What’s Mimsy Eating? Melonpan & Pan-Fried Pork Buns

I decided to give buns another try but this time instead of steaming them I pan-fried them.

I followed the dough recipe here and I definitely recommend it. It worked out wonderfully for me. You should all give it a try!

The pleating didn’t turn out so great this time but the bottoms all came out deliciously golden-brown and crispy.

I personally like to eat mine with sriracha hot sauce so I skipped making the dipping sauce in the aforementioned recipe link.

And to christen my new food scale I decided to make melonpan. It’s kind of like Chinese bo lo bao (pineapple bun) but the bread dough is dryer and the topping is more hard/crispy like a cookie. Although the textures are different, the tastes are really similar.

I used the melonpan recipe from one of my favorite You Tubers, cookingwithdog:

The recipe is really easy to follow but very time intensive. It involves kneading the dough and letting it rest several times, so if you don’t have time to spare I wouldn’t suggest making this.

Here are my melonpan after they’ve been shaped and had the cookie layer added. This is before their first rise together. Aren’t they cute?

As you can see, I didn’t score the top layer exactly the same on all of them. Some I made more diamond shaped and others I made more square. I was interested in seeing how they would look once they were baked.

Here are my melonpan after the first rise. I apparently scored the cookie layer too deeply and the cookie layer didn’t hold together as the bread dough underneath expanded. You can see that the melonpan at the top lost most of its original diamond pattern 😦

Note to self: only lightly score the cookie layer to ensure that it doesn’t bust wide open while resting.

And here they are out of the oven. Excuse the lighting in this photo which appears to be washing the melonpan out and making them look pasty pale. They’re a warmer golden color in real life.

I had to adjust the cooking time. The recipe says to bake the melonpan for 12 minutes but they still looked pretty pale. I added 10 minutes and I think I overbaked them. Only the melonpan in the top left corner looks purty.

Close-up shot below. The lighting here is more accurate.

These were so good right out of the oven — crispy on the top and light & fluffy inside — but they didn’t hold up so well overnight. By the next morning the cookie layer was still crispy but the bread felt really dry and stale. I think that’s a major difference between melonpan and pineapple buns; the latter usually aren’t that dry the next day.

If you try the melonpan recipe I definitely suggest eating them while they’re still hot. They aren’t nearly as good the next day.