Bao

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My husband with his perfect bao.

Hey, Alicia here with another international recipe. Last year my family picked a country from our heritage every month and made one recipe a week from that country. It was really fun, educational, and delicious. This year we're not doing that same thing, but we still love experimenting with food from other cultures.

That's where bao, steamed Chinese dumplings, come in. My husband works at Pixar, and you may remember that short that played before Incredibles 2 called Bao. Bao (without giving anything away) is about a woman who makes bao and one of them comes to life and she basically treats this cute little dumpling as her son. The director of the short, Domee Shi, shared her mother's recipe for bao with her Pixar colleagues and an illustrated version with Time Magazine. 

My husband really wanted to make them because he loves Chinese food. So we did. It's a pretty simple recipe, though it can take a little time preparing the filling. The first time my husband minced everything by hand. The second time he decided to use the food processor and it was perfect. We also don't have ground pork so we used pork sausage. The dough is a very simple 3 ingredient yeast dough. The results were so wonderful. A favorite part was the fresh ginger used in the filling. Don't skip it as it really adds to the flavor. It's so good.

The hardest part of the recipe is folding the dough around the filling. I was not very good at it, so mine had a lot of extra dough at the top. If my bao had come to life, it would have been a completely different short, probably in the horror genre. But they still tasted delicious! My husband got the knack for it though and made some really cute bao. 

Another thing is you will need a way to steam the bao, as that's how they cook. we used the basket that came with our rice cooker.

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Cute little bao after being cooked.

I'm not sharing the recipe directly on our page because it is Domee Shi's but you can find the illustrated version on this page and a video of YouTuber, Emmy Made in Japan, following the recipe and making the dumplings. We found the video especially helpful.

​So go forth and enjoy bao. Let us know how you like it!

Here are my ugly bao. Ugly, but delicious.