Basic Yeast Dough for Dim Sum Steamed Buns (Mantou)

I finally have found the perfect Bun Dough Recipe for Chinese Steamed Buns!!!!!!!!!
Its near perfect match to the ones I used to buy in Chinatown as a kid, perfectly soft, chewy, great sweetness ratio and super easy to make!!!!

Mantou (no filling buns), this is the basic dough recipe you can use for the ball versions filled with your ingredients of choice and the disk version used to make yummi Taiwanese Hamburgers!

What you'll need :
Bamboo Steamer

Ingredients:
1 1/2 teaspoon Fleischmann's Instant Dry Yeast
3/4 lukewarm water
2 tablespoons canola or veg oil
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour (Pillsbury)

Mix yeast with Flour dry.  Then in separate bowl mix liquid ingredients with rest of dry ingredients.  Then add to flour mix.  Then for about 5 min knead and stir till resembles ball.  Lightly oil, bowl and put in your kneaded mixture.  Cover tightly with knotted bag or plastic wrap and store in draft free place.  In about 45 min to 1 hour, mixture should have doubled.

Take out the poofed mixture and you can need or roll into shape you want.  I shaped mine into log and cut with knife.  Then put in Bamboo Steamer and let rest for 10 min.  In the meantime, boil the water first and when its ready put steamer on top of your steam source.  Make sure you don't over crowed the Steamer because these will poof and expand a second time in the steamer.

Steam for 15-20 min, and your done!

These also freeze super well! Just re steam when you want to eat warm.

*** My original mistake was not putting the steamer on top of a pan that fully covered the steamer and not waiting for water to boil first before putting steam on top.  Also, I made a huge batch so to avoid drying out dough after it poofs, work in batches.

I like to cut mines up into plain logs, because sometimes I'll cut like loaf of bread and make it an fried egg and cheese sandwich. Which sounds gross but its super yummi combo of sweet and salty!

And of course my version is the Frugal version.  So it's not super pretty. Plus with this batch, I mistakenly measured the wrong amount of baking powder which is why I think it's more spotty.

Normally I wouldn't touch recipes that require Yeast because its so expensive but if you go to BJ's or Sams club you can buy huge 1lb bricks of Fleischmann's Instant Dry Yeast for a lot less than those small individual packets that average a dollar each.  I forgot the cost because I got mine last year but its so worth it!!!!

The more pretty pretty versions use Cake Flour which is way more expensive than my $.99 5lb bag of Pillsbury Flour.  And not worth the extra cost if you consider this version tastes super yummi!!!!


I got the recipe for this via this amazing book I'm reading called "Asian Dumplings" by Andrea Nguyen.  She really makes the Asian recipes to those of us with limited access to Asian ingredients and does thorough kitchen testing with her recipes.