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(tranquil music) (speaking Japanese)
- [Alvin] Hello there.
Welcome back to another episode of Anime with Alvin.
Today, I'll be making the red bean buns from Spirited Away,
one of my favorite movies of all time.
The bun that Chihiro is eating in the movie seems to be
a little bit larger than usual, which means we are probably
going to need a lot of red beans for the filling.
I will now leave with these red beans.
Making a sweet red bean paste is quite simple.
Two cups of these adzuki beans will now go
into a pressure cooker, along with six whole cups of water.
This gets cooked on high pressure for about 30 minutes,
until the beans have softened.
That's gonna take some time, so I'll get started
on the bun itself, which seems to be a larger version
of a steamed red bean bun, commonly found
in Asian bakeries or restaurants.
In a stand mixer, in goes 560 grams of plain flour,
11 grams of instant dry yeast, half teaspoon of salt,
teaspoon of baking powder, 30 grams of sugar,
30 grams of oil, and 320 grams of whole milk.
This gets kneaded on medium speed
until the dough has become a little shaggy.
I like to ensure the dough is a bit more cohesive
with my hands before then putting it back into the mixer
and letting the machine do the rest of the work.
What should emerge is a somewhat soft and milky white
dough ball, which gets more of the manual hand labor
treatment needed, until rotund and smooth all around,
just like a baby's butt.
The little dough baby now goes into a large bowl
covered with plastic wrap and allowed to rest
for about one hour.
Now that the red beans are done pressure cooking,
they get drained to remove excess liquid
and dumped into a food processor and blended
until as smooth as possible.
Once the red beans are all pulverized,
it gets passed through a fine mesh sieve,
which will be painstakingly difficult to push through.
They're a little chunky, so this took about, like,
10 minutes of constant stirring and pressing,
but once the fruits, or beans, of our labor have been now
entered into the pan, this gets cooked
with two whole cups of brown sugar, little bit of salt,
for about 10 minutes so that the liquid can evaporate
and the sugars can slightly caramelize.
Once it's looking pretty thick and most of the water
is gone, I like to add a little bit of oil,
just to make the paste a little shiny
and help the sugars caramelize slightly more.
What should result is a thick but still smooth
red bean paste that tastes like dessert.
Kind of makes you wonder if you could do this
with other beans, like black beans or pinto beans,
but I'll leave that to the experts.
This will go and cool while we work on our steamed buns.
Our little bread baby has grown quite a bit,
which means it's time to cut it in half with a knife.
So after rolling out the dough to a large circle
but not too thin, I'm decidedly mounding on top
as much red filling into the center as I can.
I also tend to do this a lot when making dumplings at home,
which is probably why they never really turn out
the way I want them to.
Let's just say when they're done cooking,
you know which one I made, 'cause there's water in it,
or there is no filling at all,
because it has exited the wrapper.
Let's pray it does not happen this time.
After realizing the dough is slightly too big
for the filling, which never happens in my life,
I'm cutting a thin circle around it
and folding over the sides on top.
Now I'm really getting deja vu to my dumpling making days,
from which I have learned when in doubt, just keep pinching
and hope that it does not explode.
Once all the weird edges are tucked into the butt,
the rather large bun gets placed into a steamer basket
lined with a circle of parchment paper.
This process gets repeated one more time
with the remaining dough and remaining filling
until we have potentially two quite large
steamed red bean buns.
It's time to move over to the stove,
on which I have a pot of water boiling.
So after the steamer baskets are a carefully balanced
off top of each other, this steams for quite a long time,
a total of 25 to 30 whole minutes.
I checked every 10 minutes to see how they were doing,
and as you can see the middle tends to cook
a little bit slower than the edges, so it was important
to give these enough time so that we didn't have any
raw dough or filling in the middle.
But once the dough started to show resistance when poked,
just like me, I took that as a sign that our buns are done.
Onto the table they go, unveiled and allowed to cool
so that the steam of death can escape.
It's always a dangerous game opening steamer baskets,
because you need to touch it but you also need it
to exit your hand as quick as possible to be faster
than the steam rising out of it.
Although these buns are not as giant or fluffy
as in the anime, they look pretty good
and quite large compared to the normal sized ones.
And be careful, these are still extremely hot.
I can't really feel anything in my hands anymore,
so it's time to go eat, and I've learned in my experience
that diving in face first is often a good idea.
This does take me back down memory lane,
going to dim sum restaurants with my parents in California
and always making sure to order dessert at the very end.
The bun is fluffy, it's warm, the filling is sweet,
but not too sweet, and eating something like this
definitely fills you with a huge sense of comfort,
which is why I'm guessing it was something
that Chihiro really needed in that spirit world.
When you're somewhere far from home and you feel very alone,
there's nothing like eating something warm and comforting
to bring you back, and that is exactly what this is for.
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(smooth music)