I don’t know if you’ve ever had the joy of going to a Chinese bakery, but smelling (and eating) a fresh bun is one of the best feelings. Growing up, my favourite buns were the cocktail buns (雞尾包) and the sausage buns (腸仔包). I saw a recipe for the sausage bun the other day, and knew I would have to try it.

Recipe by Carroll at Kimchi Meets Dim Sum

This was my first time trying the TangZhong (湯種) method for fluffy bread, and I will be honest – it did not go that well. Maybe it wasn’t hot enough, or maybe I didn’t stir the roux at the right time, but I found the dough to be way too sticky. That made it really hard to roll out the dough, but by some miracle, some of my buns turned out to be not-complete-blobs!

As you can tell, I clearly have a lot of room for improvement, but I still enjoyed this first try! If I were to try this recipe again, I would love to have less sticky dough. I was thinking that more flour might be the answer, but I’m not quite sure if that’s the right answer. There’s probably a YouTube tutorial out there somewhere, but if you have any tips, I would love to hear them. I think I would also bake the buns a little bit longer, as my dough was on the chewy side. Finally, I would want to use more of an egg wash on the top to really get that golden brown that Chinese bakeries have.

Do you have a childhood recipe that you would love to try? Alternatively, do you have a lot of experience with dough that you could pass on to me? Please let me know if you do!

Until next time, happy crafting!