"Sourdough" Bao from Anshun (安顺老面破酥包)
Simultaneously fluffy and flaky, Posubao is our all time favorite bao. This is a version from Anshun in the Guizhou province, which uses fermented rice to catalyze a starter dough instead of yeast
This is Anshun style Triple Stuffed Posu or broken bao, and in our opinion at least it's the best bao in the world. What.. makes it so special? Well.
Imagine for a second a cross between a fluffy, Dim Sum style Char Siu Bao with a layered, laminated pastry like a croissant. That is basically the dough – the aggressive fluffiness coming not from yeast but from an aged starter activated with fermented rice, and the layers the result of a generous application of lard that should be immediately recognizable to most bakers.
And while that would probably be enough to top our list-of-favorite-Baozis-ever, we're not done yet. The filling – that triple stuffing – takes this Baozi from A-tier to undisputed champ. It's a mix of scallion pork, of course, but it's combined with two other fillings that really amp things up.
First bit is a bit of bean paste, but this isn't your run-of-the-mill Bao-filling red beanpaste. It's a bit more on the savory side, and to ensure smoothness follows the same 'washed paste' method that these days is usually reserved for the fancier sorts of mooncakes. Then for the third leg, you've got some crushed perilla seed mixed with sugar, which rounds things out and gives the filling its characteristic sweet-savory combination. It's... perfection in a bun.
So it's pretty obvious why, as soon as we tasted our first bite of this bun many years back, we knew we had to share it with you. But. As soon as that ambition materialized, we were presented with a problem. You see, this is Anshun. It's a charming little city south of Guiyang in the Guizhou province that's probably best known for its waterfall 40km outside of town.
Historically, it started as a military outpost about six centuries ago, and even today it's pretty small by Chinese standards. So like… there's… pretty much nothing out there on how to make these guys proper. Now, the neighboring Yunnan province also has their own version of posubao, but at least from what we’ve seen, their dough nowadays often relies on yeast, and, of course, the fillings are completely different.
So it's taken a while. But. After over five trips to Guizhou eating around and taking to people, countless hours of pulling at the faintest strings researching this, and even longer brute force trial-and-error testing… we finally figured out how to reverse engineer these bao. It’s not the easist bao making process you’ll come across, so we’d suggest you tackle this one after you gain some experience in standard Chinese bao making first.
High Level Overview
Anshun Posubao
Laozao Fermented Rice:
Long grain sticky rice (糯米), 250g.
Yeast ball a.k.a. jiuqu a.k.a. "Shanghai Yeast Balls" (酒曲), ~1/6 of a ball or ~1.8g.
Process:
Soak 250g long grain sticky rice overnight. Strain and transfer to a steamer lined with wet cloth. Steam for 45 minutes, coming back every 15 minutes to splash ~1 cup of water over the rice to prevent drying.
Let the rice cool down to 35C. Dissolve ~1/6 of a yeast ball (酒曲) or ~1.8g in a bit of cool drinking water and mix it in with the sticky rice.
Cover, let it ferment in a warm (ideally ~30C), dark place for 72 hours.
You can also use a Zoji rice cooker with the 'sticky rice' setting in place of steaming, but be paranoid about any potential oil in your rice cooker. Thoroughly re-wash before use. ANY oil can muff up the laozao.
Bean Paste:
Rice Beans (Vigna Umbelleta) or Red Adzuki Beans (红豆), 250g.
To boil:
Water, 1L mixed with ¼ tsp sodium carbonate (碱面).
To fry:
Neutral oil, 100mL.
Dark brown sugar (黑糖), 60g.
Process:
Soak 250g rice bean or red adzuki beans overnight.
Next day, boil the beans in 1L water mixed with ¼ tsp sodium carbonate over a medium-low flame for ~1 hour until very soft and almost broken down.
Rinse the shells off the beans using the strainer/cloth bag contraption we describe in the video - the logic is that you're rinsing the paste off of the shell (which will collect in the bag) and the shells will remain in the strainer. Squeeze out the moisture from the bag.
Fry in a non-stick pan/wok together with 100mL of neutral oil and 60g dark brown sugar over a low flame for ~30 minutes until the paste becomes thick and dark.
