Siopao - Sio Good!

A friend of mine and another former missionary from the Philippines invited me to a Filipino cultural night, to take place this Friday evening. We're going to do what is done at every good Filipino party - eat lots of food and sing karaoke. All the easy Filipino dishes, like rice and Tang, were already taken, so I picked four dishes I'd never made before and asked my wife what she'd like best. Siopao won. (The other options were sinigang, tinola, and kaldereta)

Siopao (pronounced show-pow) is a steamed bun filled with shredded meat cooked in a sweet sauce. It is of Chinese origin, but much beloved by the people of the Philippines, where I was introduced to it. In the Philippines, it is often sold out of hamburger carts parked on busy streets in the center of town. There is an urban myth in the Philippines that siopao is made with cat meat. I can tell you that that is categorically false based on my own experience trying to shred a cat - it ran at the first sight of the fork. Instead, siopao cooks usually resign themselves to chicken or pork.

The most complicated part about cooking siopao is getting your hands on a steamer. If you've got one, or can jury rig one, the rest is really quite easy. I used this recipe from Spice Of Life. The meat filling is fairly simple. Once the meat is shredded, just throw in onions, garlic, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, Yoshida's sauce, rice vinegar, soy sauce, honey, pepper, or whatever else you want in any quantities and combinations that sound good to you.


The dough is a pretty standard yeast recipe - similar to the one we use for pizza. Once it's good and kneaded and risen, you divide your dough and roll a piece into a ball...


...press it flat...

...and spoon some of the good stuff into the middle. Don't skimp - you don't want dry siopao.

Now, we wrap it up.

I used a kind of tri-fold - like so.

Then sealed it up and pinched it closed.

Tada! Siopao! All lined up on wax paper (so they don't stick to stuff).

Now for the steamer. I don't have one. I do have a deep pressure cooker pot and a metal plate with holes in it. I used a stainless steel sieve to hold the holey plate several inches above the water and presto! A steamer! Arrange the siopao like so and let 'em steam for 15 minutes.

They were way better than I remembered them. It's really hard to describe the texture of the bun - fluffy just doesn't do it justice. You gotta try one, but make sure it's fresh out of the steamer. I promise they're good. I even have witnesses.