- 5 hours ago
Bon Appétit meets Chef Lucas Sin to visit Mei Lai Wah in Manhattan’s Chinatown to see how the iconic Hong Kong-style bakery makes thousands of its famous roast pork buns. From pillowy fermented dough and rich char siu filling to the signature crackled pineapple topping, discover the techniques that go into making this $3 NYC favorite.
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00:05Welcome to Manhattan Chinatown. We are at Mei Lai Wah, opened in 1968. What they're known for
00:11is a pineapple blend with a crispy topping over the top stuffed with savory and sweet char siu,
00:17roast pork. It's somehow all textures at the same time, all flavors at the same time, and there's no
00:22doubt that this is the most popular bite for everyone visiting Manhattan Chinatown. Mei Lai Wah
00:27bakes thousands of these roast pork buns every single day, so let's see how it's made.
00:38Take a look here. This is dough that's done its first ferment. Now it's going to be reshaped into
00:44smaller balls. Chef is rolling them, tightening them into smaller portions. The idea here is to
00:52shape the gluten so that it's all facing the correct direction to trap all those gases that
00:57yeast is producing so it gets enough fries but also structural integrity. The size about doubles into
01:04what you might see over here. They're not weighing anything here because they've done it for long
01:09enough that they know 80 grams all by the feel of hand. He's using his fingers to bring in the
01:17top
01:17surface of the dough ball into the center of the ball itself. So he's using his fingers to push
01:24the outside surface into the middle until they're nice neat balls. The dough balls go inside of the
01:30trays. They get a secondary fermentation. Now that tension, that tensile strength, is going to trap all of
01:35those bubbles so that as it ferments it's like a balloon. This is what? We're at 2 pm now. Every
01:42single one of
01:43these is going to become a pork bun. This is the last step before it's baked. This is the second
01:49fermentation shaping with the char siu inside. Come over here. Soft dough gets smushed open. It gets
01:56filled with three or four tablespoons of chilled char siu filling and then just squeezing and pinching
02:01so that it closes up. Goes back onto the speed rack. That gets a second fermentation. For bakery, this is
02:06some
02:06of the loosest pinching I've ever seen. Two fingers clenching once, twice, three times. But it absolutely is
02:13getting the job done. Here's the standard. Two people should be able to finish one tray of 24 buns
02:19in one minute. It takes three months. It's three months to do your apprentice training here at
02:39The most obvious thing to compare this is to a cloud. You can feel how fatty it is. It feels
02:46closer to a
02:49soft. Cha siu filling is a little bit pasty because it's chilled down, but you can see how much fat
02:55is
02:55inside of it. That's the luxury. It's kind of crazy. We've been here for a couple of minutes and it
03:01feels
03:01like they've already done a couple hundred of these. People will tell you that they're making 2,000 buns
03:06a day. I think they are making a lot more than that. Meilaiwa is known for the cha siu bao,
03:13but there are
03:14multiple types of cha siu bao. Take a look here. So a pineapple bun looks like pineapple, has no pineapples
03:20in it. The reason for it looking like a pineapple bun is this topping that goes over the top. Chef
03:26is
03:26making it now. It's like custard powder, eggs, sugar, margarine, lard. Gets made like a dough, rolled out into
03:33a cylinder, cut into a small slice, smooshed with your cleaver, goes directly on top of the buns.
03:39It's a little bit like a Dutch crumb, but significantly sweeter. As this bakes,
03:46the dough is going to stretch out that topping until it crackles, looks a little bit like a
03:51splintered pineapple skin. Watch the technique of the chef. First of all, the cleaver is kind of cool.
03:58It's a cleaver with the tip just cut off so you don't nick yourself. Cutting off a small slice, he's
04:04smooshing it with his hand, putting a lot of pressure onto it until it becomes a disc that is
04:09slightly large enough to really basically wrap up the sides. It's so quick. Cut, smoosh, top.