Sugar and Perilla Mixture:
Granulated sugar, 1/2 tbsp
Toasted perilla seed (苏籽), 1/2 tbsp
Process:
You will likely need to toast the seeds yourself. To do so, just toss 1/2 tbsp seeds over a dry pan over medium flame for ~2 minutes, until the seeds just begin to release oil.
Pour the seeds into a mortar together with 1/2 tbsp sugar, pound into a coarse powder.
Pork Filling:
Pork leg (后腿肉) or belly (五花肉), ~60-70% lean, 150g.
Sliced scallions, 20g.
Seasoning:
Salt, ¼ tsp.
Sugar, ½ tsp.
Cornstarch (生粉), ½ tsp.
White pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ⅛ tsp.
Sichuan peppercorn powder (花椒粉), ⅛ tsp.
Liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ½ tsp.
Light soy sauce (生抽), ¼ tsp.
Water, 1 tbsp.
Oil to coat, 1 tsp.
Process:
Mince 150g pork leg (or belly, ~60-70% lean). If using belly, cut the fat into small cubes and mince the lean separately.
Add seasoning: ¼ tsp salt, ½ tsp sugar, ½ tsp cornstarch, ⅛ tsp white pepper powder, ⅛ tsp Sichuan peppercorn powder, ½ tsp Shaoxing wine, ¼ tsp light soy sauce, 1 tbsp water. Mix and stir till it's a bit sticky.
Add in 20g sliced scallions and fat (if using pork belly). Give it a quick mix.
Coat with about 1 tsp oil, another quick mix, and set aside.
The Bao
Starter:
Active laozao fermented rice, 50g. Half rice/half liquid.
AP flour (中筋面粉), 50g.
Water, 25g.
Process:
Prepare 50g active laozao rice wine (half rice, half liquid). Mash it together in a clean container. Mix in 50g all-purpose flour and 25g water.
Cover and place in a warm, dark place for about 12 hours or longer, or until it's nice and bubbly. This creates the laomian starter, which will be used to make the sponge for the final dough.
Sponge Dough:
Starter, 60g.
AP flour, 300g.
Water, 135g.
Process:
Mix 60g laomian starter with 135g water. Stir well. Add in 300g all-purpose flour. Form the mixture into a ball, then press it down. Cover and let it ferment overnight.
Main Dough and Final Wrapping:
The sponge dough from above.
AP Flour, 300g.
Water, 135g.
Sugar, 30g.
Sodium carbonate (碱面), 1g.
Process:
In a big mixing bowl, dissolve 30g sugar in 135g water.
Mix 1g (or ¼ tsp) sodium carbonate with 300g all-purpose flour, then combine with the sugar + water mixture and sponge dough.
When roughly combined, transfer to a working surface. Knead for about 12 minutes, using a fold and knead motion to develop gluten. After 12 minutes, or when the dough becomes white and smooth, divide it into three even pieces, each about 320g.
Shape each piece into a log by folding and kneading the cut sides into the center, make sure the log is smooth. Place seamed side down, cover and let rest for 30 minutes.
During this rest, take out the lard and fillings to come to room temperature.
After resting, we can roll out the dough. Dust work surface generously. Divide one log into two pieces. Roll one piece into a sheet about 20*70cm and 1mm thick. Evenly spread 15g lard over the sheet, including edges. Roll up the sheet from one end into a log/scroll like object.
Roll the other piece into a same size sheet and apply same amount of lard.
Then place the first rolled log on one side of this sheet, then start rolling the first log into this sheet as well, so that we can create more layers. Put this one rolled-up big log in a zip lock bag and rest for 30 minutes.
Repeat this process with the two remaining dough. And then we’ll have three rolled-up logs.
After all dough is processed, the first log should be ready for wrapping.
Take out the first rolled up log. Cut off uneven ends (stack and roughly shape it into tiny buns).
Tear the log into four even pieces.
One piece makes one bao. So gently press down a piece to widen into a square-roundish disc, fill with 1 tbsp pork mince, ½ tbsp bean paste, and ½ tsp sugar perilla mixture. Then grab one side, pinch up, and start pleating and wrapping. Tilt your palm outward slightly to help form a pocket. Don't worry about getting perfect pleats; a flaky, raggedy look is characteristic of posubao.
