Chinese pastry, home kitchen
Recipes for shells that stay crisp, and the failures behind them.
Everything here is cooked in an ordinary oven, with ingredients you can buy outside China. Each recipe lists what went wrong first, because that is the part most write-ups leave out.
Recipes
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About this site
There is plenty of information about Chinese pastry online, and most of it is a translation of another page, illustrated with someone else's photos. This site works the other way: one person, one kitchen, a thermometer and a camera.
The recipes here are written for kitchens that don't have a Chinese bakery down the street — which means lard or butter instead of specialty shortenings, a domestic oven instead of a deck oven, and substitutions listed next to every ingredient that is hard to find.
If a method only works with equipment you don't own, it is not written here.