Mantou and Singapore Chilli Crab

And… we are back with a new blog entry. After the birth of our daughter we took a small hiatus (four years) but we are back!

At the start of every year my wife travels to Singapore for business meetings at their headquarters and it is company tradition – first night in Singapore it is Chilli Crab for dinner. This year she brought a kit back from Singapore and on Saturday night for the first time ever I got to experience Chilli Crab.

Well… not Chilli Crab. The recipe calls for a 1.2 kilogram live Sri Lanka crab, and around these parts, Sri Lanka crab (crab in general) is hard to find. So instead of crab we settled on prawns for a number of reasons. Biggest reasons – I do not have to kill a gigantic pissed off crab.

To accompany the Chilli Prawns we made Mantou. Also known as Chinese steamed buns, they are sweet, light and fluffy. Perfect for soaking up the chilli sauce.

Cleaning the prawns and getting them ready for the chilli sauce

Making the chilli sauce is easy since the kit provides you with everything you need - You can get this kit only in Singapore or Australia - darn, sorry fellow South Africans :( .

The tricky part is getting the Mantou perfect.....

To make the buns you need:

·         300 g all- purpose flour.

·         2 tablespoons sugar.

·         1.5 teaspoon instant yeast.

·         150 ml water.

·         Pinch of salt.

To get started with the buns, heat some water to +- 35 degrees and then melt the sugar in the water and mix in the yeast. Let the concoction stand for five minutes. 

During the waiting period you will see foam on the water. It is carbon dioxide being released as the yeast feeds on the sugar.

Next, the flour. Since we do not have all-purpose flour we took cake flour and added two extra tablespoons (more info on substituting all-purpose flour with cake flour).

Put the salt and flour in a bowl and then slowly add the water / yeast mixture. Stir the mixture while you slowly add the water.

Knead the dough until it is a nice soft and smooth consistency.

Now let the dough rest until it has doubled twice in size (more or less an hour). To see if the dough is ready, lightly touch the side of the dough. If your fingertip indentation remains, the dough is ready. For more information on testing the dough, see this post from Red Star Yeast.

Keep dusting the dough and knead the dough again until it is smooth. All the air must be punched out of the dough to ensure the dough is as smooth as possible, I repeat ALL OF THE AIR must be punched out, this might even be therapeutic if you are angry. Once again Red Star Yeast has a good post on this.

Helping mommy and daddy

Now roll the dough in a log and cut log in slices about 2 centimeters wide.

Using a steamer, steam the dough slices until they become fluffy which takes around 5 minutes in a microwave. Note to self: Don't wait until the day you want to make these buns to find a bamboo steamer, because Murphy will make sure that you won't find a bamboo steamer in any store in Centurion. So we used a plastic steamer, next time I will rather plan ahead and get us the bamboo steamer. 

For a final optional steps, you can deep fry the buns until they are nice and golden on the outside.

Now for the last step - eat the chilli prawns! Soak up the sauce with those delicious fried buns!

What a fantastic way for me to finally share some Singapore culture with my wife. Maybe someday I will be blessed enough to experience the real thing...