Japanese Mantou

Chinese steamed buns (pau or bao1 包) are a common snack, breakfast food and dimsum item in Singapore, but we often only see the standard flavours like char siew, red bean paste, lotus paste, chicken and pork. Slightly less common but still commercially available flavours would be sweet corn, yam and pandan kaya. So my interest was quite piqued by these buns which I found in a local Japanese supermarket (J-mart @ Star Vista) - green tea red bean pau (officially matcha red bean pau) and purple sweet potato pau. (In Japanese, they are still called mantou　饅頭, but in Chinese, that generally refers to the plain steamed without filling.)

They came frozen in the plastic wrappers as you see in the image. I covered them with a piece of wet kitchen paper and microwaved them, a method which generally replicates steaming in a quick and dirty way. Unfortunately, the paper got stuck on the "skin" of the matcha mantou, so the smooth outermost layer tore off with the paper.

Green Tea Red Bean Mantou

The matcha red bean mantou was the nicer of the two, with a moderate green tea fragrance and earthy bean taste. Both mantous were moist. The red bean filling was quite unlike the Chinese pau filling, because it was, expectedly, the Japanese azuki version. So it was more powdery and sweeter, but also with beans that were less finely ground so you get some small chunks of beans compared to the completely smooth Chinese red bean paste.

Murasaki Imo Mantou

The purple sweet potato mantou had only a mild sweet potato flavour, and the dominant taste was mainly a flat sweetness... which was why I didn't quite like it. Also, perhaps for steamed buns, more fragrant flavours are better, at least in the bun proper. Sweet potatoes aren't so much fragrant as, say, green tea, which could also be why the matcha version was nicer.

Overall, I felt that both buns could do better with stronger flavours and less sweetness. Still, it was interesting, and the different colours of purple and green did make me happy somewhat. (Haha, yeah, so I'm shallow and easily taken in by bright colours. XP) 

I also thought that the price wasn't too bad, given that they were imported from Japan - just S$1.60 each. They're also slightly larger (about 3 inches in diameter) than the average local Chinese pau, which probably also cost around $1+.