This Pork Bun is the #1 Street Food in Chinatown NYC

[machine whirring]

Welcome to Manhattan Chinatown.

We are at Mei Lai Wah, opened in 1968.

What they're known for is a pineapple blend

with a crispy topping over the top,

stuffed with savory and sweet char siu, roast pork.

It's somehow all textures at the same time,

all flavors at the same time,

and there's no doubt that this is the most popular bite

for everyone visiting Manhattan Chinatown.

Mei Lai Wah bakes thousands of these roast pork buns

every single day, so let's see how it's made.

Take a look here.

This is dough that's done its first ferment.

Now it's going to be reshaped into smaller balls.

Chef is rolling them, tightening them into smaller portions.

The idea here is to shape the gluten

so that it's all facing the correct direction,

to trap all those gases that the yeast is producing,

so it gets enough rise, but also structural integrity.

The size about doubles into what you might see over here.

They're not weighing anything here

because they've done it for long enough

that they know 80 grams all by the feel of hand.

He's using his fingers to bring in the top surface

of the dough ball into the center of the ball itself.

So he's using his fingers to push the outside surface

into the middle until they're nice, neat balls.

The dough balls go inside of the trays.

They get a secondary fermentation.

Now that tension, that tensile strength,

is going to trap all of those bubbles

so that as it ferments, it's like a balloon.

This is what? We're at 2 p.m. now.

Every single one of these is going to become a pork bun.

This is the last step before it's baked.

This is the second fermentation shaping

with the char siu inside.

Come over here. Soft dough gets smushed open.

It gets filled with three or four tablespoons

of chilled char siu filling.

And then just squeezing and pinching

so that it closes up, goes back onto the speed rack.

That gets a second fermentation.

For a bakery, this is some of the loosest pinching

I've ever seen.

Two fingers, clenching once, twice, three times.

But it absolutely is getting the job done.

Here's the standard.

Two people should be able to finish one tray of 24 buns

in one minute.

[both speaking in foreign language]

It takes three months.

It's three months to do your apprentice training

here at Mei Lai Wah.

The most obvious thing to compare this is to a cloud.

You can feel how fatty it is.

It feels closer to a brioche than milk bread. It's so soft.

The char siu filling is a little bit tasty

because it's chilled down,

but you can see how much fat is inside of it.

That's the luxury. It's kind of crazy.

We've been here for a couple of minutes

and it feels like they've already done

a couple hundred of these.

People will tell you that they're making 2,000 buns a day.

I think they are making a lot more than that.

Mei Lai Wah is known for the char siu bao,

but there are multiple types of char siu bao.

Take a look here.

So a pineapple bun looks like pineapple,

has no pineapples in it.

The reason for it looking like a pineapple bun

is this topping that goes over the top.

Chef is making it now.

It's like custard powder, eggs, sugar, margarine, lard.

It gets made like a dough, rolled out into a cylinder,

cut into a small slice, smooshed with your cleaver.

It goes directly on top of the buns.

It's a little bit like a Dutch crumb,

but significantly sweeter.

As this bakes, the dough is going to stretch out

that topping until it crackles,

looks a little bit like a splintered pineapple skin.

Watch the technique of the chef.

First of all, the cleaver is kind of cool.

It's a cleaver with the tip just cut off

so you don't nick yourself.

Cutting off a small slice, he's smooshing it with his hand,

putting a lot of pressure onto it

until it becomes a disk that is slightly large enough

to really basically wrap up the sides.

It's so quick. Cut, smoosh, top.

All of these buns are slowly making their way

towards the front to the oven

where they're going to be baked.

Come this way.

So right near here, front of the dining room,

are these electric deck ovens.

That means that there's heat coming

from the bottom and from the top.

There's no fan in the back. There's no convection.

But it's going to give you very even heat via conduction

because these pans are going directly

on the base of the oven.

Oh, smells crazy when you open it.

All 24, remarkably consistent.

A little bit of a brown top on the top.

On the sides, you can still see that yellow.

Chef is checking the bottom to make sure

that the color is right.

That's his best indicator

for whether this is cooked consistently.

It is not an indicator for somebody

who hasn't made tens of thousands of these.

But for him, the color of the bottom is the indication

that it is made right.

Throughout the day, whenever they need more buns,

they yell to the back.

Chef will just take them out after they've been resting

for a while over his head

and parades it to the front of the restaurant.

Okay, first, here's the roast pork bun,

the non-pineapple version.

Comes out of the oven, rests just for a second,

and syrup goes over the top.

Just to give it a little bit of gloss

and for it to set a little bit of sweetness.

That's the standard-issue roast pork bun.

This is the most traditional version.

Before the pineapple roast pork buns go inside of the oven,

they also get a little bit of egg wash

to help with the color.

So this egg-washing technique,

as well as many of the other techniques we've seen today,

are obviously Western-style baking techniques.

We've adapted a lot of the techniques that were brought

through British colonialism, through the French in Shanghai,

the Russians, and that evolution and that adaptation

of Western-style baking techniques

for the primarily Chinese palate is what builds

and what births this style of cooking.

They go into the oven for about 10 minutes of cooking

before they're rotated.

Come over here. Look.

So this is what the pineapple bun is like

before it goes inside of the oven.

You can see a little bit of that fat starting to leach out.

You can see that the bun has gotten larger by maybe

about 20-30% before it goes inside of the oven.

And after it's been baked, rotated, stuffed with filling,

you can see this sort of beautiful crackle.

When people call this a pineapple bun,

this is the pattern that they're talking about.

The split and the variation in the color

from the light brown to the yellow.

