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Welcome to Manhattan, Chinatown. We are at Melewa. Opened in 1968. What they're known for is a pineapple blend with a crispy topping over the top, stuffed with savory and sweet charu, 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. Melee 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 fries, 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 g 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 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 2:00 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 tacio inside. Come over here. Soft dough gets smooshed open. It gets filled with 3 or 4 tablespoons of chilled chario filling. And then just squeezing and pinching so that it closes up. Goes back onto the speed rack. That gets a second fermentation. For bakery,
this is some of the loosest pinching I've ever seen. two fingers clinching 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. takes three months. It's 3 months to do your apprentice training here at Melee. The most obvious thing to compare this is to a cloud. You can feel how fatty it is. It feels closer to a bio than milk bread. It's so soft. Chazu filling is a little bit pasty cuz 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. Meleewa is known for the chassis bao, but there are multiple types of chasu 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. Gets made like a dough, rolled out into a cylinder, cut into a small slice, smooshed with your cleaver, 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 disc that is slightly large enough to really basically wrap up the sides. It's so quick. Cut, smush, 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. Little bit of a brown top on the top. On the sides, you can still see that yellow. Oh, 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 a 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 palette is what builds and what [snorts] 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
leech 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 purposes, nobody ever knows how much food they actually make a day. Uh, 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 cuz 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 bio 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. Tacio also means roast with a fork. But the chassis here for the bun is actually made in the braise because of the volume they're going through. Three gigantic walks here. First step is to get the pork to be blanched. Get rid of that surface
gum, some of that gy pork flavor. The second walk 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 braze 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 Melewa. 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 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.
There's always a line at the reason why there's a line cuz nobody brings cash. Left side cash only, right side order at the kiosk with a card. It is so much easier to just skip the line and bring cash. That's my hot tip of the day. Oh, there's no seating here. So, figuring out where to eat your tatu 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 chun traditional roast pork bun. Sugar glaze over the top. A little bit of a egg wash doubled in size. It is heavy. I mean this feels like half a pound maybe. 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 cuz 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 shimmer 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 bun 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 hand, you can tell how good it's going to be.
Stupid, man. So warm, so heavy. M. 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 large 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. 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 a spot. Part of what's wonderful about Melee Wa is that it is a Hong Kong style of 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 where they're serving honestly a global audience. There are places like this all throughout Manhattan, Chinatown, but may probably one of the best examples of what can 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 lb batch before.
