Mantou

Deep-fried mantou - a popular dessert.

Mantou (Simplified Chinese: }}}; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ), sometimes known as Chinese steamed bun, is a kind of steamed bun originating from China. It is typically served in Chinese cuisine. Made with milled wheat flour, water and leavening agents, they are similar in nutrition and eating qualities to the white bread of the West. In size and texture, they range from 4 cm, soft and fluffy in the most elegant restaurants, to over 15 cm, firm and dense for the working man's lunch. (As white flour, being more heavily processed, was once more expensive, white mantou were somewhat of a luxury in pre-industrial China.)

Traditionally, mantou and wheat noodles were the staple carbohydrates of the Northern Chinese diet, analogous to the rice which forms the mainstay of the Southern Chinese diet. Mantou are also known in the south, but are more likely to be eaten as a treat in a restaurant. Fancy restaurant mantou are often smaller and more delicate and can be further manipulated, for example by deep-frying and dipping in sweetened condensed milk.

They are often sold pre-cooked in the frozen section of Asian supermarkets, ready for preparation by steaming or in the microwave oven.

A similar food, but with a filling inside, is baozi.

Mantou or mandou are also found in Japanese, Hmong, Vietnamese, cuisines. It is called manju in Japanese.

The name is cognate with mandu/manty/mantı, which are filled dumplings in Korean, Turkish, Persian, Mongolian, and Pakhtan cuisines.

Recipe outline

Consult a cookbook for more detailed instructions to make mantou.

Add 3 cups of wheat flour to one package of dry yeast.
Slowly pour in lukewarm water into the mixture. Mix everything and knead it into a dough. The dough should not stick the hand nor should it be flaky.
Cover the dough with wet towel and let it set for several hours until it rises up.
Knead the dough again.
Cut the dough into bun size.
Steam the buns for 15 minutes or so.

Legend about the term \"Mantou\"

There is a saying that the Chinese character 饅頭 (Mántóu) actually originated from the word 蠻頭 (lit. barbarian's head), which has the same pronunciation in Chinese.

This story originates from the Three Kingdoms Period, when Zhuge Liang led the Kingdom of Shu Army in an invasion of the southern lands (roughly modern-day Yunnan and northern Burma). After subduing the barbarian king Meng Huo, Zhuge Liang led the army back to Shu, but met a swift-flowing river which defied all attempts to cross it. A barbarian lord informed him that, in olden days, the barbarians would sacrifice 50 men and throw their heads into the river to appease the river spirit and allow them to cross; Zhuge Liang, however, did not want to cause any more bloodshed, and instead ordered buns shaped roughly like human heads - round with a flat base - to be made and then thrown into the river. After a successful crossing he named the buns "barbarian's head", or 蠻頭, which evolved into the present day 饅頭.

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