Dan

If you've ever watched Bojack Horseman (and you definitely should), Ralph Stilton had a very familiar air to him, and it took me several episodes to confirm it is because he reminds me of Dan. To directly pull from his wiki summary, "Ralph is mild-mannered, kind, considerate, and thoughtful." He shares a "snarky sense of humor" with Princess Carolyn and despite how she "could be stubborn or not always have the right answer," he was "always considerate about [her] thoughts and feelings." And then you add the layer of Jennie's rodent obsession and the fact that Dan also wears glasses and the resemblance is uncanny. Dan identifies as half Asian aka Chinese (Cantonese) American + White, and I bullied Jennie into introducing me to her boyfriend over dinner at her place.

 

Dan's predominant story memory was about Yan Yan snacks. He didn't grow up around a lot of Asian people or Asian grocery stores despite being half Asian, so a restock of Chinese groceries happened when his mom would drive them the 45 minutes to visit family or for work things. Occasionally this trek would reward little Dan with a container of Yan Yan's and as all Yan Yan enthusiasts can probably remember, the crackers are gone loonnnggggg before the chocolate dip. And then Dan was forced to eat the rest of his dip with his fingers (me too, though). Even decades later, they still have not optimized the cracker to chocolate dip ratio - perhaps intentionally.

I knew I definitely wanted to make a savory dumpling despite having something like chocolate creme Yan Yan's as my central ingredient. And what I really latched onto is our group's obsession with mole. We gave another friend a lot of shit for referring to mole as "just a chocolate sauce" but offensively reducing it down to that really caused the gears in my mind to turn. Can I make a mole-like filling with this hyper processed thick homogenous fake chocolate dip? Yes... sorta.

So the filling is shredded chicken with garlic, onions, parsley, chili... and the entire cup of chocolate creme. Then I pulsed all the crackers into the a rough powder to knead into a batch of yeasted bao dough. 

If you don't know what haw flakes are yet, then I highly recommend you find out. They are a simple sweet that come in disk form, stacked like a roll of pennies and meant to be popped in your mouth one at a time so you can press it flat against your tongue until it dissolves away... or at least that's how I ate them. Sometimes I pretended like they were big pills, sometimes I shoved a whole stack in my mouth to bite through the layers all at once. Haw candies are like the tamarind candies of my Chinese childhood. So instead of turning to black vinegar as I usually do, I dissolved the haw flakes in some white vinegar and a touch more sugar to make a haw vinegar dipping sauce for the buns.

Meiji snacks and candies were such an integral part of the Asian grocery experience for me too. Every trip to Ranch 99 was not complete without some muscat choco gummies or pandas or yes, yan yans. I didn't even know it was a Japanese company. It was originally founded in 1916 as Tokyo Confectionary Co at a time when Western candies were gaining popularity in Japan but domestic manufacturers weren't meeting the demand. Those first confections were caramels, biscuits, and chocolates, so Meiji's chocolate and dairy production expanded first. Gummies were not introduced until 1980 when Western gummies were modified to more Japanese textural preferences using both gelatin and pectin. Meiji's dairy business also allowed them to enter the pharmaceutical and health food industries by way of producing penicillin and offering nutritious infant and probiotic yogurt products - in case you, like me, didn't know they offered anything but candy.

Sadly I have to admit I felt very... dubious about the final result. And not just because I encouraged Dan and co to help me fold them.

The filling was not bad (actually pretty good) as I continued to taste and adjust it in the pan. But something happened between folding and steaming that caused the end result to give a very... bitter? aftertaste. We theorized it could be the steam step, the combination with the dough, the dough itself, and by the end I felt very convinced there was something off in the chili oil pairing. A conclusion was never reached. My fondness towards these buns never grew. I have a lot of ideas of how I would make them differently. But Dan still humored me and took the leftovers home *smiling face with three hearts emoji*

Things I would do differently: maybe if I ground the yan yan crackers finer the dough wouldn't have taken so long to come together like maybe the weirdness came from being over fermented? maybe just use less yan yan cracker dust. maybe also just use less yan yan chocolate dip. maybe more other seasonings to support like more chili? or another sweet component like fruit? idk man this bao was perplexing.

Dan's complete list:

wu gok at dim sum

yan yan

haw flakes "hell ya haw flakes"