Place each wrapped bao on a small piece of parchment paper in a steamer. Cover the steam to prevent drying. Repeat the portioning and wrapping process with the second and third logs.
For proofing and steaming, put steamer full of baozi over 35C water and proof for 30 minutes. Then place the steamer over boiling water and steam on high heat for 13 minutes.
Turn off the heat, let sit in steamer for 1 minute before removing. And then your flaky, layered posubao are now ready to serve. Enjoy it while it’s hot.
Important notes to help along the process:
1. This is not an introductory recipe.
If you’re new to Chinese bun making, try your hand at Mantou first, recipe here:
Also, we’d suggest getting comfortable with making Laozao fermented rice before embarking on this recipe as well – video here:
(in that video we used packaged Rhizopus, same same but different, we need the herbal yeast cake for making laozao starter since packaged Rhizopus is single strain and so is commercial yeast by any other name).
2. Creating the starter.
The laozao activeness would vary, it would affect the activeness of your starter, which in turn affects the time of making the sponge dough. In order words, don’t just simply follow the timing provided in the video, you’ll need to observe the condition of the starter, and the sponge in the same sense.
During testing, I made two batches of stater using two different batches of laozao rice wine fermented at different temperatures. The very powerful starter is made with the rice wine that’s fermented in a fermentation set-up (aka our oven with a fermentation setting), with a steady 30C environment for 72 hours. The relatively weaker starter is made with rice wine fermented at room temperature, ranging between 23-26C, and it’s undeniably weaker.
I compared how two starters behave 3 hours after first feeding. The obviously bubbly one is made with the more active laozao rice wine, and the one with little bubbles are the one made with the weaker laozao.
So if you don’t have a fermentation set up and your room temperature is cooler, your laozao rice wine would likely to be weaker. After mixing the laozao rice wine with flour and water to create your starter, feed it once after 12 hours and see if it obviously bubbles up and double in size within 5-6 hours to test its activeness. If it stays relatively low and quiet, you can start feeding your starter every 12 hours for several more days so that it becomes steadier and more active.
During the feeding process, the sign to look for in an active starter is basically the same as regular sourdough starter, i.e. it doubles or triples in volume within 6 to 8 hours (for me at a sub-tropical climate, the stronger one only takes 4 hrs to double in size).
3. Feeding and maintaining the starter.
It’s basically the same as sourdough starter, feed it every 12 hours when storing at room temperature. (I’m lazy and only feed mine every 24 hours but it seems fine.)
If you’re not planning on using it anytime soon, you can store it in the refrigerator. I follow Ken Forkish’s method in his Flour Water Salt Yeast book: add some water to create a film covering the starter, put it in the fridge. It can keep for two weeks without feeding.
Feed the starter every two weeks when keeping it in the fridge, which follow the same steps of restoring the starter for baking/steaming: take the starter out from the fridge, let it sit in room temperature overnight to comeback in temperature. Discard the water that’s covering it, mix in fresh flour and water, cover and sit in room temperature for 12 hours or until it doubles or triples in size. Then it’s ready to be used or put back to the fridge.
Because I hate discarding too much starter and wasting flour, so I usually do 30-40g flour feeding (2 tbsp flour + 1 tbsp water) each time and keep a relatively small stater.
Kingarthur also has a pretty good discussion on how to maintain starter, here’s the link: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/feeding-and-maintaining-your-sourdough-starter-recipe
4. Sponge dough fermentation time variation.
After creating the laozao starter, we can make the sponge or levain. Depending on your room temperature, the time for the sponge to double in size will vary. From my testing using the active starter, it takes about 6 hours at 30C, 10-12 hours at ~18C, and 28 hours in our fridge. The “overnight” fermentation mentioned in the video is not a standard timeline, it really depends on your room temp. So you can use the time provided above to adjust your bulk fermentation time, and look for when the sponge is doubled in size.
5. The risk of over-fermentation.
As much as we want a strong and active starter, it may present problem as well, which is over-fermenting.
