Purple Cabbage Impossible Bao
vegan // makes about 30 buns
Vegan bao with a filling of impossible beef, purple cabbage, purple carrots, shiitake mushrooms, water chestnut, and purple scallions. This is the fourth dish in my 2021 Series of Five Sustainable Dishes, a project supported by the Stanford Office of the Vice President for the Arts. The series is a personal exploration of the various meanings of “sustainable food”. My goal with this series is to consider some angles from which food and food products can be considered good for the environment.
I went ahead and used Little Fat Boy Frankie’s Steamed Bao Dough recipe to help me out. As for the vegan bao filling: it’s made with a flavorful blend of impossible beef, purple carrots, purple cabbage, and shiitake mushrooms. Crispy water chestnut is also one of my favorite additions. Seasoned with a dash of white pepper, salt and sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, and purple scallion. To ensure a juicy filling, you must “beat liquid”, such as a light, homemade veggie stock in this case, into the filling. This process is called daxian (打馅) in Chinese. The impossible meat product doesn’t absorb as much liquid as animal meat, but the same principles apply.
When thinking of the idea for these bao, I found myself wishing I could try cooking with cell-based meat (more commonly dubbed “lab-grown” meat, but more accurately described as “cell-based” or “cultured” meat). In 2013, the world’s first cultured burger patty was eaten in front of cameras at a news conference in London. And just last December, cell-based chicken meat was approved for commercial sale by a regulatory body for the first time in Singapore. Personally, I’d love to try a cell-based meat product in a recipe, but since that isn’t yet possible for me, I opted for a plant-based meat analog instead. Plant-based meats like Impossible Foods are common on U.S. supermarket shelves now, but are far from being universally accepted. Common complaints are that they’re “too processed”, “hazardous”, or that their health impacts are “not-well researched”. No doubt, cell-based meat will face similar backlash in the near future. (Update as of June 2023: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has granted its first-ever approval of cell-cultured chicken meat produced by two companies, GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods.)
It’s no secret that whole foods, like a tomato, often offer higher nutritional benefits and fewer health risks than so-called “processed” foods, which, when you think of it, can refer to anything from a can of yoghurt to a bag of chips. But when critics of meat alternatives turn their noses up at new food products, they end up expressing disdain for innovations in the food system that may allow us to produce food at scale to feed billions of people without straining the environment. The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembath says that skepticism about plant-based meat reflects just how much classism and elitism infiltrate our conversations about food.
From a personal standpoint, I think we can exercise a healthy amount of caution about what we eat without engaging in fear-mongering behavior. There are a slew of myths about plant-based meat that continue to be propagated without scientific basis. At the end of the day, plant-based meat, which is made through a process called precision fermentation, isn’t as alien as it might seem. If you eat cheese, for example, you already eat food made with precision fermentation (rennet for cheese-making is produced by precision fermentation industry-wide). Many experts predict that in the next couple decades, plant-based and/or cell-based meats will reach cost parity with traditional meat, and become a bigger part of our diets. The ethical arguments behind supporting or disparaging cell-based meats are manifold and complicated: the environmental cost of sterilization required to make these meats, the use of calf-deried fetal bovine serum for cell-culture medium, and the affordability of such products all raise concern. But with strides being made in the direction of reusable cell-growth medium, the development of non-fetal-bovine-serum dependent production lines by startups like WildType Salmon, and ongoing attention on the artificially low price of traditionally farmed animals like broiler chickens, I’d say the future of these products might be brighter than we think.
On the bao: the taste of the filling is almost indistinguishable from meat, but the texture is a bit looser, so just take care to control the amount of liquid you add. This was my first time making braided bao and I have a ways to go, but I’m pretty proud of the result.
