BBQ Pork Puff

The puff comes from the same Cantonese tea-house tradition as its steamed cousin: char siu — fork-roasted pork — chopped fine and bound in sauce, then enclosed in pastry rather than leavened dough. Where the steamed char siu bun uses a fermented dough, the puff borrows the Chinese laminated short-pastry method (a water dough wrapped around a lard or shortening dough, repeatedly rolled and folded), the same technique behind the egg tart's flaky shell and the wife cake. Baked rather than steamed, it became one of the standard 'three steamed and two baked' style offerings of the dim sum repertoire. The same filling, in this flaky baked form, is the dividing line from the soft steamed bun.

A glossy, deep-gold pastry, oval and palm-sized, that sheds fine flakes the moment you bite. The shell shatters into dozens of thin crisp leaves; inside is warm diced char siu glazed in a thick brown sauce — sweet, salty, faintly smoky from the roast. The contrast is the whole point: dry, buttery, splintering pastry against a moist, savory-sweet core. It is at its best straight from the oven; once it sits, the layers soften and lose their snap.

The flakiness is all in the lamination. Two doughs are made — a water-and-oil dough on the outside and a pure fat-and-flour oil dough within; the water dough is wrapped around the oil dough and rolled and folded several times, building alternating sheets of flour and fat. In the oven the water in the dough turns to steam and pushes the layers apart, while the fat fries each leaf crisp from within, so the shell separates into many discrete flakes rather than a solid crust. The filling must be cooled and tightly bound in a starch-thickened sauce before wrapping: a warm or wet filling melts the fat in the pastry and steams the layers limp, so the puff turns greasy and flat instead of crisp. An egg wash gives the lacquered shine.