A gua bao is a folded steamed bun, and the folding is not decoration – it is what makes it work
BAO City holds a 4.7 from six hundred and seventy-two people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and does one thing.
Short menu. Do one thing. It is the finding of four hundred and eighty-five articles and it applies to kitchens exactly as it applies to bars.
What a bao actually is
Steamed, not baked. That is the whole difference and it is everything.
A baked bread has a crust, because the dry heat of an oven drives moisture out of the surface and the sugars caramelise. That crust is the point of bread. It is what a loaf is for.
A steamed bun has no crust at all. It is cooked in wet heat, so nothing browns and nothing hardens, and what comes out is pillowy, slightly sweet, and completely soft on every surface.
Which makes it a fundamentally different piece of engineering.
Why the fold matters
A gua bao is not a bun that has been cut open. It is folded – steamed as a flat oval, doubled over on itself, with a piece of paper or a smear of oil in the crease so that it does not fuse.
It comes out as a soft, hinged pocket.
And this is a better structure than a sandwich, and we said so at Buns and Buns in Covent Garden, and we will say it again.
A bread sandwich is a dry structure containing a wet filling, and the two are at war from the moment they meet. Everybody has eaten a sandwich that has gone.
A steamed bun is designed to absorb. The fat and the braising liquid go into the bun and improve it. It does not collapse – it gets better.
It is a thousand years older than the Earl of Sandwich, who was probably just working late, and it is a superior piece of design, and the country that produced it does not have a peer named after it.
The filling
Braised pork belly, pickled mustard greens, crushed peanuts, coriander.
Fat, acid, crunch, herb – which is the four-part structure that underlies essentially every great mouthful of food in any cuisine on earth, and which the Taiwanese arrived at independently, and which is exactly what a good taco is doing, and a good bahn mi, and a good sandwich when anybody bothers.
The 4.7
On six hundred and seventy-two people, which is a real sample and a serious number.
And it is achieved by doing one thing, in a small room, extremely well – which is what every high-rated venue in four postcodes has turned out to be doing, without a single exception.
Verdict
Excellent. Go, order three, and eat them with your hands.
The paper
One small thing, because it is the detail that makes the whole thing possible.
A gua bao is folded before steaming, and if you fold a raw dough over on itself and steam it, the two surfaces will fuse and you will have a solid lump.
So a strip of paper goes into the crease. Or a smear of oil. And the two halves cook without joining, and when it comes out of the steamer it opens like a book.
It is one of those solutions that somebody worked out a very long time ago, which is completely invisible in the finished product, and without which the entire food does not exist.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My mum’s been in three marriages and watched this city change twice. Says you’ve got the tone exactly right.