Hawaiian rolls.

This is the ticket item a.k.a snack of choice amongst my students in my youth group. They are very picky eaters but if there is one thing they can all agree on, it is on the goodness that is Hawaiian rolls.

I have one student who can singlehandedly eat a 12-pack of rolls by himself.

If you have picky kids, give them Hawaiian rolls.

Also when you don’t have enough time to make your own dough or Chinese buns from scratch, use Hawaiian rolls.

This recipe for pineapple buns with chinese bbq pork has been on my radar for awhile and happens to be the first new thing I made in 2024 for the potluck held at my church’s winter college senior retreat. What first caught my interest in this recipe was the shortcut it offered in the form of using Hawaiian sweet rolls as the base for the pineapple bun. I actually don’t care for pineapple buns as much. This is not usually the first thing I would pick from a Chinese bakery. But I appreciate a good hack that saves time though.

Though, it’s still on my radar to try my hand at making my own Chinese buns/milk bread. Sometime.

History of the Pineapple Bun: A Symbol of Chinese-Mexican Relations

The pineapple bun (bo lo bao) is one of HK’s most famous buns, first exploding in popularity in the 40s. Similar to the dan tat, the pineapple bun is said to have Western influences because that is how colonialism works.

Something that I didn’t realize is that the pineapple bun kind of looks like a Mexican concha bun. Especially with that crackly top. There is a reason for this.

The story behind this bun is a little bit more interesting. Traders from Guangdong tried to find their fortune in Mexico back in the nineteenth century, assimilating into the culture and eventually bringing back Mexican influences back to their homeland.

First introduced by a family of said immigrants in HK in the 1940s, the bun quickly grew in popularity as a popular breakfast item that complimented tea and coffee well. While traditionally served with a slab of butter as the filling, the list of other potential fillings expanded to include custard, red bean, and char siu.

Making It

My first order of business was making the cookie topping or what would make the iconic “pineapple” look. It’s still a bit slightly disappointing to realize that there is no actually pineapple in the pineapple buns.

I first creamed the butter and sugar together before adding the egg yolks and vanilla extract. I then added the dry ingredients before rolling out the dough into a log and leaving it to chill and firm up in the fridge.

The next order of business was to dice up some char siu and prepare the filling. To fill ~20 buns, I bought 1 lb of char siu from 99 Ranch and diced it into little pieces–then diced up two shallots.

Making the filling was very simple. I stir-fried the onions until translucent before adding the mix of water, soy sauce, oyster sauce, hoisin, sugar, and chicken bouillon and letting the mixture come to simmer before thickening it with cornstarch. I ran into a brief snafu with the cornstarch where I think my mixture was too hot so it immediately cause the cornstarch to clump where I had to fish out globs of cornstarch from the pan.

Oh well.

Moving onto the buns, I took a small paring knife and carved out a deep hole from the top of each roll, making something that looked like mini bread bowls. I then stuffed each roll with about ~2-3 tsp of BBQ filling before placing the cut out tops back.

The next step was making the cookie crust. I took out my chilled dough log from the fridge and partitioned it into what looked like ~24 pieces. For each piece, I rolled it into a ball and flattened each until it was about 1/8″ thick, using a saran wrap. It was a little over the size of a dumpling wrapper.

After that, I laid each crust on top of the rolls and used a knife to gently draw a crosshatch pattern.

This process went by very quickly.

I then applied an egg yolk wash to the rolls and baked for ~17 minutes at 350F. I noticed that the cookie crusts took a little longer to bake than I expected so the bottoms ended up being a little toasty but that’s alright.

The hidden, uneven ways of how my oven heats up is a mystery to solve for another day.

Overall

Appearance-wise, it did not look too shabby. It did not look as yellow or as nicely cross-hatched as I expected. I feel that I could correct this by being even more generous with the egg yolk wash (I thought I was but I’m starting to suspect that it is really hard to be overly generous with egg wash) and using a thicker knife like a butter knife to make the cross-hatch pattern to make it more distinct.

Taste-wise, it was pretty solid. Granted, with the components of this recipe–mainly Hawaiian rolls and char siu, it is hard to go awry, especially for char siu cooked in good things like oyster sauce and hoisin sauce, flavor-wise. The flavor of the cookie crust was a little bit more muted than I expected and, dare I say this, could use a stronger note of vanilla. Nevertheless, the texture was crunchy on top as I expected and pillowy inside of the roll. Speaking as someone who usually doesn’t care for pineapple buns, I found that this one was pretty good.

The sweetness of the bun and the cookie crust complimented with the salty savoriness of the char siu.

I had a few leftover rolls and cookie crust and later repeated this recipe, but with red bean paste instead. It made for a nice little breakfast after DT.

All in all, while I won’t be winning any awards for appearance, I felt pretty satisfied by how these rolls turned out.

Again, the shining thing about this recipe was how simple it all came together–in about an hour? I know that there is a snobbish part of me that everything from scratch tastes better. However, the ratio of the return on this recipe to the effort I put into this makes a compelling case of why I should consider time being more of my priority than effort.