Lu Shiyu opened the pot lid; the dough had already expanded until it nearly touched the lid. She pulled the dough apart, revealing the beautifully fermented holes inside.
She kneaded the dough until there were no air bubbles, then rolled it into a long strip and divided it into small pieces. Since she hadn’t brought a rolling pin, Lu Shiyu simply used her hands. She first flattened the dough pieces, then pressed the edges of the skin with the base of her hand and the side of her palm, rotating as she pressed to form an irregular circle that was thick in the middle and thin at the edges. The bun skins were complete.
After briefly teaching the others how to make bun skins with just their hands, Lu Shiyu went to process the filling. She took the two birds to handle the feathers and internal organs. After a simple processing routine, a bare bird was cleaned. Since it was for bun filling, all the bones had to be removed, leaving behind meat chunks of varying sizes.
The fruit Chen Yunliang brought back was deseeded and cut into small pieces, to be mixed with the meat later.
When it came to the berries Shao Xingyang brought back, Lu Shiyu faced a dilemma. If she wrapped these berries in the buns, the sweet and sour flavor would definitely overpower the rest. After tasting one, she ultimately gave up on the idea of including them in the filling.
But since they had been picked, she found a way to handle them.
She crushed the berries and boiled them in a pot, added an appropriate amount of sugar, then added vinegar according to taste. She stir-fried them continuously until they thickened into a jam, which she then bottled.
“What is this?” Tang Zeyu asked while rubbing a bun skin with his hands.
“Jam. Since I felt those berries weren’t suitable for the buns, I made jam instead.” Lu Shiyu scraped a bit of the remaining jam from the pot with a spoon and handed it to Tang Zeyu. “Try it and see how it is.”
“Sour and a bit sweet… wait, why does it smell like vinegar?”
“Uh, that must be your imagination. How could there be vinegar in jam?”
Lu Shiyu countered guiltily. In truth, because there were no lemons, she had to make do with vinegar. She didn’t expect him to taste it. A miscalculation.
The cut meat chunks and fruit were poured into a bowl, mixed with salt, sugar, light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, oyster sauce, and other seasonings. While rummaging through her bag, Lu Shiyu unexpectedly found a leftover snake-tailed chicken egg and decided to mix it into the filling as well. Due to limited conditions, the filling couldn’t be made as fine as it was back at the base; both the meat and vegetables remained in chunks.
Everyone sat in a circle, watching Lu Shiyu demonstrate how to fold the buns.
The bun skin seemed to behave as if by magic in her hands. Taking a spoonful of filling and placing it in the center of the skin, she supported the bun with one palm from below. With the index finger and thumb of her other hand, she pinched pleats along the edge of the skin like plucking flower petals, rotating the bun as she pinched. Finally, the start and end of the pleats met, and a simple squeeze sealed the loop. A bun with pleats like a blooming flower was formed, layers gathering into a circle. The size and spacing of the pleats were nearly identical; her skill was so practiced that it gave the others the illusion that folding buns was an easy task.
It was not easy at all!
The four of them screamed in their hearts, as the buns in their hands looked more abstract than the last.
Tang Zeyu’s bun barely looked like a bun. Yan Hong’s bun didn’t wrap the filling at all; it was a bun that “leaked the secret.” The one Shao Xingyang wrapped had already deviated from the category of a bun; he had made a dumpling.
Tang Zeyu looked at the bun in his hand and then at the others’ buns, feeling some consolation. At least his wasn’t the ugliest; the truly ugly ones belonged to someone else.
Shao Xingyang’s fingers seemed to be fighting each other, unable to pinch it no matter what. Seeing the others finish their first buns one after another, he grew anxious. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration hit him, and his movements quickened.
After wrapping a few buns as demonstrations, Lu Shiyu began to check the results of the others’ learning. She gave Tang Zeyu’s bun a relatively high evaluation.
“It’s quite good for a first attempt.”
It was a bit ugly, but buns were for eating, not for looking at.
Next was Yan Hong’s bun. Half of the skin was laboriously pinched into a clump, while the other half wasn’t pinched successfully at all, exposing half of the filling.
“It’s okay; it’ll be fine to eat after steaming.”
Then came Chen Yunliang’s. He pushed up his glasses and, holding his dumpling-shaped bun, talked serious nonsense.
“Actually, what I made is a relative of the bun—a steamed dumpling. If there are only buns in the pot, they will surely be lonely, so I pinched a companion for them.”
“…As long as you believe it yourself.”
Finally, it was Shao Xingyang’s turn. Lu Shiyu pointed at the ball of dough in front of him and asked, “What is this?”
“A bun,” Shao Xingyang introduced proudly. “Isn’t wrapping a bun just about letting the dough cover the filling? Why make it so complicated? It’s much easier to just wrap it like mine.”
Lu Shiyu looked at Shao Xingyang’s ball-shaped bun and pointed to one spot. “This part is too thin; it will definitely break later.”
“Really?” Shao Xingyang said casually. “I don’t believe it. It looks fine.”
Tang Zeyu also leaned in to look. Shao Xingyang’s bun was thick in some places and thin in others. It looked fine now, but who knew what would happen once it was put in the pot to steam?
The buns were wrapped, but a larger problem followed.
Lu Shiyu looked at the iron pot filled with water and crouched beside it in silence. Tang Zeyu thought something was wrong. Lu Shiyu shook her head and said faintly, “I forgot I didn’t bring a steamer basket.”
“No steamer? Then what about the buns?” Shao Xingyang asked.
“Perhaps we’ll just have to change the cooking method,” Lu Shiyu stood up abruptly, her tone full of determination and resolve. “Let’s make pan-fried buns then!”