Product spotlight:
Impossible Foods: Impossible Burger
Gourmet Sweet Botanicals: garlic flower, fennel flower, purple sweet alyssum flower, rosemary flower, thyme flower, micro kale and cabbage, petite red scallion
what you need:
for the bao dough (from Little Fat Boy Frankie’s How to Make Purple Steamed Bao Dough):
2 cups all purpose flour
½ head of purple cabbage
water
2 tsp yeast
2 tsp sugar
½ tsp kosher salt
¼ tsp baking powder
⅛ tsp baking soda
note: to make the bi-color bao, I split my bao dough into two bowls, adding cabbage juice to hydrate one half and plain water to hydrate the other half.
for the bao filling:
12 oz Impossible Burger
2 oz finely shredded purple cabbage (saved from the dough-making process). make sure any excess liquid has been squeezed from the cabbage.
2 oz finely shredded purple carrot
3 oz shiitake mushroom, chopped finely
2.5 oz water chestnuts, chopped finely
¾ tsp kosher salt
1 tsp brown sugar
dash of white pepper
dash of granulated onion
dash of granulated garlic
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 spring onion, sliced finely
1 tsp ginger, minced
½ clove garlic, minced
as much veggie stock as needed. for best results, I recommend a light, homemade veggie stock. I advise against using store-bought vegetable stock that includes tomato. if using a store-bought stock that has added sodium, reduce the amount of salt and soy sauce added in this recipe accordingly.
optional, to decorate:
edible flowers: garlic flower, fennel flower, purple sweet alyssum flower, rosemary flower, thyme flower
microgreens: micro kale and cabbage, petite red scallion
how to make it:
to make the bao dough:
see Little Fat Boy Frankie’s How to Make Purple Steamed Bao Dough. to make the bi-color bao, I split my bao dough into two bowls, adding cabbage juice to hydrate one half and plain water to hydrate the other half.
to make the bao filling:
in a large bowl, mix Impossible Burger, purple cabbage, purple carrot, shiitake mushrooms, and water chestnuts.
in a small bowl, mix all your seasonings: salt, brown sugar, white pepper, granulated onion, granulated garlic, soy sauce, sesame oil, spring onion, ginger, and garlic.
add the seasonings to your Impossible Burger mixture and mix to combine.
to ensure a juicy filling, we need to “beat liquid”, such as a light, homemade veggie stock in this case, into the filling. this process is called daxian (打馅) in Chinese, which literally means “beat the filling”. gradually, add veggie stock to your filling and mix vigorously after each addition. stop once the filling stops absorbing the liquid. depending on the hydration of your other ingredients, you might need anywhere between ¾ cup to 1 ¼ cups stock.
to wrap the bao:
check out Little Fat Boy Frankie’s Vegetable Filling for Steamed Bao and Dumplings ("Make Wrappers" and "Fold and Seal Buns" sections) for gif how-tos on rolling out dough and wrapping fishtail bao. more specifically, what I did:
roll out a circle of white bao dough and a circle of purple bao dough.
place the two circles on top of one another and use a bench scraper to cut in half. the bao doughs naturally stick together at the seams after you cut through them.
separate into two half-white half-purple circles and pinch each wrapper at the seams where the two colors meet to fuse securely.
after filling and wrapping, place each bao on a small square of parchment paper to prepare for steaming. cover the bao with a damp paper towel to prevent them from drying out as you steam them in batches.
to steam the bao:
in a large vessel (large enough to accommodate your bamboo steamer), bring a couple inches of water to a boil.
place bao (on their parchment squares) at least 1 inch apart in bamboo steamer.
place lid over bamboo steamer. add the bamboo steamer to your large vessel and place a tight-fitting lid over the vessel.
steam on low for 5 min, then on medium for another 10 min.
after 15 minutes total, turn off the heat. don’t lift the lid just yet—let the bao rest, covered, for 5 min.
after 5 min, open the lid. remove bamboo steamer from vessel and allow bao to cool for a few minutes.
to decorate and serve:
if desired, decorate steamer with edible flowers and microgreens. enjoy the bao hot from the steamer, no dipping sauce needed. but you can try soy sauce, black vinegar, and/or spicy chili oil if you want.
TIP: you can store the cooked bao in the freezer. to reheat, cover bao with a damp towel and microwave for 1 min. or, steam on the stovetop over medium-low heat for 15 min.
