Dinner in Vietnam

Since we started back to school, we started back in on our round the world tour. The first stop has been Vietnam. The food aspect to our tour has proven so popular, that even before we began school again, I was getting questions as to when we would be eating our special dinners and when they would happen.

Now, the trouble with Vietnam is that we have Vietnamese food somewhat regularly, and the things I cook have become just a part of our family repertoire of meals. To make it special, I needed to come up with something new and different. So I started thinking.

I have a lot of quail eggs.

Many people love any variation of meat in dough.

TM had been missing the steamed buns from the Vietnamese bakery which was just 20 minutes away from our old house.

All of these things together meant that I decided it was time to try making my own steamed buns, or banh bao in Vietnam. The girls from China call them baozi. Pretty much everyone calls them something different. In preparation I bought myself a new cookbook; one that I had checked out from the library about a year ago, and really liked. It is Asian Dumplings: mastering gyoza, springrolls, samosas, and more by Andrea Nguyen.

The bun dough was made from that cookbook, and it made up beautifully. The filling recipe was found at Vietnamese Home Cooking Recipes. I chose this because it had hard-boiled quail eggs in the center, which my children believe to be a key ingredient to steamed buns. And I had the eggs...

The whole thing took some time, but none of was terribly difficult. I even made the filling and the dough come out even, which is very satisfying. I do need to work on my banh bao dough sealing, though. But everyone loved them, and ate them happily. We also had jasmine rice, cucumber salad, and dragon fruit for dessert.

Buns cooking in the steamer.

The inside

Dragon fruit