04:17All of these buns are slowly making their way towards the front to the oven where they're going
04:21to be baked. Come this way. So right near here, front of the dining room, are these electric deck
04:28ovens. That means that there's heat coming from the bottom and from the top. There's no fan in the back,
04:32there's no convection, but it's going to give you very even heat via conduction because these pans are
04:38going directly on the base of the oven. Oh, smells crazy when you open it. All 24, remarkably consistent.
04:45A little bit of a brown top on the top. On the sides, you can still see that yellow.
04:52Chef is checking the bottom to make sure that the color is right. That's his best indicator for whether
04:56this is cooked consistently. It is not an indicator for somebody who hasn't made tens of thousands of
05:01these, but for him, the color of the bottom is the indication that it is made right. Throughout the
05:06day, whenever they need more buns, they yell to the back. Chef will just take them out after they've
05:11been resting for a while over his head and parades it to the front of the restaurant. Okay, first,
05:17here's the roast pork bun, the non-pineapple version, comes out of the oven, rests just for a second,
05:22and syrup goes over the top, just to give it a little bit of gloss and for it to set
05:26a little
05:26bit of sweetness. That's the standard issue roast pork bun. This is the most traditional version.
05:32Before the pineapple roast pork buns go inside of the oven, they also get a little bit of egg wash
05:37to
05:37help with the color. So this egg washing technique, as well as many of the other techniques we've seen
05:43today, are obviously Western-style baking techniques. We've adapted a lot of the techniques that were brought
05:49through British colonialism, through the French in Shanghai, the Russians, and that evolution and
05:56that adaptation of Western-style baking techniques for the primarily Chinese palate is what builds
06:03and what births this style of cooking. They go into the oven for about 10 minutes of cooking
06:11before they're rotated. Come over here, look. So this is what the pineapple bun is like before
06:16it goes inside of the oven. You can see a little bit of that fat starting to leach out. You
06:21can see
06:21that the bun has gotten larger by maybe about 20-30 percent before it goes inside of the oven,
06:25and after it's been baked, rotated, stuffed with filling, you can see this sort of beautiful crackle.
06:31When people call this a pineapple bun, this is the pattern that they're talking about. The split and the
06:37variation in the color from the light brown to the yellow. One of my favorite things about shooting
06:43Street Eats is for tax purposes and whatever else's purposes. Nobody ever knows how much food they
06:51actually make a day. I've heard since being here this morning everywhere between 100 and 300 pans,
06:59and each of them have 24 of them on there. So that's a huge amount of fluctuation, but it doesn't
07:05really
07:05matter how many they sell every day because they just come into work and they just start pumping them
07:09out and they do it until the store is closed. The line is perennial. It's always going to be out
07:14the
07:14door and the buns are always going to need to be baked. Somebody will always go to eat them.
07:19Okay, so in the basement, the dough is going to be mixed in these gigantic Hobarts. Look at this.
07:25The dry ingredients are flour and sugar and over the top, a little bit of yeast, a little bit of
07:31eggs
07:31before the mixing happens. The dough itself is sweet because there's a lot of sugar in it.
07:38Now the fat for this is lard. Everything is measured out by chef by feel.
07:44That lard acts like butter, like margarine would in something like a brioche or a milk fat inside of
07:51milk bread. That's what gives it softness. It's what gives it that luxurious sort of like generous
07:57feeling. This is also a cleaner flavor that doesn't have those milk solids inside.
08:03Here's the pork. It is called roast pork in English. Chacio also means roast with a fork,
08:08but the chacio here for the bun is actually made in the braise because of the volume they're going
08:12through. Three gigantic walks here. First step is to get the pork to be blanched. Get rid of that
08:19surface gum, some of that gamey pork flavor. The second walk is filled with mostly actually pork skin and
08:25pork fat. Mixing the lean and the fat together is what creates that balance. And finally the braise
08:31with all of the seasonings, the spices, and that is really the soul of the filling.
08:37I have heard legends about this machine that they use to cut the gigantic amount of pork that they
08:43use here at Meilai Wah. Let's see it. So the pork hot is going to be dropped inside. Two interlocking
08:52blades cut it into slices. They pass it through a couple of times so that it can become a fine
08:57dice.
