red bean paste — Blog — Catering and Personal Chef

Practice makes perfect red bean baos (Recipe)

A good cook can as easily make a crummy cake as a good lover can screw up a relationship. Cooking skills don't necessarily carry over into the realm of baking. And sometimes a sexy cuddle should stay exactly that, no strings attached.

In cooking, there’s more room for error. Anyone with enough enthusiasm, a decent palate, maybe a glass of wine or a shot of mezcal, can dive into cooking with wild abandon and end up with something delicious. An olive oil-finish, some squirts of lemon, a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt can go a long way to save a dish.

Baking on the other hand is a science. There’s just no rushing through the chemistry and math that transform wet brown batter into an irresistible chocolate soufflé. At restaurants, I’ll often hear friends scoff at their food and say, “I can make this at home! Psssh.” But I’ve never heard anyone tell me that she or he is going to recreate the chocolate babka from Breads Bakery. That’s because baking requires a tremendous amount of studying and practicing. And humility. And an acceptance that the first try if far from being the last. But back to that earlier analogy: Baking, like a relationship, takes work.

I suck at baking. Once, I attempted to make croissants from scratch. For three days, I’d jump out of bed at 5:30 A.M., salivating as I rolled and folded the laminated dough, dreaming of the warm, buttery crescents. By day four, it was time to bake the croissants. This was my first attempt, but I was already expecting Parisian patisserie-level perfection. But the croissants came out cakey and dense. Zero flakiness. They were good enough to be biscuits but not croissants. Hadn’t I followed directions? Or measured the flour correctly? Wasn’t I careful with the dough, like a first-time mom is with her newborn? I couldn’t pinpoint the problem, not with only one notch on my belt. Anything could have contributed to my dough’s undoing, like inferior ingredients to the uncalibrated oven to Mercury stuck in retrograde.

Recipes, Thoughts, Tradition, CookingDiane ChangFebruary 6, 2016Baos, red bean paste, red bean bao, pastry, chinese dessert, breakfast Comment

In Love With Red Bean Paste (Recipe)

Chinese legend has it that there was once a woman who, while mourning her deceased husband, cried tears of blood. Her cattle farmer husband had gone off to fight a war. Every day and night while he was away, the woman waited patiently for him and then took her waiting to a mountain top where she’d stare deep into the horizon for her beloved’s return. But surprise, surprise–he never returned. Her optimism regressed into soul-crushing sadness. And with no Netflix, burritos, or ice cream to ease the heartbreak, she just sat on the mountain and cried. The tears she continued to shed turned into blood and then mysteriously transformed into little tiny red beans, readying the earth with seeds to sprout the first ever red bean tree.

This myth and iterations of it have come to symbolize a kind of punishing but enduring love and unwavering devotion. Because of this, it’s become customary to eat red bean soup at Chinese weddings, as if auspicious foods could steer someone with a roving eye away from committing adultery. But I love red bean soup, so any excuse to eat it, I’ll take it.

Recipes, Tradition, CookingDiane ChangFebruary 4, 2016red bean, adzuki, dessert, red bean paste, wok, sweetComment