Pineapple buns (aka Bo Luo Bao 菠蘿包) is a classic soft, sweet buns in Hong Kong where I grew up with eating countless pineapple buns as afternoon tea. The recipe I developed here, was adapted from the owner of a Hong Kong bakery shop, specialized in making and selling pineapple buns. There are two important ingredients in the original recipe, lard for making the topping crispy, and ammonia powder for making the crackling patterns on the crispy topping. As I don’t use lard in my home-cooking at all, I tweaked it and used butter only. Besides, how would I make Asian breads without tangzhong (湯種)? Absolutely not. Many of my readers have already known that I’m addicted to tangzhong breads because they are soft and fluffy, and can be kept for days. Since I tweaked the original recipe with butter and tangzhong, I have had three trials until I got it right and feel satisfied.
As for using ammonia powder, it’s quite tricky. If used not enough, you’d be disappointed for no crackling patterns appear on the topping. If more than enough, your buns would smell weird (yes, like wee). Hope that I didn’t scare you off. If you don’t want to risk, or can’t find any ammonia powder, you can skip the ingredient, and use a knife to score the top pastry before transferring your buns in oven for baking. You’d get regular patterns, instead of getting irregular crackling that classic Hong Kong pineapple buns would have. Taste remains the same anyway. Hope you all like my sharing here.
(Update: This recipe was originally created and guest posted for Ann's PigpigsCorner on 31 Jan. 2011. For some reason, she stopped blogging on the site, so I've put the full recipe back on my blog again for my readers.)