Viet World Kitchen

Gluten-Free Bun Trilogy: Dough, Baked Buns, Steamed Buns

It started last week with an email from a gluten-free Asian dumpling lover who asked about Indonesian buns (bao) made of rice flour dough. Then there was a tweet from @chubbybuns_shop in Boise, Idado, asking if I’d ever made gluten-free bao. I have poked and held enough loaves of gluten-free breads to know that it would be a challenge to create fluffy, chewy dough that could be baked and steamed.

Marvin of Burnt Lumpia asked if I knew how to make Filipino rice flour siopao (stuffed bao). No I didn’t but figured that the Filipinos may mix rice flour with other flours. Given the Filipino- style bao, I figured that I could come up with something. I wasn’t a fool for taking on the challenge of creating gluten-free bao dough.

I looked through several gluten-free sources and decided to base the dough recipe on a cinnamon roll dough from Cybele Pascal’s reliable Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook. I chose it because it had similar elements as my regular bao dough in Asian Dumplings: flour, fat, sugar, liquid, and leavening. It wasn’t such a big leap, going from Western cinnamon rolls to stuffed Asian buns.

Gluten-Free Baked Buns (Bao) Recipe

Baked gluten-free buns are less tricky to make than steamed ones because you bake them in the same pan that you let them rise in. The result looks like giant macarons or pfeffernusse – low domes. They’re firmer and denser than your typical baked bao, but they are tasty in their own right.

Making a flavorful filling is important because it stamps the bao with extra texture and savor. I used char siu pork for the ones pictured above. Other filling options are mentioned below for savory and sweet buns. If you’re super sensitive to gluten, you’ll have to figure out alternatives for certain Asian ingredients used in the fillings. See this post for guidance on gluten-free Asian ingredients.

Gluten-Free Steamed Bun (Bao) Recipe

Prepared with a rice flour-and-starch dough, these steamed gluten-free bao remind me of sticky-rice dumplings, though the gluten-free ones are firmer, buff in color, and  bit translucent in appearance. They’re good tasting and I'd gladly offer them to guests who have a difficult time with gluten.

You’ll have to let the formed buns rise in a deep baking pan, then transfer them to a steamer tray to cook. When I let the buns rise in a bamboo steamer tray, the dough didn’t have a warm enough environment to rise due to the open nature of the steamer tray. It took f.o.r.e.v.e.r. to get yeasty action going.

Apple Tart Tatin with Banh Mi (Bread) Recipe

After months of deadlines, I had a breather this past week for goofing around in the kitchen. Having succeeded with the fried apple spring rolls – a tasty exercise in mutant cooking of sorts – I decided to try a nontraditional approach to making tart tatin, a classic French upside-down fruit tart, typically made with apples. At a professional food conference this summer, I watched the legendary Jacques Pepin tweak an apple charlotte by cooking it in a skillet and putting the bread on top instead lining the pan with it; for serving, the result was inverted like a tatin. He'd crossed the charlotte with the tatin, said to be created by two sisters in in 1898.  

Since a tart tatin required caramelizing the apples stovetop followed by covering them with a pastry crust and baking, why couldn’t I substitute slices of white bread for the crust? I suppose you could think of that approach as a Franco-Viet tart tatin. Imagine a resourceful cook in Vietnam not having enough butter for cooking the apples and making the pastry. Perhaps she or he would reach for a few slices of banh mi to fudge the dough? In Vietnamese, banh mi refers to both bread and sandwich. Baguette and sliced white bread are both types of banh mi to Vietnamese people.

I had plenty of butter and flour for the pastry but frankly was feeling a little lazy about making dough, and also was very curious about how the bread would function as a crust. I also had these fears: What if the whole thing fell apart when I inverted the pan? What if the bread didn’t stick to the fruit or crisp up? What if the tart looked ugly or worse, tasted bad?

Deep-Fried Apple Spring Rolls Recipe

Last year when I was in Beijing to do research for the tofu book, my friend Lillian Chou, food editor at Time Out Beijing, dragged me and stylist Karen Shinto to a McDonald’s. We were there to eat tofu but she insisted that we first try the fried fruit pies. “You can hardly get them anymore in the States so eat up girls!” Lillian said. I hadn’t been in a McDonald’s in years (primarily to use the rest room) yet there we were eating fried pineapple pies at McDonald’s in China.

It was surreal but truth be told, it was good. In fact, the fried pie took me back to my childhood, when my family would buy deep-fried fruit pies at the supermarket. We didn’t know they were bad for us. We got them on super duper sale along with the occasional Twinkies nearby. My favorite was the fried apple pie.

That experience in Beijing, my longing for fried apple pies, and a frozen package of spring roll skins leftover from the Chef’s special crunchy shrimp balls led me to create this spring roll. I should also mention that I have an abundance of apples right now – thanks to generous neighbors and my overbuying at the farmer’s market. I live in an apple farming area. You’ll be seeing another apple recipe or two later.