肉菜包 Meat & Vegetable Bun

Previously, I wrote about 葱油餅 - green onion pancake and mentioned that the sourdough discard is perfect as skins for Chinese dumplings.  Here, instead of making dumplings, I have excess squash/zucchinis, I thought of making pan fried meat and vegetable bun, like 水煎包, with 海山醬 - the sea mountain sauce (😆) for the family.  The main reason is, my family likes pan fried more than boiling!

For the inside (meat & vegetables), I loosely followed a recipe from a friend:

絞肉     ground pork    1 lbs

葱        green onion     2 branches

姜        ginger             1.5 tsp

蛋        egg                 1

鹽        salt                 1 tsp

糖        sugar              1 tsp

香油     sesame oil       2 tsp

醬油     soy sauce        3 tbsp

白胡椒  white pepper    1/8 tsp

太白粉  potato starch   1.5 tbsp

水        water              1/4 cup

菜        vegetables       half of the meat quantity

👧 You just need to vaguely follow the recipe.  For vegetables, I used squash.  You can use mushrooms, cabbages instead.  Pretty much every household has different composition, but the ingredients are pretty much the same.  You do only want to mix in the vegetables when you are ready to wrap, otherwise, the water will form as vegetables get pickled.

Like green onion pancake, meat and vegetable bun freeze well.  With high effort food like this, it makes sense to make a bunch and freeze.  Call your friends.  Have a food making party where everyone get to bring home yummies.

The finished product looks something like the picture below.  When I was young, 水煎包 - pan fried bun costed NT$5, about a quarter in USD.  You can eat it for breakfast, or snacks and they looked like:

* Image is originally from https://travel.yam.com/Article.aspx?sn=106678.

There!  Another one of my preferred way to used up the sourdough discard.  👏