Great British Bake Off: BBQ Pork Buns

Episode 7: Pastry

Recipe (Signature Challenge): Savory Parcel – BBQ Pork Parcels

For the first Pastry challenge, the task was to make a savory parcel. The sky really is the limit – from pasties to pot pies! I decided to make a BBQ pork parcel. It’s a riff on a classic dim sum recipe. I went to my dim sum cookbook and looked up a recipe for BBQ pork buns. It was a really straightforward recipe. Unfortunately the pastry didn’t contain any salt, so it came out quite bland. So note for the future – always add a dash! Even though the filling is savory too, having a bland pastry really brought down the experience. It just seems like you’re eating wrapping paper. Ick.

The pastry was similar to the egg tart dough I had made previously – so two different types of dough that are folded together. There was a water shortening dough and a flaky dough (can you tell which one is which?)

After dividing the dough into portions, you wrap the flaky dough inside a piece of the water shortening dough. 

Roll out each piece of dough until then and then fold over in 3 – repeat twice (so it would be like having 9 layers). 

Once you’ve got the dough pieces ready, you can roll them out into the desired shape and make your parcels! Remember to add a nice glaze to make them pretty.

Kind of too bad the pastry turned out crap because the layer game was STRONG! 🙂

Overall: 6/10

Next up…the Technical Challenge!