Ugly Buns
Ugly Buns. Listen... sometimes you just haffi call a puss a puss. Or however the saying goes. But pree this.
The first bao bun I ever had was at some bougie, 300-seat seafood restaurant in the Hamptons. They fried them and stuffed them with lobster salad. Meanwhile, I was in the back unaliving hundreds of lobsters a week so tourists could eat three fancy "Asian sliders" for $28 a plate.
A bao bun is just steamed bread. Milk-based dough, proofed twice, steamed instead of baked. Soft, pillowy, slightly chewy. Best paired with fatty meats and pickled vegetables.
You just have to start. You can fix it later.
Making it mine
Fast forward. I get the chance to run my own kitchen in Mandeville. Of course I want bao buns on the menu... but nobody's selling them. So I make them myself.
Sixteen weeks of testing. Because it had to be mine.
And when I finally got it right? They were perfect...
...ly delicious.
But ugly as hell.
The name
At some point I just gave up trying to make them pretty, and nobody cared. Eventually, I fixed the imperfections. Now they're actually kinda beautiful.
But the name? That will never change.
Because I don't want the lesson to disappear: you just have to start. You can fix it later.
And yeah... we won a competition with them first year running.
Find Ugly Buns on our food page, or come taste them at D'Ville in Mandeville.
