Bingo 6: Part 1
Mooncakes & Milk Bread is a cookbook emphasizing Chinese bakery baking. For those, like me, who don’t exactly know what that is, there are occasional 2-ish page interludes with stories and explanations. The reason such a thing qualifies for this square? About 80% of the recipes are extensions of one of four base recipes (the parts 1): milk bread, mooncake, steamed bun, and a variation on puff pastry. Basically, there are 4 part ones, followed by a lot of recipes that start off something like: “Do {part 1} up to step X, and then….”
I am pretty excited to work my way through this book. I’ve never really wanted to take the time to deal with a lot steamed bun type things, and dumpling recipes tend to be large quantity and take a long while to work all the way through, but the recipes here make it sound relatively do-able. The only real problem, besides my lack of practice with most of the things in here, is that there area handful of places with ingredients that would be a little harder to source for someone who does not live near a large Asian market (and I refuse to grocery shop online), as well as a couple of recipes that require specific equipment that I don’t’ see myself using a lot and would mostly just take up space I don’t really have. I’m not going to go find a set of 12-16 individual small tart pans; I’ve got a mini muffin tin that’s going to do the job when I get to that section. Neither do I see the need to invest in a pineapple cake mold (no actual pineapple necessarily involved). I might find a mooncake mold because I don’t have anything remotely equivalent and that’s something I don’t mind getting off of the internet.
I might actually also try to get the looks of some of these things right, in part because it looks kind of fun, and in part because there are both picture and word instructions, and I’ve got a feeling I’ll need both. There’s an Asian pear turnover (turnovers are my favorite) that requires the puff pastry recipe, but the instructions for the pastry (which I’ve trouble with getting right; it’s always leaked on me) look pretty clear and the method is slightly different than what GBBO and similar have said to do. Fingers crossed that adding a little flour to the butter block and a few other little things are the trick. There’s a rhubarb custard bun that looks really yummy (milk bread base) and it only requires a little rhubarb. I like rhubarb, but it’s hard to grow/find where I live. I hate paying $5 a pound for something I could get out of my backyard as a kid. The hot dog flower buns, basically fun pigs and a blanket are definitely making an appearance at the next church potluck, unless I decide I really need to try the garlic and chive whole wheat flower buns (steamed bun) first. I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever had a mooncake, but I’m looking forward to trying out the honey pistachio mooncake, and the snow skin ice cream mooncake (which is pretty close to ice cream mochis).
The handful of recipes that don’t start with a part 1 are either cakes of some kind or drinks, and some of those look interesting. Coffee with grass jelly might actually get me to buy a can of grass jelly, which I’ve seen before but always been a little weirded out by. Like I said, this is going to be fun to experiment and learn from.