08:58Because they're not putting through a food processor, it doesn't get shredded. Instead,
09:02it gets diced. It gets cut into little chunks so that when you bite into it, you get little gushers
09:08of fat and lard and then little like solid pieces of protein. To do it by hand at a place
09:13that does
09:13this type of volume would be insane. After that meat's been passed through three times, you can smell
09:19the oyster sauce, you can smell the spices. This pork now needs to chill down so that it's not as
09:25runny and
09:25gooey. There's a huge amount of gelatin, collagen inside of here, which is to say that if you were to
09:30wrap
09:30this, it would just run. It's a little bit like a Shanghai soup dumpling. So this goes straight
09:35into the walk-in where it's going to chill, usually overnight, maybe until later in the afternoon.
09:44There's always a line at Meilai Wah and the reason why there's a line because nobody brings cash.
09:50Left side, cash only. Right side, order the kiosk with the card. It is so much easier to just skip
09:55the
09:55line and bring cash. That's my hot tip of the day. There's no seating here, so figuring out where to
10:17eat your ta siu bao is always a question. The best place to do it is as quickly as possible
10:23right in
10:23front of the store. So here, standard issue, chun tong. Traditional roast pork bun, sugar glaze over
10:30the top, a little bit of an egg wash, doubled in size. It is heavy. I mean this feels like
10:35half a pound
10:36maybe. Not piping hot because it had to rest, but it is very much warm. Look at that. It is
10:44actually
10:45incredibly enticing. The fragrance of the lard, the perfume of the pork is incredible. The gloss of
10:54these pieces of pork and the distinct rough chop instead of a pureed texture, that's quite special.
11:02The pork itself is actually maybe about 60-70 percent of the volume of the bun itself.
11:10I cannot pretend that I haven't had this before because I'm in the neighborhood. So I eat this
11:15weekly, maybe twice a week. It's the best on the go snack that you could possibly have. Like look at
11:22that. That's all you would want to bite into. That shiver of that piece of fat, the bounce, and then
11:29the
11:29sweetness and the savoriness in a way that lingers. The sweetness in a way that is the first flavor.
11:37Crazy. Insane. We should compare it to what most people get here, which is the pineapple buns stuffed
11:43with roast pork. Now the pineapple crumb over the top. They wouldn't tell us what was inside, but I'm
11:49pretty sure it's a combination of fat, lard, sugar, custard powder. A little bit of a glisten. Cracker
11:57crumb though. Same pillowy whiteness in the middle. Little morsels of lard. Little bits of that lean pork.
12:04Ridiculous. So enticing. And I mean, when you're splitting it in half with your hand, you can tell how
12:10good it's going to be. Stupid, man. It's so warm, so heavy. I don't know anyone that does it better.
12:26It's a bit of a shame to say so as a Hong Konger. This is better than anything I've had
12:32in Hong Kong.
12:33The sheer generosity and almost violence in the amount of fat and lard and weight in the pork in
12:41the middle of this bun is ridiculous. This is a $3 bite that takes basically a day to make. It's
12:49almost like they don't like money. All that work, all those people back there, it's such a gift. It's
12:57supposed to be a snack. It tastes like a meal. It's nutritionally dense. It'll make you want to go to
13:03war. It's ridiculous. I guess the birds know that this is the spot. Part of what's wonderful about
13:13Mei Lai Wah is that it is a Hong Kong style bakery that exists in Manhattan Chinatown. The style of
13:18baking
13:18is a combination of European techniques that then has immigrated with the people, the southern Chinese
13:24people all the way over here to New York on the other side of the world. Well, they're serving
13:28honestly a global audience. There are places like this all throughout Manhattan Chinatown,
13:33but Mei Lai Wah is probably one of the best examples of what could happen to traditional
13:37Hong Kong dishes when they're brought over here to New York City.
13:43By the way, just to point this out, this is clearly because someone forgot yeast in a 50-pound batch
13:49before.