Manju

Manju, as near as I could discover in fifteen minutes of internet research, fall into the bao or pau family (S'ra has assured me that this is pronounced bow or pow) of steamed, filled buns. Sia bao might be the more commonly known variety (S'ra, once again, assures me this is pronounced "show bow". I acknowledge her superior expertise in these matters.) - sia bao being a steamed bun filled with seasoned pork.

Manju, on the other hand, are made with a sweet dough and are filled with sweetened red bean paste, also known as anko.

It was a challenge for me to wrap my head around this. Sweet red beans? You're telling me beans are a dessert? In my book, beans are slow cooked with onions, salt, pepper and jowl bacon for several hours and are served with corn bread. They are not sweet. You do not eat them as a dessert.
But hey, I'll give most things a try. After all, I might like it.





For my first manju adventure, I went with the ready made, frozen variety. You can make your own manju at home, and they really look pretty simple if you're already familiar with the process of making yeast dough. You can even make them into adorable forms of bunnies, cats, mice or pigs. But I didn't want to put a lot of effort into something I was completely unsure I would like. I mean, sweet beans. Sweet. Beans. What? No.






The manju sat in my freezer for weeks, partly because I just wasn't in the mood and partly because I just ... sweet beans ... (seriously, this concept really messed with my head). But today was the day. I took the steamer out of its packaging (that's right, I'd never used a steamer before and was rather unsure how that was going to work, too). I don't have a wok, but the steamer fit perfectly on the top of my largest sauce pan.

I filled the sauce pan half full of water, turned it on high and then put the steamer on top of that.
I had a moment of confusion when putting the manju in the steamer - they had pieces of paper on the bottom of them. Do I leave the paper on, or take it off? The Power of the Internet yielded surprisingly little result - apparently everybody else already knows how to do this. I left the papers on, using my reasoning skills to determine that otherwise, the manju might stick to the bottom of the steamer and it would be a pain to clean.

Twelve minutes later, I took the steamer off the boiling water and opened it up, to reveal my perfectly steamed red bean buns. I went ahead and ate them hot, although there's no reason why eating them cold wouldn't be perfectly acceptable and in fact is probably more usual if you're cooking up batches of them.

The dough itself was extremely tasty, being a light sweet yeast dough, and the steaming produced an interestingly smooth texture. I tried a steamed bun - sia bao - once years and years ago in my childhood at a Filipino karaoke Christmas party at the club house of a mobile home park where a member of my father's traditional bluegrass group lived - a long and actually completely true story that I might tell another day - and was completely disturbed by the texture of steamed dough. But keep in mind that at that point, my experience of international foods was spaghetti. American spaghetti. No longer a child frightened by a Filipino Elvis impersonator, I handled the steamed dough like a pro.

And now, the moment we've all been waiting for - how did this Hoosier girl handle the sweet red bean paste?

To my great astonishment, I had absolutely no problem with the taste at all. It tasted, well ... fine. Pleasantly sweet but otherwise maybe even a bit bland. I could see spicing it up with, maybe nutmeg? a dash of ginger? if I were making it myself.

But the texture still bothered me a little. Yes, the taste was that of a sweet filling, but the texture was the texture of beans. My mouth was simultaneously trying to tell me "dessert" and "where's the cornbread?" I think red bean paste will take some practice to get used to it.

That said, I think the experience was overall a positive one. I could see manju as a breakfast/brunch alternative to donuts. You can also bake them, if you don't want to steam them. (Or deep fry them ... you know someone has tried it ...) And of course, if you were making them from scratch you could use whatever filling you liked rather than the traditional red beans. Various fruit pie fillings would be delicious - apple manju, yeah?