Pork Floss Buns 豬肉鬆包

Have you ever tried Chinese pork floss, 豬肉鬆?  If not, you're totally missing out cuz pork floss is the bomb and it's the meat version of cotton candy!  Pork floss is meat that is stewed in soy sauce and spices until imbued with flavor and fall apart tender, then teased apart and cooked again until completely dry, in the process becoming a light tender fluff that's packed with intense and incredible yummilicious meat flavor.  It's so good that you just always want to have a bit more!  

Pork floss is used inside rice rolls, or eaten with congee, or with a bit of bread.  One of my favorite (and easy!) tricks is to grab a slice of bread, slaughter on some butter, add some pork floss, roll it up and it's a quick delicious and very popular snack in our household.  Even my wee cat loves the stuff!  

This time I decided to go a bit more formal and make the proper Pork Floss buns, just like you can buy at the bakery!  A soft enriched bun with a hidden heart of pork floss as well as a luscious piling of pork floss on top, this bun is as good looking as it is tasty!

Chinese Steamed Chicken Buns 雞包仔

Recently my 老公 decided that he doesn't want to eat 'red meat'.  Red meat like beef and pork.  Makes dinner kinda crazy sometimes cuz we have to cook his stuff and the regular stuff for us (he insists a growing girl, meaning my little girl not me LOL, needs her red meat.)  Teensie tiny eyeroll...I mean proteins are proteins, wherever they're from, amirite?  But I digress. 

Actually this limitation has challenged us in directions we probably wouldn't usually consider.  Like these Chinese Steamed Chicken Buns.  I myself grew up eating my grandma's Steamed Pork and Veggie Buns.  For quite a period of time it was my breakfast and after school meal.  This skinny little growing Chinese girl could gobble up 3 to 4 buns in one go!

I wanted my family to enjoy the same kind of bun fun so I decided to make these chicken buns so that everyone in our little family could enjoy them.  In the process I discovered that these Chinese Steamed Chicken Buns 雞包仔, with its juicily delicious, tenderly aromatic infused chicken pieces wrapped inside a soft pillowy bread is actually super yummilicious as well as quite easy to make!

Silver Thread Buns 銀絲卷

This playful and tasty bread is a great childhood favorite of mine.  When I was little we used to get to eat it only when we happened to go to Shanghai or Northern Chinese cuisine restaurants, a special treat.  

These Silver Thread Buns 銀絲卷 (or Gold Thread Buns 金絲卷 if deep fried to a golden crispy brown) were a real treat for us kids, delicate fluffy strands of sweet white bread all wrapped inside a bun, a surprise every time!  It was so much fun to slowly tear into the bread and pick out the delicate threads of bread, eating them slowly, one amazing stick at a time.  There's nothing like food you can play with, amirite? 

But, shucks, I gotta admit that I still secretly love to pick these buns apart now that I'm grown up.  (Shhh...don't tell!)  The only difference nowadays is that I can make these Silver Thread Buns myself and enjoy their sweet, delicate white fluffiness (and play with my food!) in the comfort of home!