One of my favorite things about shooting Street Eats is,

for tax purposes and whatever else's purposes,

nobody ever knows how much food they actually make a day.

I've heard since being here this morning

everywhere between 100 and 300 pans.

And each of them have 24 of them on there.

So that's a huge amount of fluctuation.

But it doesn't really matter how many they sell every day

because they just come into work

and they just start pumping them out.

And they do it until the store is closed.

The line is perennial.

It's always going to be out the door.

And the buns are always going to need to be baked.

Somebody will always go eat them.

Okay, so in the basement,

the dough is going to be mixed in these gigantic Hobarts.

Look at this.

The dry ingredients are flour and sugar

and over the top, a little bit of yeast,

a little bit of eggs before the mixing happens.

The dough itself is sweet

because there's a lot of sugar in it.

Now the fat for this is lard.

Everything is measured out by chef by feel.

That lard acts like butter,

like margarine would in something like a brioche

or a milk fat inside of milk bread.

That's what gives it softness.

It's what gives it

that luxurious sort of like generous feeling.

This is also a cleaner flavor

that doesn't have those milk solids inside.

Here's the pork. It is called roast pork in English.

Char siu also means roast with a fork.

But the char siu here for the bun is actually made

in the braise because of the volume they're going through.

Three gigantic woks here.

First step is to get the pork to be blanched.

Get rid of that surface gum,

some of that gamey pork flavor.

The second wok is filled

with mostly actually pork skin and pork fat.

Mixing the lean and the fat together

is what creates that balance.

And finally, the braise with all of the seasonings,

the spices, and that is really the soul of the filling.

I have heard legends about this machine

that they use to cut the gigantic amount of pork

that they use here at Mei Lai Wah.

Let's see it.

So, the pork, hot, is going to be dropped inside.

Two interlocking blades cut it into slices.

They pass it through a couple of times

so that it can become a fine dice.

Because they're not putting it through a food processor,

it doesn't get shredded.

Instead, it gets diced.

It gets cut into little chunks

so that when you bite into it,

you get little gushers of fat and lard

and then little like solid pieces of protein.

To do it by hand at a place

that does this type of volume would be insane.

After that meat's been passed through three times,

you can smell the oyster sauce, you can smell the spices.

This pork now needs to chill down

so that it's not as runny and gooey.

There's a huge amount of gelatin,

collagen inside of here, which is to say that

if you were to wrap this, it would just run.

It's a little bit like a Shanghai soup dumpling.

So, this goes straight into the walk-in

where it's going to chill, usually overnight,

maybe until later in the afternoon.

[people chattering]

There's always a line at Mei Lai Wah.

And the reason why there's a line is

because nobody brings cash.

Left side, cash only.

Right side, order the kiosk with the card.

It is so much easier to just skip the line and bring cash.

That's my hot tip of the day.

[both speaking in foreign language]

There's no seating here, so figuring out

where to eat your char siu bao is always a question.

The best place to do it is as quickly as possible

right in front of the store.

So here, standard issue, [speaking in foreign language].

Traditional roast pork bun, sugar glaze over the top,

a little bit of an egg wash, doubled in size.

It is heavy. I mean, this feels like half a pound, maybe.

It's not piping hot because it had to rest,

but it is very much warm.

Look at that. It is actually incredibly enticing.

The fragrance of the lard,

the perfume of the pork is incredible.

The gloss of these pieces of pork

and the distinct rough chop instead of a pureed texture,

that's quite special.

The pork itself is actually maybe about 60,

70% of the volume of the bun itself.

I cannot pretend that I haven't had this before. Mmm.

Because I'm in the neighborhood.

So I eat this weekly, maybe twice a week.

It's the best on-the-go snack that you could possibly have.

Like, look at that. That's all you would want to bite into.

That shiver of that piece of fat, the bounce,

and then the sweetness and the savoriness

in a way that lingers.

The sweetness in a way that is the first flavor. Crazy.

Insane.

We should compare it to what most people get here,

which is the pineapple buns stuffed with roast pork.

Now, the pineapple crumb over the top,

they wouldn't tell us what was inside,

but I'm pretty sure it's a combination of fat,

lard, sugar, custard powder.

Little bit of a glisten. Cracker crumb, though.

Same pillowy whiteness in the middle.

Little morsels of lard, little bits of that lean pork.

Ridiculous. So enticing.

And, I mean, when you're splitting it in half

with your hands, you can tell how good it's going to be.

Stupid, man. So warm, so heavy.

Mmm.

I don't know anyone that does it better.

It's a bit of a shame to say so.

As a Hong Konger,

this is better than anything I've had in Hong Kong.

The sheer generosity and almost violence

in the amount of fat and lard and weight in the pork

in the middle of this bun is ridiculous.

This is a $3 bite that takes basically a day to make.

It's almost like they don't like money.

All that work, all those people back there,

it's like such a gift.

It's supposed to be a snack. It tastes like a meal.

It's nutritionally dense. It'll make you want to go to war.

It's ridiculous.

I guess the birds know that this is the spot.

Part of what's wonderful about Mei Lai Wah

is that it is a Hong Kong-style bakery that exists

in Manhattan Chinatown.

The style of baking is a combination of European techniques

that then has immigrated with the people,

the Southern Chinese people, all the way over here

to New York on the other side of the world.

Well, they're serving, honestly, a global audience.

There are places like this

all throughout Manhattan Chinatown,

but Mei Lai Wah is probably one of the best examples

of what could happen to traditional Hong Kong dishes

when they're brought over here to New York City.

By the way, just to point this out, this is clearly

because someone forgot yeast in a 50-pound batch before.