Andrea, Author at Asian Dumpling Tips

Portuguese Egg Tart Recipe (Poh Taht, Pasteis de Belem)

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Ask and you shall receive. Thank you to everyone who contributed insights on my question about Portuguese-Chinese egg tarts. They are a Portuguese treat called pasteis de Belem (a.k.a., pastel de nata) that were brought to Macau and adopted quite heartily by the Chinese. The Chinese, particular those in nearby Hong Kong created a riff by making their own Hong Kong-style egg tarts in the 1940s. The resulting Cantonese dahn taht has become ubiquitous with Chinese bakeries and dim sum houses.

Many of you submitted Portuguese egg tarts tips, such as where I can get them in the Bay Area, such as the bakery in Milpitas Square off the 880 freeway, in the 99 Ranch Market shopping center. Amy Sherman of CookingwithAmy.com gave a link to her post on the famous Portuguese egg tarts from the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém pastry shop in Lisbon, Portugal. That bakery was the one that commercialized the tarts in 1837. Before then, Portuguese egg tarts were made and sold by the Catholic nuns of the Jerónimos Monastery. (Praise the sisters!) Others pointed to the Macao institution that’s renowned for their Portuguese egg tarts – Lord Stow’s bakery. Stowe’s cross between the English and Portuguese versions is the benchmark for Portuguese egg tarts in Asia. Egg tart fever hit Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan in the late 1990s.

I looked up Stow’s and found this YouTube video which was incredibly enlightening. Watch it and in the first minute, catch how the pastry is rolled up into a cylinder and then pressed into the tart shell! For those of you who have the Asian Dumplings cookbook – that cylindrical treatment of dough is the same as what’s used for Chinese flaky pastry on page 120 to make things like Malaysian curry puffs. I now wonder if the Chinese got that from the Portuguese? I’ve not seen that technique applied to puff pastry in other cuisines.

By using a cylinder of rolled up puff pastry-type dough (some describe it as a Swiss roll) for the pastry, the tart shell naturally pushes upwards as it bakes in the oven. All that hot air forces the custard to puff up like a mushroom cap and when things deflate after baking, you get the characteristic undulating top. I know this because I went about five rounds with baking the tarts to develop my own Portuguese egg tart recipe.

What do you know about Portuguese Chinese Egg Tarts?

Cooking Tips & Tricks, Dim sum recipes, Dumpling Restaurants

When I was in Sydney last November, Chris Tan of Foodfella.com was raving about tasting some freshly made Portuguese egg tarts that a local Portuguese baker had made. He showed me a food porn-type of photo he’d taken to whet my appetite, and explained that it was a Macau specialty. That makes the little sweet kinda like a Portuguese Chinese egg tart, seeing how they’re very very similar to Cantonese egg tarts that you find at dim sum joints and bakeries.

I let the notion of that tart simmer in the back of my Asian dumpling brain. I even saw a recipe in a new book coicidentally by Chris’s dad, Terry Tan, called The Food and Cooking of South China. It’s hard for me to make something I’ve never tasted. How was I going to get my hands on one? Portuguese egg tarts are not a commonly found item in the United States at Chinese restaurants, or so I thought.

How to Make Steamed Chinese Bao White?

Asian Dumpling Basics, Asian Ingredients, Cooking Tips & Tricks

As absurd as that headline may sound to you, it’s a question many home cooks ask. What is the Chinese secret to getting their buns so snowy white? It’s like how is Wonder Bread produced? In Asia, there’s the notion – just like there used to be in much of the developed western world – that white colored food reflects modern progress, purity, and civility. (If you want more on this, read Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad and note what she says about the use of white sauce on page 91.) I have done a fair number of experiments, as a previous post on The Trick to Making Bao described, but I’d not gotten down to the nitty gritty. Here they are:

Does adding vinegar to bao dough make it whiter? Sorry. No. I’ve read of that trick in a number of Chinese American recipes and have tried it out, but the vinegar doesn’t do anything to the color. I suspect that the deal with adding the vinegar has to do with developing gluten in the dough. In order to get white bao, many Chinese American cooks use low-gluten (low-protein), bleached cake flour for their bao dough; cake flour is milled from soft wheat and has 8 to 10% gluten/protein. To make up for the flour’s lack of gluten a touch of vinegar is added to result in more chewy dough.

Does putting vinegar in the water for steaming produce white bao? Nope. It just makes for a sour smelling kitchen. I never understood the rationale for this approach.

What can I do to produce snowy white bao? The answer is the flour. Below is a photo of three kinds of ultra-white wheat flour that I collected for the purposes of developing recipes for Asian Dumplings. From left to right: Taiwanese all-purpose flour by Sunlight Foods Corporation that I purchased from Ranch 99 market; legendary White Lily All-Purpose flour obtained from a trip to the American south; and Malaysian Red Man (Phoon Huat) Hong Kong Flour brought back from a trip to Singapore. Note how the Taiwanese and Malaysian flour have pictures of bao on their labels, as if to signal to consumers, “Buy me if you want white bao!”

