We had fun with yeast dough this week! Students got to make their own red bean buns as we discussed the oldest Chinatown in North America right here in San Francisco, Chinese immigration to California during the Gold Rush, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (and its relevance to current immigration issues), as well as the culinary wonders of dim sum.
We rolled the proofed dough into balls, patted the balls out into flat disks, filled them with a sweet paste made from adzuki beans, pinched the dough around the paste to make what looked like dumplings, flipped the buns over, and steamed them in multi-tiered bamboo steamers.
We ate the buns warm with a traditional Chinese smashed cucumber salad and drank jasmine or (decaf!) black tea. Then we learned how to say dou sha bao (red bean buns) in Mandarin (even though in San Francisco, Cantonese is more common!).
