I love food, but not just eating it, I love making it! Whether it's for myself, for friends, or to prevent my partner from living off a plate of lettuce with tomato and salt for dinner for the rest of her life.
However, you might not have seen my previous post, I'm now basically a traveling freelancer, we're taking a tour in Brazil while we work, and that means, I NO LONGER HAVE MY KITCHEN, and if you saw the previous post you can see that I controlled myself too much and only took a few things with me on the trip, like my favorite knife and frying pan, some tupperware and spice containers, my whole kitchen was reduced to that... good thing I have an idol, which is Senshi from Dungeon Meshi and if he can venture into inhospitable places and still make a good meal, so can I! (and maybe you'll be inspired by seeing the things I'm making!)
It's worth remembering that I'm not a trained cook or anything, I just like making food and eating different things, and now I want to share the adventures I'll have adapting along the way, because there's no way I'm going to live off eating noodles for a while!
The first place we stayed is a very small but comfortable place, the "kitchen" (which is also the living room, bedroom and office) has a refrigerator, a sink, and a cooktop, perfect... until I remembered that there's no oven, and my god, I love making BREAD, I made it basically every day at home, so this led me to two possible recipes, making a good old pita bread (Syrian bread, Arabic bread) or flatbread (Tortilla, Roti, Chapati, Txipá which is fried and so on) but these breads we usually use to dip in a sauce or put some filling and roll, I wanted to make something fluffier, but without an oven how would I do that???
Once again my hero reminded me of something
I CAN MAKE STEAMED BREAD!
So I thought about making something like a Bao (until I found out that it's called Mantou) so here's the recipe! (it's worth remembering that I do a lot of things by eye, and since I'm not carrying measuring cups or a scale I'll go by basic things like cups and spoons)
Ingredients:
2 cups of all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of dry yeast
1 tablespoon of oil
a copo americano, or 190ml of warm water (or until it has a texture that almost sticks, you may need more or less water depending on your flour)
Preparation:
1 - Mix all the dry ingredients first, NEVER PUT THE SALT ON TOP OF THE YEAST, it kills it! My tip is to put the sugar on one side of the bowl, the yeast on top, and the salt on the other side of the bowl, then mix everything.
2 - Add water little by little and mix until you can touch the dough and it's soft but not sticking to your finger.
3 - Let it rest a little, like 10 minutes.
4 - KNEAD THE DOUGH, here you can vent all your anger on this beautiful piece of flour and water, there's a specific way to do it like pushing it up and bringing it back, but be happy, vent your frustrations here for about 10 minutes, because good food is made with anger! Oh, if the dough starts to stick too much you can sprinkle a little flour to help you.
5 - After the beating let the dough rest and rise until almost double, this can vary depending on the temperature of where you live, I usually just leave it in a bowl with a cloth covering for 30 minutes to an hour and a half, don't stress too much, no one here is a professional.
6 - After resting, for this dough I opened it and rolled it and then cut it into 8 pieces to make the buns.
7 - Here comes the tricky part, in this house I only have some very small pans, so I made a gambiarra (the Brazilian method of achieving something complex with the minimum resources available), I used a silicone pot that I'm carrying, so I put water in the pan, very little just to evaporate, and put the silicone pot on top with the buns, so the steam will enter from above and bake the buns. Inevitably a little water will fall on it, but it's the way to do it, if you have a steamer, or those pasta drainers it's even better to heat something with steam... but the idea here is to show the makeshift solutions I'm making!
8 - And that's it! Leave them steaming for a while like half an hour, they get very fluffy and work with anything, it was great fried with butter and with a piece of cheese! And if yours got a little wet on the bottom it's okay, just let it dry a little on a paper towel and everything is fine! (it's a steamed bread by the way...)
The right thing to do is to make a smaller quantity, like one at a time steaming it correctly for it to rise... but well, I'm making do here which is not ideal lol, then I fry it a little with butter and it's delicious!
Images of the gambiarra and the result
Wow, what a giant post! And that's it folks, tell me if you want other recipes here (I'll do them anyway), eat well, don't live off noodles, and stay hydrated!
ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ/
Comments