These three are all specialty flours that most of us can’t just go down the street and get. But I tried them out and in testing the flour for making steamed Chinese bao, the Hong Kong Flour produced by Red Man yielded shockingly white results, followed by the Taiwanese flour. White Lily came in third. All three produced steamed bao dough that was whiter than supermarket Gold Medal all-purpose. (The top three bao in the photo at the top of T he Trick to Making Bao post are of bao made from Red Man, White Lily, and Sunlight Foods flours respectively; Gold Medal are on the bottom row.) But frankly, the flavor of the dough was flat in comparison to the Gold Medal flour, which even in a bleached form, had more natural sweet wheat flavor.

Are all bao in Asia super white? Nope. In wealthy urban areas such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, the bao tend to be white. I’ve had outstanding not-snowy-white bao made from not-so-bleached flour in the countryside. However, even in Shanghai, I purchased nice tasting, not-so-white bao from a storefront bao vendor. You just have to look, but the real point here is that not all bao have to be super white to be delicious or authentic!

When to use bleached vs. unbleached flour? When flour is first milled, it’s naturally yellowish in color. Flour bleaching agents are added (such as peroxide and chlorine) to yield whiter color and finer grain. My thought is that some bleaching is fine but when you overdo it, you rob the flour of too much flavor. Note that for making tender sweets, such as cookies and cakes, I use bleached all-purpose flour. For savories, such as pot stickers or poached shuijiao dumplings, unbleached flour contributes a more toothsome texture and deep flavor.

How to choose all purpose flour for bao and other Asian dumplings? High-protein flour, such as King Arthur All-Purpose (flour stats sheet), do not work for most Asian foods because the gluten (protein) level is too high – around 11.7 percent. Doughy Asian foods are not of the rustic European kind; chewiness is obtained from the addition of starches or other techniques, not from the wheat flour alone. All-purpose flour with a moderate about of gluten — about 10.5 percent — works best for Asian dumplings. I spoke with a Gold Medal representative earlier this year and their all-purpose flour has a moderate gluten level.

Conclusion: For good flavor in Asian dumplings and pastries, flour from the supermarket work just fine. If you want bright white results, seek out specialty flour such as the ones pictured above.

Related links:

My baking soda and bao mistake — see what happens when baking soda is used in the dough

Tips on How to Have a Dumpling Party (and not work hard)

Asian Dumplings Cookbook, Cooking Tips & Tricks

It may not surprise you to know that I involve Asian dumplings in a fair amount of my entertaining and social activities. People come over to my house and they get dumplings. I go to parties or pot-luck dinners and I bring dumplings. Let’s just say that I like to share dumplings with others. Spreading the dumpling love also prevents me from getting the dumpling belly – a physical condition brought on by over consumption.

However, you can have your Asian dumplings and eat them too – that is, you don’t have to work too hard to keep the flow of dumplings going. They can be labor intensive but with a little strategic planning and a flexible approach, dumplings can be a no sweat effort and lots of fun. Here are a few tips to keep in your back pocket:

Chairman Mao’s Red-Cooked Pork Belly Recipe (Hong Shao Rou)

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Since I had to buy a sizable piece of pork belly for the Japanese braised cha shu, I went hog wild and cooked pork belly Chinese style. If you noticed in the Japanese pork belly recipe, it’s simmered in a classic Chinese method called red cooking in which soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar are combined to flavor and color the meat a deep mahogany. The Japanese borrowed the Chinese simmering technique but for some reason called it cha shu, though they never roasted the pork. Go figure. Chinese red cooking produced remarkably rich meat that doesn’t taste fatty. You end up gobbling pork belly but don’t mind it. Actually you want to eat more of it. Chinese red-cooked pork belly is perfect for slicing and stuffing into steamed rolls, just like its Japanese counterpart. Or, just have it with rice for a sumptuous meal.

When I set out to prepare red-cooked pork belly, I looked in a number of my favorite Chinese cookbooks and settled upon Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe in Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, which focuses on Hunan cooking. Fuchsia relates how red-cooked pork in Hunan is practically unseparable from Chairman Mao Zedong, who loved it, ate lots of it, and requested it from his personal chefs in Beijing. The folks from Shaoshan village where Mao was from even declared red-cooked pork to be a health food that also kept your mind sharp. I suppose that in times of hunger, which China had plenty of in its past, a chunk of well flavored fatty pork would be both luxurious and nutritious.

Asian Dumplings among NPR Best 10 Cookbooks of 2009

Asian Dumplings Cookbook

Yowza — T. Susan Chang selected Asian Dumplings as one of NPR's Best 10 Cookbooks of 2009! As the cookbook reviewer for the Boston Globe and contributor to the Kitchen Window column on National Public Radio (NPR), Chang sees most of the cookbooks published in the United States every year. I greatly respect her work and to be included alongside The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones, Gourmet Today by Ruth Reichl, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, and Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart — well that's pretty amazing company to keep.

You may know of Ruth Reichl's acclaimed work as the LA Times and New York Times restaurant reviewer, food writer and editor of Gourmet magazine, but Judith Jones is the legendary editor who oversaw the publication of Julia Child's cookbooks, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo has been a maven of Chinese cooking for decades, and Peter Reinhart is royalty among bread bakers. Here's an excerpt of Chang's comments about Asian Dumplings:

Personally, I have always strictly believed that the effort of making dumplings yourself magically negates the calories you might accrue by eating them. With the help of this book, you may find yourself reaching the same conclusion.

For the full article, read NPR.org's The 10 Best Cookbooks of 2009