Oriental House, Melbourne University

Oriental House has recently had a bit of a makeover and ditched many of the old gloopy anglo-style Cantonese dishes, in favour of some reasonable mainland fare. There's an unapologetically fiery Sichuan chicken, a decent mapo dofu and the number one Beijinger comfort food - xī hóng shì chǎo jī dàn - fried Egg and Tomato.

My interest today, of course, is their chā shāo bāo 叉烧包.You have to get in at exactly the right time to grab one of these from Oriental House, on the ground floor of the Union Building at Melbourne University. Too early and they aren't ready, too late and they are all gone.

Accordingly I have had a few false starts.

叉烧 Chā shāo is the filling. It literally means 'fork-cooked'.
包 Bāo actually means bag or wrap - it's fair to translate it as bun for our purposes.

I am gearing up to take my search offshore very soon and so I need to force my palate to make the paradigm shift from Bánh Bao to chā shāo bāo. I have been practising ordering them in mandarin. It feels faintly ridiculous because each word is pronounced with the neutral tone which is weird and high. It also falls flat because either - none of the staff speak Mandarin OR (more likely) I speak terrible Mandarin. Every attempt so far has been futile - I have been too early or two late. Anyhoo - I digress.

The unprepossessing entrance to Oriental House.

BBQ Pork Bun for $1.80 - how does it compare?

Today I managed to hit the sweet spot (more prescient than I realised - see later) and I grabbed one hot from the steamer.

From an external viewpoint - it looks a bit like one of those bread sculptures I used to make as a child with fresh white bread. Cripes it does look like white bread smooshed into a rough bun shape. Not an auspicious start.

Oriental House BBQ Pork Bun

The guts of it is...well...there aren't many. Another bao suffering from a woeful filling to dough ratio. Oh woe is me.Dough is me...oh noh.

The texture of the dough is fluffy - but not good fluffy. I know this is fresh from the steamer because the grumpy shī fu had to go and check if they were ready. She grabbed this baby straight from the steamer and popped it in the bag.

So why is the dough so dry? Fluffly AND dry all at once. Bah! The dough is also... Very. Very. Very. Sweet.

innards

Inside there is a paucity of filling. It is comprised of loose, small and thinly sliced pieces of not easily identifiable meat - but passibly cha siu like. The loose pieces of flesh are almost bound by a sauce which is overpoweringly sweet. There is no hint of spice or meaty flavour. Consequently the flavour balance is all off - really just tipped to the maximum sweet end of the spectrum. If the meat is cha siu - the flavours are totally swamped.

I think you can see that the colour is also not something those with food dye allergies would wish to dwell upon too much.

I will not be back for this - the fried egg and tomato however, is entirely another matter.