You Say Sandwich, We Say Yeah!

Baos have really become all the rage and I first wrote about this during a Taiwanese food festival that I stumbled across in Vancouver a few years ago. The steamed bun sandwich, or bao, has made its way across North America as the latest sandwich craze following the rise and plateauing of the banh mi, including Mean Bao , which already has two locations in Toronto and dedicated to all things bao. Sampling a bao and some dim sum one afternoon, the baos were heftier than I had imagined. Incredibly filling and large for a bao, this pork belly and cucumber number definitely has satisfies appetites with North American sizes and Taiwanese flavours. My dining companions were very pleased with their selections, which included the Tofu and Enoki bao and the Pulled pork bao. The sui mai dumpling shared amongst us was subpar at best. As I work pretty close to both Mean Bao locations, I have surprisingly not returned, as the soft bun is something I associate with desserts or best on thei...

A while back there was a Taiwanese festival, which to my knowledge, was just about food. It's known to anyone with taste buds that the Taiwanese have some of the best street snacks in the world, but amongst the array of soups and meat popsicles and deep fried chicken bits, here was a Taiwanese sandwich! Now under colonial rule there was and still sort of remains the popular teatime sandwich, but this ain't it. This was a pulled pork sandwich that reminded me of the Chilean sandwiches that haunt me in my dreams. Here, the "bread" is in fact a large steamed bun, or steamed flat bread, with a mound of pork and cilantro. The bun bread held its contents better than ever expected, but if you read this blog with any regularity, you will note how important the bread is to the integrity of each sandwich. This was more of a delicious meat dish encased in a shell, which some may say sandwich, but I am not convinced. In the same way a Jamaican patty or empanada (Salvadorean...