As we discussed in the video, acid proteases break down the gluten in flour. Over fermentation means the protease is having a party and there’s not much gluten left.
When the sponge has already doubled in size and you don’t use it relatively soon, but instead let it sit for several hours or even overnight, it won’t have enough gluten and it will affect the main dough.
There are two tell-tale signs of over fermenting and lack of gluten:
a. when kneading the main bao dough, you can’t really get to that beautiful smooth “skin” (something like this:
Instead the dough would always have some small raggedy ripped openings.
b. when wrapping the baozi, you can’t really pinch and close the pleats, it tends to break very easily and you end up with holes in the pleats even if you manage to close up the pleats. That’s because the dough can’t stretch enough to wrap around the filling when there’s not enough gluten. And during steaming, the pleats will break and expand, the end result would be something like an open-face bao. It’d still taste good, it’s just not a baozi but a mantou with stuffing sticked on top of it.
6. Why not packaged yeast?
I tested with just commercial yeast from very early on and the texture is just different. Commercial yeast is single strain, it’s powerful but it lacks the flavor that laozao starter provides. It lacks Rhizopus as well, that means it doesn’t not have protease that breaks down the gluten, which I think may be the main reason why the texture is so different.
For the very few Posu Bao recipes you can fine online, they all use commercial yeast, which also creates that layered in a baozi, but it does just taste like a normal baozi, nothing special.
However, if you want to make sure that your bao is fluffy, you can try adding 0.1% yeast (to the weight of flour) when mixing everything to make the final bao dough.
But DO NOT add any commercial yeast to your starter, it’s so powerful that it’ll end up dominating other microbes in the starter and becomes a single strain.
7. Lengthen the roll up log
In the video, I forgot to mention that you’ll need to lengthen the rolled-up log, apologies.
So basically, after rolling up the whole log, you’ll need gently squeeze and roll with both hands to slightly lengthen the log so that you’ll have a big enough piece for wrapping. I believe we include that in the uncut video, please do check it out.
8. Different fillings
In addition to sanxian three delicacies, there’re some other classic fillings for the Guizhou Posu Bao: potato + pickled vegetable, just pork, toasted peanut + granulated sugar, perilla seeds + granulated sugar, toasted black sesame paste, washed bean paste, pork fat cubes + sugar.
The two classic ones I see everywhere in Yunnan are minced pork + mushroom and Yunnan ham + some toasted nuts + granulated sugar (btw, this is an awesome filling, one of our favorite mooncake filling as well).
9. Amount needed when using herbal dried yeast ball
So the amount we used in the video is calculated according to the dried yeast ball we got. When using the one you can get, do check out how much rice you can make using one ball, and do the calculation according to the actual rice amount that you’re using.
10. Using rice beans
If you can find actual rice beans, you’ll need to up the oil quantity when frying as rice bean is starchier and take up a lot more oil. I tested it and ended up using about 160ml oil for 250g beans. The oil mostly functions as the heat conductor for frying and releases back after it sits a bit, so no worries.
11. How to make your sodium carbonate
Spread out some baking soda on a plate, bake at 150C for 1 hour. The thermal decomposition will turn baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) into sodium carbonate. After it’s done, store in an air tight jar and keep for future uses.
12. How to use up your Laozao
Laozao stays well in the fridge for at least a month. Here’re some ideas for you to use it: in place of sugar for seasoning; add in spicy dishes to balance the heat and add depth; thicken it like a sugar and water mixture to make sweet and sour sauce; in drinks with yogurt and milk, one popular mix here is laozao + milk/thin yogurt + Osmanthus flower + green tea; lightly flavored desserts like yogurt mousse cake, lemon bar, key lime pie…(have fun with it); make mantou and kuihs; use the laozao or the starter to make bread, I’ve done it and it tastes and smells great; and of course, use it as a yeast.
13. Make sure all your containers are clean when making laozao fermented rice wine and the starter. It should not have the slightest touch of oil. I swapped container for one of the batches of laozao, the lid of that Tupperware box probably got some oil on it, then the whole batch just gone bad with a strange bitter after note. So yeah, keep all your container clean and oil free for fermentation.