Yan Hong: “Why is she so fired up?”
Chen Yunliang: “No idea.”
She poured out the water and wiped the pot dry, switching to a flat-bottomed pan. She poured oil into the bottom and swirled the pan to let the oil coat the surface evenly. The pan was placed over the fire to heat, and she placed the wrapped buns inside one by one, arranging them neatly to avoid sticking.
She added starch water until the water level was about one-third the height of the buns, then covered the lid to wait. Before the water was about to dry out, she drizzled a circle of oil around the buns, covered the lid again to let them simmer for a while until the starch water had almost evaporated and a complete crispy layer had formed on the bottom of the buns.
Lu Shiyu used a spatula to lift them from the edge, flipping a few buns over to reveal the golden, crispy bottoms.
Mixed-filling water-pan-fried buns—complete!
“Time to eat.”
Lu Shiyu used the spatula to separate the pan-fried buns and scooped them onto plates one by one. She then put another batch into the pot because she had wrapped too many to fit in one go, so they had to be done in two batches.
As soon as the pan-fried buns were served, everyone began looking for the ones they had wrapped.
First, the most beautiful and well-shaped ones were definitely the ones Lu Shiyu wrapped. Those that looked crooked were Tang Zeyu’s. Yan Hong’s buns, because they weren’t wrapped tightly, had leaked their juices. Chen Yunliang’s looked no different from potstickers.
Finally, there were Shao Xingyang’s strangely shaped “ball” pan-fried buns.
“Because I wrapped them too big, I fried both sides to prevent the middle part from being raw.”
So Shao Xingyang was the only one whose buns had a crispy layer on both sides.
Tang Zeyu picked up a bun wrapped by Lu Shiyu. Upon entry, he could immediately feel the abundant oily fragrance. The upper part of the dough was soft and fluffy; the fermented dough even had a bit of a chewy texture. The golden crispy shell at the bottom was as thin as a cicada’s wing, crumbling with a crisp snap at the first bite.
As soon as he bit into it, the scalding meat juice rushed out along with the fresh fragrance of the fruits and vegetables. The fat from the bird meat had been fully rendered into a broth, and that unknown fruit happened to neutralize the greasiness of the meat soup. The egg liquid Lu Shiyu added at the end made the flavors inside the pan-fried bun soft and harmonious. The mixed flavors danced on the tip of the tongue.
Chen Yunliang had just taken a bite when the meat juice flowed onto his wrist, forcing him to eat with his head and hands stretched out.
Yan Hong’s “leaked” buns, because the meat juice had run off, weren’t as oily; she ate them one by one with great pleasure.
Shao Xingyang looked at the ball-shaped bun in his bowl, which was half the size of a fist. Because both sides had been fried, it wasn’t as round now and looked more like a patty, but it still left him unsure where to start. Seeing the others already eating happily, Shao Xingyang grew anxious. Since it was hard to pick up such a large bun with chopsticks, he simply used his hands.
As a result, as soon as his hands touched it, the thin part of the water-pan-fried bun broke, and the scalding meat juice poured all over his hand.
“Hot, hot, hot!”
Shao Xingyang hurriedly used his mouth to catch the juice. The result was his face and hands were covered in oil. Since they were already dirty, he simply stopped being fastidious and ate without any image.
“The way he eats is so unsightly,” Yan Hong commented.
Before Shao Xingyang could take two more bites, his face suddenly turned flush red.
“So spicy! So spicy! Water!”
“Spicy?” Lu Shiyu was confused. “But I didn’t put any chili.”
“It’s probably because of this,” Tang Zeyu, also flushed from the heat, held a piece of yellow fruit in his fingers. “It’s this, it’s very spicy.”
“Eh? Didn’t I pick this?” Chen Yunliang looked and said, “The yellow fruits are spicy, the red ones aren’t. But I only tasted the red ones at the time.”
Shao Xingyang searched for water in his spice-induced frenzy, but the water bottle was long empty. Lu Shiyu intended to give him hers, only to see Shao Xingyang release a stream of water out of thin air.
“Eh?” Lu Shiyu was stunned for a second, then realized this was probably Shao Xingyang’s ability.
Shao Xingyang took several large gulps of water before recovering, his upper clothing soaked.
“I just realized your ability is water,” Lu Shiyu said.
“What else would it be?” Shao Xingyang said indistinctly, sticking out his spicy-swollen tongue. “Where do you think the water we use normally comes from?”
Lu Shiyu recalled that they indeed hadn’t found any water source along the way, yet the water seemed inexhaustible. Every time she finished her water, Tang Zeyu would go and fill a flask for her. She had thought Tang Zeyu’s team brought enough water.
But a little thought revealed that was impossible. Carrying that much water on the road would definitely be a huge burden. She had just taken it for granted.
“What is this?” While eating, Lu Shiyu suddenly bit into a coin. “Where did this coin come from?”
“Ah, I put that in. I didn’t expect you to eat it.” Shao Xingyang had just finished speaking when he received a kick from both Yan Hong and Tang Zeyu.
“You think this is like wrapping dumplings for New Year? Putting coins in.”
Shao Xingyang feigned sadness and threw himself at Chen Yunliang. “Waaaah, they don’t understand my good intentions. I just couldn’t help but want to put a coin in for good luck when I saw we were wrapping dough. What’s wrong with that?”
Chen Yunliang dodged. “Don’t touch me with those oily hands.”
“Waaaah, you’re so cold. Am I not your dear teammate anymore?”
Chen Yunliang said with a chilling smile, “If you dare dirty my clothes, you won’t be in a second.”
Lu Shiyu held the coin in one hand while eating the bun, wondering when Shao Xingyang had put it in without her noticing.
Good luck, huh?