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Flipping through Kristina Cho’s incredible new cookbook Mooncakes and Milk Bread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries, it felt impossible to pick the recipe I wanted to make first. I quickly found my kindred treats in chapter three—“Pork Buns and Beyond”—which is filled with both iconic and new-school savory snacks like char siu bao filled with crimson barbecued pork, a jaw-dropping deep-dish pepperoni bread, and beautiful hot dog flower buns that are as miraculous to gaze upon as they are to pull apart, one “petal” at a time. Savory buns are my favorite Chinese bakery delicacy, so I was delighted to find an entire chapter featuring twists on nostalgic favorites.
But it was the Pork Floss and Seaweed Pull-Apart Rolls that I and everyone I baked them for could not stop raving about. We had seconds and thirds, fought over the squidgiest (and arguably best) bun in the center of the pan, and ate all the leftover pork floss straight from the container.
The bun itself is made from Cho’s master milk bread recipe, which she incorporates into all kinds of recipes throughout the book. It’s bouncy and light and employs tangzhong, a quick roux of milk and flour that gets mixed into the yeasted dough, which keeps the resulting bread super moist. Once you roll out the dough into a rectangle, you spread on a layer of sweet Kewpie mayonnaise, top with a generous sprinkling of seaweed-savory furikake, and finish it all off with a thick layer of pork floss before the dough gets rolled up and sliced into buns (think savory cinnamon rolls). Once baked, these tall and fluffy buns have a touch of sweetness from the mayo, savoriness from the furikake, and a punch of salty richness from the pork floss in every bite.
Pork floss will be a familiar sight to anyone who’s poured over the display cases at any Chinese bakery, where you’re likely to find it as a coating on tall, bouncy sponge cakes, in Swiss-roll-style cakes, or tucked into buns. (It’s also a very popular topping for jook or congee.) Also known as pork sung or rou song, among other names, pork floss is perfectly named: It’s finely shredded pork seasoned with sweet and salty ingredients such as sugar and soy sauce. The pork is then dehydrated until wispy and cotton candy-like. These sweet-salty morsels of dried pork are absolutely irresistible, melting on the tongue and leaving you wishing you had a big spun cone of the stuff whilst walking around a county fair.
Pork floss is most readily available at Chinese and Asian markets, but if you haven’t shopped for it before, let Cho walk you down the aisles of the Asian grocery store—the book dedicates several pages to breaking down all the wonders you’ll find in the aisles, from myriad sauces to dried mushrooms and beans to the vast world of cured, salted, and dried meats. And if you’re lucky enough to come upon pork floss, don’t think twice—buy the biggest container you can find, and make these savory buns before you eat it all straight from the jar.
