omitted the fish sauce, kamcho powder, red colouring and of course the MSG. The smell was similar, however the taste lacks the saltiness And then only did I noticed that the recipe doesn't consist any bit of salt except soy sauce.

Before & After

The minced pork is to be spreaded to as thin a sheet as possible. And it is spreaded widely. However, after baking, it shrunk so much, about 50%. See the difference from the pictures above? So now I think I knew why BahKua is sold so expensively in Malaysia. Hehe

So here I have my very own BahKua, I am still very satisfied with the taste :)

Hmm, wanna know how the reunion dinner was??? Sure, next post will be about it :)