as i have gotten older, i just try things. NEXT: the elusive BAO.

[boomchakabowwow]

in one way i have matured, i know how to get out of my own head. sometimes, just showing up is 80% of the success.

i love the BAO in all its variations. i live near San Franscico, and i have been known to call my favorite BAO-house. (if i owned a place, i would call it BAO HAUS, hahha) and have them freeze or chill muliiple dozen so i can stuff them into an ice chest to drive home. it is my favorite on the go, breakfast item. one such place is on Clement St. i had a lady there notice me watching her roll out buns and she slowed it down to show me her techique. i just need a wooden dowel, and i am gonna give it a try.

i will try the coming weekend...or tonight. haha..wait, i will work from home one day this week and that might be a good distraction.

you have any food cooking hurdles? stuff you want to learn or try?

 

[Lars]

stuff you want to learn or try?

Yes! Small stuff, big stuff. I hope my curiosity out lives me.

 

[YumYumSauce]

Im not Baking/pastry/dessert inclined at all. I love pizza so eventually I think I'll start down that rabbit hole and hopefully I'll pick up some baking tricks. Same thing with ice cream and creme brulee to get me into desserts. Start by focusing on learning things I like.

 

[Naftoor]

Lifelong baker here; I cook in order to use my knives and to survive, I bake because I love it.

Done most of everything at least once, but my current challenge lies at the intersection of baking and cooking, aka Australian/kiwi pies. Made my first batch with rough puff pastry a month ago and fell in love with it. Amazing meal, the rough puff was incredibly flakey and crispy. Absolutely perfect. Ended up picking up some antique steel mini pie tins so I could continue experimenting.

My current hurdle is shredding butter for rough puff in a tiny apartment with low storage. Shredding 1/2-1 lb of frozen butter with a cheese grater is a terrible experience, and storing a food processor isn’t super feasible for me currently. I’m eyeing those standing mandolins but it’s another gadget to store and seems like a nightmare to clean with nonremovable blades, so I’ll be sticking with a good youtube video and a cheese grater for now

I’ve come across sheng jian bao, which is a pan fried relative to soup dumplings recently which has caught my eye, so I’ll be trying that at some point in the next month or so. I failed miserably at soup dumplings so we’ll see how this goes

 

[mengwong]

I failed miserably at soup dumplings so we’ll see how this goes

XLB is hard. Din Tai Fung’s massive international success is well earned.

 

[ian]

Someday, when my shame and heartache is a distant memory, I’ll attempt pulled noodles again.

 

[Naftoor]

XLB is hard. Din Tai Fung’s massive international success is well earned.

Yeah the pleating is seriously high skill stuff, by the end of a batch of 15-20 I had allllmost started to get it, but most of the batch just failed at the seams. I wept tears of delicious soup

 

[mengwong]

i love the BAO in all its variations.

From the annals of the Internet, if you haven’t already seen this, you might appreciate it.

https://www.dumplingemoji.com/