Photo courtesy BAO
When I first got my hands on Bao the book, I wasn’t immediately sure that it would find a home in CookbookCorner. Restaurant cookbooks, I find, don’t always make the best companions in the domestic kitchen, and yet the more I read, the more I became entranced by it. No, it isn’t an everyday cookbook, but it is a hugely inspiring one, and there is so much in it that I long to eat. And more than that, it is an elegant introduction to Taiwanese cooking. It is something of a manifesto for the restaurants, too, but you don’t need to have eaten in one of the restaurants or be interested in their concept to appreciate its approach or the recipes therein.
Perhaps, before I expand on the recipes that so particularly sing to me, I should explain for those who have yet to eat a bao bun that it’s a light, yeasted rice-flour bun, pretty much the shape of a sleep-mask folded over itself, that’s exuberantly stuffed; if it helps to think of them as a take on a burger, do, but it doesn’t do justice to their exquisiteness. If you’ve yet to eat one, I do feel the recipe to start with is the Classic Pork Bao, but once you’ve done that, you really will want to make more. Actually, I’m not sure there’s one I don’t want to make! I nodded approvingly and greedily at the Confit Pork Bao, the Curry Cheese Bao, the Fried Chicken Bao, the Lamb Shoulder Bao, the Shortrib Bao and — wait for it! — the Fried Horlicks Ice Cream Bao. But let me tell you what else I have set my sights on: Sweet Potato Chips/Fries with Pickled Plum Ketchup; the Taiwanese Fried Chicken; Half-Roasted Chilli Chicken with Aged White Soy; Fried Prawn Roll; Slow-Cooked Beef Cheek and Short Rib Noodles; and, as a black-pudding lover, I thrilled to the Pig’s Blood Cake with Soy-Cured Egg Yolk. I know this isn’t for everyone, but not all recipes (nor, indeed, all cookbooks) need to be for everyone! I should also mention that cocktail-lovers will be made happy by a fascinating list. But the recipe that had me mesmerised, and that I returned to again and again with increased fervour, is the Bone Marrow Rice with Fermented Daikon.
BAO by Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung and Wai Ting Chung is published by Phaidon, £29.95 (Phaidon.com).
